The Four Color Media Monitor

Artist Cho's left DC after issues with Greg Rucka, whom Cho feels is sabotaging his art drafts (Hat tip: Breitbart). He told them that:

All the problem lies with Greg Rucka.

EVERYONE loves my Wonder Woman covers and wants me to stay. Greg Rucka is the ONLY one who has any problem with covers. Greg Rucka has been trying to alter and censor my artwork since day one.

Greg Rucka thought my Wonder Woman #3 cover was vulgar and showed too much skin, and has been spearheading censorship, which is baffling since my Wonder Woman image is on model and shows the same amount of skin as the interior art, and it’s a VARIANT COVER and he should have no editorial control over it. (But he does. WTF?!!!)

I tried to play nice, not rock the boat and do my best on the covers, but Greg’s weird political agenda against me and my art has made that job impossible. Wonder Woman was the ONLY reason I came over to DC Comics.

To DC’s credit, especially [Art Director] Mark Chiarello, they have been very accommodating. But they are caught between a rock and a hard place.

I just wanted to be left alone and do my Wonder Woman variant covers in peace. But Greg Rucka is in a hostile power trip and causing unnecessary friction over variant covers.

I'm willing to give Rucka some credit for insisting Eddie Berganza not be an editor on the books he's writing, as a condition for returning to work for DC. But here, he's being very petty and laughable, and that's not a good sign. Let's not forget Rucka was one of the writers involved in the post-Identity Crisis storylines, like the tale where WW breaks Max Lord's neck to stop him from mind-controlling Superman into performing violent carnage, and instead of thanking her for saving him from winding up with blood on his hands, he damns WW for taking a life - no matter how out-of-character it was to begin with - to save many more innocent ones in danger of the effects. Batman was also depicted shunning her for this. I don't see how drawing WW in hot poses is such a big deal, but setting her up in a storyline to look like a baddie isn't.

Here's the draft as drawn by Cho:
What's so wrong with this that isn't so wrong with what dozens of other artists were drawing years before? In fact, what's so wrong with Cho's cover that isn't so wrong with the covers Greg Land drew for the Elektra series of the early 2000s when Rucka was writing it?

@Archaicking2 @Grummz cool. Greg Rucka, oh virtuous one, had no problems writing these. pic.twitter.com/LWqVJidgc6

— bc (@firstteam80) July 15, 2016

And of course, there's the Black Widow series from the MAX line and Perfect Dark covers to consider. Rucka sure is hypocritical on the topics.

To be honest, I think it's for the best Cho left, because so long as Dan DiDio and his ilk are in charge, I don't think Cho should be lending his talents to them for their sake. At the same time, while I oppose censorship, as Rucka's apparently advocating, I do think it's idiotic at a time when the industry's doing so badly to be relying so heavily on variant covers, because they don't a good story make. At worst, they're a waste of money, and only compound the image of comicdom catering to aging collectors who'll buy almost every variant cover, even though you could surely find the same pictures online, save to file and set as a desktop photo, or print them up and hang them on your house walls. Variants are only making poor substitutes for talented writing, and IMO, it could even make the artists look like they're making bad choices of where and how to put their talents. Just one cover illustration is enough, and while there's plenty of fine artists out there, that doesn't mean the publishers should be wasting so much money by employing almost every cool artist for the sake of variants as a short-term means for moneymaking.

That said, if Rucka caused so much trouble for Cho over peanuts when there's surely quite a few books out there featuring gore galore that's far more jarring, then I see no point buying what's bound to be a crummy story that'll likely get interrupted by the very crossovers Rucka was part and parcel of in the past decade. Many people have the chance to let Rucka know they disapprove of his hypocritical stance on artwork, and I strongly recommend they do so.

Labels: dc comics, dreadful writers, good artists, marvel comics, misogyny and racism, moonbat writers, women of dc, women of marvel, Wonder Woman