Tom Brevoort

Con l’avvicinarsi del rilancio DC di settembre – in particolar modo ora che, dopo l’uscita del catalogo “Previews” di luglio, è possibile ordinare gli albi della “prima ondata” post-Flashpoint – gli autori delle avventure di Superman e soci si stanno prodigando in densi tour virtuali per i siti di settore, promuovendo le loro creature attraverso le consuete (anche, duole sottolinearlo, in termini di contenuti) interviste di rito.

Dalla girandola non poteva certo esimersi Paul Levitz, – la sua ultima comparsata, assieme al collega Fabian Nicieza, è presso il blog ufficiale DC, The Source – un cui dialogo coi ragazzi del sito Newsarama ha innestato una piccola ma interessante polemica con un noto collega della concorrenza.
Andando con ordine, ecco innanzitutto le parole di Levitz:

In coming back to writing after 20 years of not doing it regularly, I realized even writing has to change in the era of Google. When you introduce something in the course of a conversation of your characters, if it’s something the reader isn’t familiar with, but it doesn’t block or stop the story, if the reader’s curious, they can find out literally everything they want to know about it in about three minutes. That’s totally different from what the world was when last I was writing Legion of Super-Heroes. Does it make writing better? Worse? I don’t know. But it makes it different. I had a throwaway line in my first Legion book, the last run, about Maslow’s hierarchy and I would never have dared do that when I was writing in the old days.

A questa controversa affermazione – vale la pena ricordare che le ultime opere levitziane non spiccano certo per leggibilità – ha risposto in maniera diretta Tom Brevoort, editor di numerose testate Marvel di successo nonchè Senior Vice President della publishing house di Spider-Man, che ha così illustrato a Comic Book Resources il suo punto di vista sulla questione:

[…] somebody asked me about a recent interview in which Paul Levitz was talking about writing “Legion” now and how he handled it differently than he did years ago. He was writing a scene and made some oblique reference to something in the past, being cognizant of the fact that there’s an internet out there now so people who don’t know what that is and understand it can look it up. And they can look it up easily because the internet is something they’re carrying around with them on their phone in their pocket. And there’s definitely some truth to that. But I don’t like to rely on that a whole lot and would rather have my information be in the stories rather than have people needing to look it up. But that doesn’t change the fact that there’s a distinct difference between how people relate to their comics today than they did even ten years ago. So I’ve got to take that into account as well as we’re doing things.

La discussione è proseguita idealmente in una successiva intervista a Brevoort, apparsa la settimana seguente sullo stesso sito, nella quale l’editor ha affermato: (altro…)