I’ll try and keep this short.

“Brevity,” as someone once said, “is the soul of wit.” But brevity takes times. As someone else said, “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.” And still someone else said, “The only kind of writing is rewriting.”

Which brings us to that venerated literary form, the short story. Some of the best writers in their respective languages and genres have labored in this form. I have too, on and off, over the last twenty years or so of my career. Many of the short stories I’ve been asked to write have been about licensed characters (Batman, Doctor Who, The Lone Ranger, The Green Hornet, etc.), with some originals thrown in along the way.

It’s only in the last few years that I really started to pay more serious attention to the short story, although the short stories I was writing were getting, paradoxically, longer and longer. Five thousand words to seven or eight thousand to twelve or thirteen thousand words…granted, some of the stories were part of shared universes (Latchkeys, ReDeus, Pangaea, all published by Crazy 8 Press), but even my own Leo Persky stories (appearing in R. Allen Leider’s Hellfire Lounge anthologies, published by Bold Venture Press) were getting longer, although a lot of that was due to how much fun I was having writing Leo’s (i.e. my) snarky observations on the world. Continue reading

By Paul Kupperberg

Recently, Bob Greenberger wrote about the satisfaction of creating and writing a recurring character of his own and that got me to thinking about characters I’ve worked on in my career. Having spent more than a little of the past forty years laboring in the comic book field, a majority of the stories I’ve written were about OPCs (Other People’s Characters), from the Atom and Archie to Superman and Scooby Doo. I’ve never had a problem with that; as a lifelong comic book fan, I was always happy to get my paws on the classic characters I grew up reading. But a writer comes to these established and long running characters weighed down by the character’s baggage, allowed to bring to them a certain limited amount of individual interpretation but always bound by what came before…and with full knowledge that no matter what story they tell, things have to be reset to the status quo when they’re done.

Still, along the way, I managed to create a few new additions to the DC Universe of characters. A sorcerer here, a spy agency there, a science fiction hero way out there in deep space…but though I created them, they aren’t really mine. Mainstream corporate comics operate (for the most part) under the work-made-for-hire provision of copyright law, meaning that the corporation is considered the legal “author” of the work. The actual creators have some (small) equity in the creation, but no real control over its destiny or use. The editor, as representative of the “author,” has more control over the character than does the creator and the corporation is free to make whatever changes or alterations it deems necessary. Continue reading