Rage Rumor Rover

SBC's Blair Marnell treats us lonely weekend surfers to another meaty edition of his weekly All The Rage column. Most interesting was outgoing Firestorm and Bloodhound writer Dan Jolley's comments regarding his departure. Unfortunately, it doesn't go beyond the usual "creative differences":

If I may engage in a drawn-out and possibly stupid analogy here... being a member of a mainstream comic book's creative team is in a lot of ways like being a member of a sports team, and the sport we were playing in this instance was called "Firestorm." There's the owner of the team -- DC -- and the coach -- Peter Tomasi to begin with, now Steve Wacker. The coach recruited the starting line-up and explained the game plan, and we started playing.

Now, what you have to do with this is walk a fine line; because you need to do what the coach asks you to (reflecting both his personal wishes and the owner's) and stick to the game plan -- while at the same time injecting as much of yourself as you can, so that it is indeed something you're creating, instead of simply following directions. And that can be hard. I struggled with it, off and on and to varying degrees, throughout my run; but by the time I finally really started clicking (around #8, I would say), a decision came down from the team's owner: time to re-think things. And, because of that, it quickly became clear to everyone involved that what the book needed was a change in writers.

While that's the top story for me, Blair treats us to news about a new Digital Webbing ongoing, Kieron Dwyer's next project and the true Hollywood story behind Rob Liefeld's lack of involvement in Marvel's second X-Force mini-series.

I've also been told by folks at SBC that the ATR update mentioned at the end of the column "concerns an X-Men creator's most significant creator owned franchise returning to publication."

Stay tuned! I have a few guesses off the top of my head: Next Men (Byrne), Sovereign Seven (Claremont), High Roads (Lobdell), Fray (Whedon). Not sure if any of those rate as a franchise aside from Next Men and Fray, though. We shall see.