executive decisions for artfags in poverty (part of an ongoing infinite series, cont'd)

Don't compromise.  Don't equivocate.  Demur.

You're not in demand.  What's to be gained by compromise?  Nothing but the tailoring & gelding of a vision that's exclusively your own.

Oppose any suggestion that "It might be better, if."

Better to whom?

A dictum once held boneclose, from earlier, fist-shakingly independent days:

There is no audience.  This is not the riddling reply to some philosophical koan like, 'Who makes the grass green?'  THERE IS NO AUDIENCE.

There is only power: where it is generated, what is produced by it, and where it is received.  The wooing & flirting & compromise, ever after audiences, is how Eastman & Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles degenerates into TMNT the Synergy of Toy Line & Cartoon Serial & Rubbery Vinyl Movie Ikons & Pop Clothing Merch & Corn Syrup Flavoured Cereal.

T.M.N.T., the Landfill Stuffer.

The power Eastman & Laird's work had was theirs.  It did not belong to child audiences.  Though the parents of those insufferable sprats would contend elsewise.  And it did not extend, tendril-like, through mergers & acquisitions from their modest patch outward into the greater culture to become synonymous with their names on the header.  Their power was mutual, and it was, ultimately, squandered.

"But,"  I do not hear you say, because there is no audience, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin has been extremely successful."

In relation to what?  Several decades of diminished cultural capital.  And what, today, are Eastman & Laird doing with their influence and creative control?  Maintaining a toe-hold in a world that doesn't need Eastman & Laird, because Eastman & Laird have not contributed a fresh idea since 'Melting Pot', which the world perhaps best remembers as the straight-to-video failure, Heavy Metal 2000.

There is no audience.  Imbibe this as strength.

Did you scroll too quickly past?  Did you skip a sentence that began "Their power was mutual..."?  Or did you find it contradictory, because implicit in the equivalence of Audience with Power is the assertion that Kevin Eastman & Peter Laird were producing their work for no-one except one another.

There is no contradiction.  Eastman & Laird were not simply a partnership:  they were a Feedback Loop, and K&E's TMNT, as its influence entered our sphere, was the production of that noisy riffing.  The Turtles were being produced for Peter Laird & Kevin Eastman.  There were enjoyable emanations of that power, as it faded, in the years immediately following their success, largely within the original comic, performed by visiting appreciative powers--  other artists, other creators, self-identified "fans".

But who today remembers any of those?

There is no audience.