I'm the managing editor of Orang Utan Comics, group editor of AAM/Markosia, writer of Alpha Gods, Hypergirl and Hero: 9-5, and also do freelance inking and lettering work for the likes of AAM/Markosia, Slave Labour, Top Shelf, Image, Marvel/Panini and I letter the official Doctor Who graphic novels for BBC Books.
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…the moral indignation regarding Before Watchmen is really starting to make me feel a little sick.
Why?
Because if any of these people actually felt that strongly about the issues involved they a) wouldn’t read any of Moore’s work because he’s pretty much guilty of all the things people take issue with before watchmen over himself; and b) wouldn’t read any mainstream books at all and would only read creator owned books and nothing else.
That leaves aside the whole point that this is in no way a black and white issue and the fact that people act like it is really winds me up.
I’ve never seen any compelling evidence as to point A)-everyone who brings this up also curiously fails to provide links every time-, and as to point B) Tom Spurgeon sums it up best:
In cases like More Watchmen, I think the companies involved are very much insulated from even an unlikely significant drop in profits and bad publicity. If profits are five percent less than what they should be at a comics company, everything we know about the last two decades indicates it’s much more likely more people will be fired and page rates reduced than policy changed. I think if you’re going to promote a response in terms of its bottom-line efficacy, you need to really grapple with what that is and why that is. Otherwise, if you don’t pull it off, your failure to do so becomes a tacit endorsement of the virtues that you’re trying to foil.
90% of what I buy and read these days is in fact creator-owned work; I do still pick up Daredevil and The Flash; I am aware of Gene Colan’s horrendous treatment at the hands of Marvel; I do not believe that cutting royalties from Mark Waid and his artistic collaborators will cause any practical change towards Marvel policy and so, instead, I choose to reward good work when I see it. I’m not going to read Before Watchmen because it’s scab-work, created at the behest of editorial and corporate entities who value profit over art. If I see a new argument for the legitimacy of Before Watchmen I will grapple with it, but every argument/fallacy that has been ginned up in order to apologize for DC’s outrageous behavior has been rebuked by parties more eloquent than myself.
This is important, this is not people just “looking for something to be upset about.” I personally want a comic book industry where creator’s rights are honored, and where luminaries like Alan Moore and Jack Kirby are treated with, if not reverence, at the very least respect from the people who have enjoyed the fruits of their labors for years and years and years. Before Watchmen is a step in the precise opposite direction, an indictment of a culture where the men and women who make these things are considered tertiary in importance to the “IP” and I, personally, will have no part of it.
I’m sorry if that “sickens” you.
Yeah, I’m sorry if I can’t provide links to conversations I’ve had with people who’ve actually worked with Moore and been shafted by him…I’m afraid I don’t post all of my conversations on the internet.
Really, I’m done with arguing about this. The idea that “owning all the rights to your creation” is the only morally justifiable business model in any creative industry is simply absurd. Sometimes it is entirely okay to do work for hire, get paid for that work and then, you know, actually be able to put food on your table and pay your rent each month. There’s nothing morally wrong, IMHO, with paying people to create IPs for you…that’s a job…that’s how paid employment works.
Also, your response to point b) utterly missed my point.
The Beat’s Before Watchmen post today is the best our medium can inspire, even if it’s better than our fandom on each side (and some of our industry peeps) deserves.
This is a great article, but do you know what the most horrifying thing in it is? It’s the suggestion that their might have been a recoloured Watchmen. And that Moore would have been okay with that. Recolouring Watchmen would be a travesty far beyond Before Watchmen, because Before Watchmen doesn’t alter a single page of the original - but a recoloured Watchmen would alter every single last page of the book.
It just shows how undervalued colouring is and how undervalued colourists are. John Higgins is a legend. Watchmen would not be Watchmen without Higgins’ colours. The Killing Joke is not The Killing Joke without his colours, it’s just a pale imitation of the original.
Frankly, I’m disgusted and appalled that such a thing as a recoloured Watchmen was ever considered.
Who Watches The Industry by Ty Templeton
We need comics. We don’t need the comic mainstream – certainly not as much as it needs us. And we wouldn’t even be having this argument about Watchmen if that book wasn’t part of that industry. It couldn’t have existed without it, it wouldn’t have been relevant without it, and most of us wouldn’t have even had the chance to read it without it.
