The Four Color Media Monitor

I was taking a look recently at a website about Belgian cartoonist Roger Leloup's creation, Yoko Tsuno, introduced in 1970, and I think he's said something not many in the US superhero business are willing to admit - that fictional characters aren't real people:

"The luck that I have to live with Yoko is worth so much more to me than the fun I could be having somewhere else," Roger Leloup continues. "I am happy when I see that she's happy. I'm not in love with my character as some people might think. It goes beyond that. Even for me she stays a character on paper. She will never talk to me. But I know that through Yoko I can convey the emotion and poetry that lives inside me. She is that friend I've always wanted to have when I was young but never met. Through time she has become my spiritual daughter."

Now that's saying a lot more than people like Joe Quesada, Dan Slott, Tom Brevoort, and Kevin Dooley do or did when they act like Mary Jane Watson and Hal Jordan are real people, and made them out to be scapegoats. Leloup may not be perfect at this, but he clearly recognizes that his fictional creation is just that, and can only express what anybody in charge of the scripting ascribes to her.

So the query here is: how come a European scribe can be so much more realistic in telling the difference between fiction and reality, while some mainstream US superhero publishers by sharp contrast cannot? And they put on their absurd acts all because they're selfishly seeking every excuse in the book to justify even the most revolting step they took past and present with the casts of characters. If mainstream American writers and publishers can't be reasonable, then they can't be surprised they've lost so much audience while European comics by contrast do considerably better with theirs.

Labels: comic strips, Europe and Asia