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They really should hire fans to write stories more often. Fans that are obsessed create the best stories, because they've lived with those characters and understand them.

*returns from comic convention*

Amen.

As far as I'm concerned, there're two primary types of non-fan writer:

1. Has no real personal agenda but whose cluelessness about what they're writing about means that they rub people up the wrong way accidentally.

2. Ambitious, ego-driven, and sees getting tied to a licence as an opportunity to showcase their own ideas, plots and stories, rather than their having any sort of responsibility to the fans and/or spirit of the franchise they're working with.

They don't tend to react very well to being told that if their own ideas were that darned good, they'd be writing their own books rather than jobbing on someone else's franchise titles. I freely admit that I know this through actually having said this both to Penders (whose The Lost Ones, of course, flopped gloriously) and Fleetway writer Nigel Kitching.

Kitching's (who admitted that he was not given any Sonic source material to work with when initially developing his ideas, and who couldn't be bothered trying to find any under his own steam) attitude was that if he had been given the franchise job, it was his toy to play with and he could do whatever he wanted with it, and screw the spirit of the franchise or any prior knowledge.

He never went as far as Penders did and actually said online to fans who criticised him that all fans were merely stupid people with no imagination, who didn't appreciate the greatness that they were being given and ought to just shut up and be grateful (and bizarrely, that was an attitude he kept his job for holding) - but I think that he may've thought much the same thing.

Even if they're not a fan with a fan's intimate knowledge of the franchise, a writer can work with the spirit of the franchise without those details. It's writers who don't give a flying... ummm... fox for either who really drag things down.

I'm not denying that - hence my concern about Ian's current (as far as I'm concerned, anyway) excessive fanboyism.

Other-M - which is my main experience of Ian working with the full Archie cast - didn't make Sally into Sonic's love interest, so I've never seen how he handles the Sonic/Sally dynamic before.

But, as I said over at SHQ, I don't like what I'm seeing of his monomaniacal handling of it over the last couple of issues...