>>102963515>>102963599I don't know anything about Comicsgate, but this reminds me of a thought I've been having increasingly. What if publisher interference is, on balance, a good thing?
The best quick example I can think of is Ren and Stimpy since my background understanding of this is more in television, though the principle is the same: When artistic freedom was constrained, forcing the creators to work to a deadline and be clever if they wanted to get vulgar past the television execs, they wound up making a pretty good show - but once those restrictions were removed, instead of getting a better result from greater creative freedom we got something much less interesting. It's a very interesting dynamic, since it's a completely different justification for interference to the ones you'd usually see, and it's not really a restriction you can expect creative types to embrace.
I think the same tension underlies a lot of modern society, interestingly. For decades the cool thing has been to rebel against authority and that's been ingrained in us. But nobody wants to be the boring guy in the grey suit who ruins everyone's fun, so the cat-and-mouse game between authority figure and rebel has been stalled. Even where people continue to cause similar problems to before (such as a bad boss), they're now doing so in a different way, they don't want to be an authority figure but to be "approachable" and "one of you guys", so the dynamic is completely changed and you don't get that fun of rebellion anymore. Sneaking a dirty joke past the comics code censors is fun. Printing "BOOBIES" on the front-page without anyone trying to stop you is just boring.
