But today work-for-hire in movies, TV, music, books, are still primarily new concepts and characters.

Work-for-hire in comics used to be full of new concepts as late as the sixties and even the seventies. But the last several decades work-for-hire in comics means reworking the same properties over and over.

It's odd that we all accept another relaunch of AQUAMAN or NOVA or BATGIRL or WAR MACHINE, because that's how corporate comics work ...

... and yet in other media, retreads are greeted with suspicion (and often for good reason). From the new "Knight Rider" television series to the "Get Smart" movie, and including all the retread crap in between, we're not usually delighted to see someone take another crack at an old idea. You wanna see a film buff scream? Tell her that Julia Roberts is remaking "To Kill A Mockingbird."

But comics? Bring on the 17,967th battle between the Batman and the Joker! Show us the ALL-NEW HAWKEYE AND THE THUNDERBOLTS!

I liked the new Knight Rider series. It had a great mix of sexual tension between oh, everyone on the series including a lesbian FBI agent. On the 2 hour pilot they had introduced all the key players in the first 10 minutes of the series including the main male character (Michael Knights son) waking up in bed with 2 women and the lesbian fbi agent the morning after a fling with the other chick still in bed.
Anyway, KITT's pretty cool and it looks like they were going to bring back KARR the evil car who became sentient. I believe the show has been cancelled and that some of the characters that have been on the series since the beginning are going to die.

Budman says, "Retreads are OK if they have hot lesbians."

On last weeks show, they show her and her crew go into a warehouse, she see's a bomb, tells everyone to "get out!!" and it cuts to the outside of the warehouse and an explosion. Then it shows previews for the next 2 shows and it says that "someone dies!". I''ll bet my left nut that it aint the lesbian that seemingly got caught in the warehouse explosion...too obvious

Brian K. Vaughan talks a bunch about writing his own characters versus writing other people's characters in his upcoming Comics Journal interview:

lengthy preview at TCJ website here.

Millar and Hitch's FF doesn't have have hot lesbians.

But ... no one would see it as odd that a great actor would want to play King Lear or Hamlet when that character has already been performed by many many great actors in the past. Rather it would be seen as a great challenge and one that any actor who was serious about his craft would want to take up. Similarly no one moans much when an Orchestra puts out yet another version of Mozart's 40th (one of my favourites).

there are some classic characters in comics that many writers and artists for perfectly valid reason would want to have a go at doing.

True. Fortunately, now there are alternatives for business-wise creators to consider rather than signing over your life's work to a major corporation. There's self-publishing, Image comics, Dark Horse, and others that have more creator frinedly contracts. In the 60's, these alternatives really didn't exist, and a few attempts made by creators to strike it out on their own (Gil Kane's Savage, Wally Wood's witzend) were commercial failures.

Shakespeare, Mozart ... and Aquaman.

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