…let’s talk, you know, hypothetically here…

Say, for example, you worked on a creator owned book and you were a pretty big name in the industry…in fact, so well known that you were able to get your collaborators to work with you for little or nothing, because they would share part of the property with you. They are your co-creators, they co-own the book with you, right? They’re willing to work for nothing because they’re going to be getting a slice of the profits from this project with a really, really big name creator…so they’re willing to take the financial hit of foregoing a page rate for the promise of future profits from reprints and trade paperback collections and the like.

But then that same big name creator blocks any reprints or trade paperback collections. The book comes out and that’s it…you don’t make much off the initial run and…there’s going to be no future profits.

Now, say that big name creator then waves the banner for creators rights? He rails about being mistreated and denied the ability to make the kind of money from projects he was expecting. That sort of thing.

We’re talking hypothetically here, of course.

Now…hypothetically, that man would be a hypocrite, no?

Now…say that same big name huge star creator said absolutely nothing about a recoloured edition of one of his works. Said nothing about the fact that recolouring the book not only ruined a masterpiece but actively denied the original colourist from making any future royalties from the sales on that book? And that same big name creator was going to quite happily approve the publication of a recoloured edition of his most successful book, which had been coloured by the same man, until he fell out with the publisher? Once again this would not only severely effect the creative integrity of the work but would prevent the colourist from receiving any future royalties from the sales of that book.

And that same big name creator continued to talk about creators rights and being denied what he felt he was entitled to?

Might you not start to think that creator was concerned with HIS rights and not the rights of creators in general? Not even with his closest collaborators?

All of this is purely hypothetical, of course…