Take four rights and you're back where you started.

Why do some creative people reject opportunities to change directions?

The combination of art and commerce has never got along entirely smoothly. Many creative people working in the entertainment industry are not in a position to control the decisions made about the properties they are employed on. People working on a radio program, television program, comic strip, film or comic book are frequently a hired hand who must temper their sensibilities to what the owners expect or else be out of work.

People who have toiled long within these fields on other people's properties often yearn to seize the means of production for themselves, to leave their former owners and create something wholly original in which they have a larger say in about creative decisions.

When creative people leave a property they were well-known for and move into something else, they don't necessarily continue in the same oeuvre which made them famous. When Dennis Weaver left Gunsmoke, it wasn't so he could star in a different western program; when McLean Stevenson left M*A*S*H his next show wasn't another army/medical comedy; Alex Raymond's post-Flash Gordon work was not science fiction.

But occasionally, creative people leave the property they were best-known for to take on exactly the same type of material they had been doing before. It can pay dividends; when Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll wanted to move their radio program Sam 'n' Henry from local broadcasting to national they couldn't because they didn't own the property; quitting the show, they developed a brand-new program which was basically the exact same thing with different names: Amos 'n' Andy. The latter show lasted 30+ years.

But more commonly, it doesn't work out; another radio show, The Great Gildersleeve was perhaps the first spin-off show (from Fibber McGee and Molly) and certainly established many of the tropes which spin-off programs use to this day. However, star Harold Peary - who had been playing Gildersleeve first on Fibber McGee, then on his own show and in motion pictures - wasn't satisfied with the level of creative input he had (among other things, he wanted more opportunities to sing). Peary left The Great Gildersleeve and launched a new program, Honest Harold; but Honest Harold was basically the exact same program - Peary played the same type of character and even employed some of the same supporting cast members. Meanwhile, Willard Waterman replaced Peary on The Great Gildersleeve and did a fine imitation of Peary; audiences had spent years bonding with the character of The Great Gildersleeve and were loathe to accept an impersonation, even coming from the man who created the original; Honest Harold flopped and Peary never had another hit.

When Image Comics launched in 1992, the founding seven creators played mostly within the same kind of stories they had been producing as hired guns for Marvel Comics (but with graphic violence). As Peter David observed at the time:

So when a creator boldly announces that he’s off to start his or her own line, my presumption and hope is that it’s going to be something new and visionary. It doesn’t have to be highly marketable. Indeed, Marvel and DC’s main flaw is that titles are expected to draw significantly higher sales than an independent would reasonably expect for his piece of the market pie. So “Hard Boiled” doesn’t have to sell like “X-Men.” No one expects it to.

If Todd said, “I’ve been dying to do a good romance comic,” I’d be thrilled. If Erik said, “My life’s goal is to produce a solid western,” I’d be impressed.

So what’s Image publishing?

Superheroes.

Young superheroes. SWAT Team superheroes. Young freelance superheroes. A group of superheroes.

I mean…haven’t we got Marvel and DC for that? Why have X-Force clones when we’ve got X-Force?

Indeed, Rob Liefeld's Youngblood was made up of characters he had originally created as unused redesigns for titles like Legion of Super-Heroes and Teen Titans. Violence aside, there was very little different between X-Force and Youngblood, aside from fan investment in existing characters and publishing identities.

Sticking with similar type of material leads to creative people being typecast; when Johnny Weismuller left the Tarzan films to be Jungle Jim, he merely left one type of jungle hero films for another. Basil Rathbone suffered from being typecast as the detective hero Sherlock Holmes in film and radio; he finally abandoned the role to take on the part of... detective Basil Rathbone in the radio series Tales of Fatima, doing absolutely nothing to halt his typecasting.

For contrast, look to Jack Webb, who started in radio with the serious news-commentary program One Out of Seven, then the very-burlesque humour of The Jack Webb Show. For a time he settled into programs where he played wry private detectives - Jeff Regan, Pat Novak, Johnny Modero - but broke out of those parts with his show Dragnet, a successful attempt at a grounded police drama. Even with the fame of Dragnet, he didn't simply branch out into other kinds of cop dramas - his other big passion project was the jazz/crime series Pete Kelly's Blues.

I had some understanding of this when I worked at Marvel - I didn't want to be known just as an Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe guy, so I jumped at the chance to write introductory text in Untold Tales of the New Universe, to write the trade dress for trade paperbacks and step outside my comfort zone for properties like Anita Blake and Image's Proof. If you intend to be considered a creative person, you can't simply toil at the same kind of thing from project to project - not if you want to be considered vital. Do the same thing for too long and people will assume that... well, that's all you've got to offer.

