Quote:
Originally Posted by ChosenOne
I have no desire to feed this pointless argument, so I'll just say this: you never write for the fans; you write to service the story and the characters. If you write well, and your story is good, then the fans will come. Everything else will end up becoming a disaster.
It's impossible to please everyone so there's no point in even trying.
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My approach is sort of somewhere in between, I do try to write to service the story and characters, but I also write in service to myself and what I personally think is fun or interesting or what I'd like to see. I pander to myself, haha.
Obviously I can't (and wouldn't) do any old thing or follow every whim I have particularly on something like TMNT that I don't personally own and involves many other people, but for me part of doing comics long-term is finding ways to stay excited about what I'm doing and when I'm the artist, focusing on what's most fun and engaging to draw. Otherwise the work suffers. I don't usually think in terms of whether what I'm doing is good or bad/well-done or badly-done, the most important thing to me is whether I'm having fun with it or not, and if I'm having fun then other people will too (not EVERYONE will but you get the idea). Yeah, you can't please everyone, but I can at least try to please myself. I've done enough comics at this point to have stuff I'm not proud of or be disappointed in the end result, so if I can just have fun with what I'm doing and be happy with how it turned out even if people don't like it, then that's the ideal result.
About the Mona Lisa stuff, if Alopex wasn't on the table I probably would have gone the usual Raph/Mona route, but when it comes to romantic relationships I really follow my gut and my heart and whether the dynamic is fun to write. It has to have some spark on the page when I'm writing, and sometimes two characters that I initially set out to pair up simply don't end up having a spark so I move away from that even if I love the pairing. I can't force a relationship if I'm not feeling that spark.
I actually never even thought about anything between Mona and Donatello before working on issue 104, it was never part of my plan or anything, but I noticed that when I was writing scripts and drawing scenes, moments between the two of them kept popping up. It felt like something was there, meanwhile nothing between Mona and Raph ever worked its way in, Alopex being present notwithstanding, like my gut never led me down that route. I don't have anything against Raph/Mona, I think the original Fred Wolf cartoon episode is great and they're fun together, but I think a bigger issue is that IDW Raph is different than 1987 Raph and 2012 Raph. Every incarnation of the Turtles has them written a bit (or a lot) differently, and while 1987 Raph definitely has that spark with Mona, I just didn't feel it with IDW Raph. He's a different person than those other versions. I just don't feel anything drawing him toward Mona when I'm writing, and when I do start outlining a scene between the two of them, it always ends up on the cutting room floor, and to me that sends a message that it isn't "right," whether it's not right for the characters or it's not the right time for that to happen, or both.
And obviously Mona doesn't HAVE to be with anyone, she isn't just a love interest whose only purpose is to hook up with another character, from her first issue she's got her own goals and things she's interested in. Regardless, we'll see where things go.