Business vs. Creativity

I've got yer business model right here!

[W]hen I wrote comics, I lived in the moment, letting my stories tell me what to write about, riffing off the zeitgeist month by month.

This is the main thrust of a short post by Steve Englehart regarding the creative freedom that comic book writers had back before all the blockbuster movies were based on comic book superheroes. Englehart remembers the good ol' days fondly, as we all tend to do when waxing nostalgic: "Once we creators were Marvel or DC." He is less impressed with the modern comics industry:

Today, the comics companies are top-heavy with editorial interference.[...] They expect writers to give them synopses for the next twelve issues in their series, so that when the writer finally gets to that twelfth issue, the material is so old and stale that he might as well just blow his brains out, for all the satisfaction he can derive from it.

I find it pretty common that creative-types bristle when their activity is governed by business-types. Is this because they have different ideas about what customers really want? Or is it because they want their products to satisfy different people with fundamentally different tastes? Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok have a paper on the topic (which I've mentioned before) that takes this latter view. This "different targets" view seems to imply that, as we develop technology that lets us mass produce goods that used to be produced by artisans, we should see see the influence of creative-types fall and the influence of business-types rise.

On the other hand, I know of many who would support the idea that the goal may be the same, but there are multiple ways of trying to satisfy a given target audience, and creative-types will have very different ideas on this than business-types. Sir Ken Robinson would say that we live in a world where we neglect and ignore creativity to our detriment. This "different techniques" view leaves open why one group would gain more influence than the other, but it also suggests that it's possible to reverse the trend if enough people are willing to try. No such reversal seems possible in the "different targets" view.

So which is it? Was Steve Englehart driven out of comics by the inexorable market forces acting on a good that is easy to mass produce? Or is his lament a rally cry to take the power from the suits and give it back to the creators? Or is there a consistent view in between with its own set of important implications?