The Most Problematic Program of Old-Time Radio

When I first became interested in Old-Time Radio, the comedy genre was one of the most difficult for me to appreciate. Initially, I found OTR comedy to be dated, stodgy and not especially funny. Gradually, I found a number of comedians whose work was timeless but there are still certain programs I have little interest in. Perhaps the most difficult program for a modern-day listener to appreciate is Freeman Gosden & Charles Correll's Amos 'N' Andy.

In my early days online I found an OTR fan page where the author summed up how I felt about Amos 'N' Andy, which is likely how many OTR fans feel: grave discomfort. He recalled how he went to purchase a collection of episodes from a bookstore but was so ashamed of it that he tried to conceal it on his way to the till and was afraid the clerk would call him a Klansman for buying it.

If you aren't familiar with Amos 'N' Andy, then you may wonder why we OTR fans are so guarded about the show, often afraid to admit if we like it or not. Amos 'N' Andy depicted for most of its 30+ year run a cast of characters who were predominantly African-American, but the majority of the characters - particularly in the series' original incarnation as a serial - were voiced by Gosden and Correll, a pair of white men. (There was also a lot of furor over the Amos 'N' Andy tv series in 1951, but that has little to do with the radio program.)

My favorite OTR comedian Jack Benny waxed late in life about the depictions of race on his own show, where Eddie Anderson portrayed his valet Rochester:

"But remember, you who look back with perhaps contempt or patronizing pity on the old radio programs, that like most entertainers of that period I was brought up in another time and another place. I developed and learned my trade in Vaudeville. In the golden days of Vaudeville, there were blackface comics and there were black comics - like Bert Williams. There were also Swedish comics, Jewish comics, Dutch comics, Italian comics and Scotch comics.

Bad as you may think this kind of humor was, I think it was a way that America heated up the national groups and the ethnic groups in a melting pot and made one people of us - or tried to do so. Everybody loved ethnic humor during Vaudeville and often the people who were being ridiculed most enjoyed the kind of ethnic humor aimed at their own group. During World War II, attitudes changed. Hitler's ideology of Aryan supremacy put all ethnic humor in a bad light. It became bad taste to have Jewish jokes, Italian jokes and Negro jokes."

I've had an inexplicable fascination with the story behind Amos 'N' Andy, a magnetism stronger than my interest in the programs themselves. What were Gosden and Correll's intentions? How did Amos 'N' Andy become the most popular radio program?

The first place I went to for answers was Melvin Patrick Ely's The Adventures of Amos 'N' Andy: a Social History. Although there were some interesting pieces of history recounted in this book, it wasn't particularly concerned with Gosden and Correll themselves, nor with the content of the radio program. It had more to do with the television program and was somewhat dismissive of the radio series, likening it to a minstrel show. This, it seems, is fairly typical of modern analysis of Amos 'N' Andy.

However, the sort of book I had been looking for does exist; Elizabeth McLeod recently authored The Original Amos 'N' Andy: Freeman Gosden, Charles Correll and the 1928-1943 Radio Serial. McLeod points out many of the flaws in modern analysis of the series and goes into a terrific exploration of the program's earliest years. Amos 'N' Andy was at its most popular in it's first few years, particularly around 1930-1931. Unfortunately, scarcely any recordings exist from 1928-1943 and the bulk of what we have now is from the era where the show was reworked into a situation comedy, the same format used in the ill-fated television series.

Fortunately, McLeod delved into the original scripts which have survived but have been mostly neglected by scholars. As it turns out, Amos 'N' Andy was originally a nightly serial program similar to the old soap operas. The series offered long-running storyarcs about Amos and Andy trying to make ends meet first in Chicago, then in Harlem. The humor which developed in these early years was a gentle sort, like that of OTR shows Vic and Sade or Easy Aces, not the latter-day sitcom variety. Amos in particular tries to improve his standing in life, eventually becoming a successful businessman, marrying a refined woman and becoming a perfect father; Andy remains shiftless and often unable to learn from his mistakes, but his braggadocio conceals his own insecurities.

McLeod deftly summarizes the continuing problem of Amos 'N' Andy:

"Today, Amos 'N' Andy is a complex relic of an often-confusing past, and modern commentators tend to see in the program what they have been conditioned to see - conditioning that may involve racial issues and political ideologies that have nothing to do with the content of a radio program. It is far simpler, far more comfortable, and far less challenging to their own assumptions for these modern analysts to criticize Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll for what they were not than to attempt to understand what they actually were to the three generations of radio listeners of all races and backgrounds who embraced their creation."

Before I read McLeod's book, I had no idea that Gosden & Correll had brought about the advent of radio syndication, nor the influence the series had in spawning not just imitators but in bringing talent to radio who realized through Gosden & Correll that it was a medium which was vibrant and rewarding. Gosden and Correll were pioneers of radio broadcasting and for this alone, they deserve their place in history. I strongly recommend McLeod's book to anyone with an interest in the history of radio broadcasting, particularly that of radio drama.