We don’t have to give a shit about Watchmen, or Before Watchmen. We choose to.
We don’t have to fight about issues that we really have no skin in. We choose to.
We should really grow out of it.
Last Friday I wrote a really long post over at my site about Before Watchmen. It was probably too long, fence-sitting and unstructured to get as much widespread attention as some of the more aggressive pieces out there, but I still feel everything in it.
This is the tiniest part of it - a sentiment that I feel is pretty important - you can read the whole thing here.
(via nixsight)
I’ve just read the whole thing, and it is most definitely worth reading.
“I have no idea whether this project will be any good or not. But it sits as a shining example of the fundamental flaw that exists in the comic industry, especially within DC Comics. They spend most of their time chasing the readers that grew up with their iconic characters rather than attempting to attract new readers who are growing up right now.”
Totally agree with this - though I think DC52, being a company-wide initiative, was more indicative of it, and I said as much at the time.
However, that backward looking trait in comics isn’t unique to publishers. Comic readers - many of whom are also comic retailers, which is a bigger issue - run wild with entitlement on either side of any comic-related debate, and stand ready to jump on anything that they perceive as a deviation or affront to comic texts or characters that they feel shouldn’t be touched. It all adds to the stupidly binary way any comic-related issue is handled.
The huge amount of brilliant work that goes un-discussed, unsupported and unbought in-between those two dominant cultures is the only genuine ongoing tragedy in comics today, I reckon. The rest is just semantics and negotiation of contracts.
Yup, yup, yup…the fact that people are wasting their time arguing about the merits of Before Watchmen while amazing books like The Interactives go largely ignored is, quite frankly, criminal.
“I have no idea whether this project will be any good or not. But it sits as a shining example of the fundamental flaw that exists in the comic industry, especially within DC Comics. They spend most of their time chasing the readers that grew up with their iconic characters rather than attempting to attract new readers who are growing up right now.”
Yes, this, all of this.
…it’s funny how Alan Moore was “perfectly happy,” his words not mine, with the deal on Watchmen until it became the most successful graphic novel of all time. Something which neither he nor DC could have anticipated. He and they both foresaw a time when the book would be out of print for over a…
For Alan Moore, it is not, has not, and has never been about the money. Money is not the issue at hand. It is so not about the money that Alan Moore has gotten in financial trouble for refusing to accept his royalty checks. He does not want to get paid for Watchmen, he wants creative control over characters he made and the story he told.
It is because nobody could have anticipated the success of Watchmen that the deal ended up being a shitty one. It is because he had a gentlemen’s agreement with the company that he would eventually regain the rights to the characters he made that such a thing never happening constitutes a sort of betrayal. This man has made DC Comics millions and millions of dollars over the course of 25 years. He can’t even legally say “these things, which I have made, which have changed the face of comics, changed lives, changed the way stories are told, belong to me.” That is ferociously fucked.
I am going to have to respectfully disagree with you here. If you want creative control over the characters you make and the stories you tell then you do NOT sign the rights over to someone else. He was asked in 1986 if he owned Watchmen and to paraphrase his answer he replied, “No…and I’m perfectly happy with that.” That may well be because he anticipated that at some point in the future he would own it, but he also knew (and it’s clear from what he said in ‘86 that he was fully aware of it) that DC could do whatever the hell they liked with the characters until that day.
I can understand him regretting the deal, I can understand him regretting entering into a “gentleman’s agreement” and not getting something in writing ensuring a time and a date when the right would revert to him…but you learn from these experiences, you man up and accept responsibility for your own errors. You don’t rant and rave about dirty deals when the other party has done nothing but honour the terms of a contract that you were fully aware of when you entered into it.
If you want to own your stories then self publish, because ANY publisher will take at least a share of the rights. Of course, a self published Watchmen wouldn’t have been read by very many people…it’s almost as if DC share some of the credit for the success of the series…
Here’s my thing: Watchmen was one of the stories that made the graphic novel format viable. You could make an argument that it’s the comic that made the graphic novel a sellable entity. When that happened-when DC saw that the game was changing, that they could make stories that would stay in print for longer periods of time-they could have renegotiated, made a new contract that reflected the changing times, the changing times caused by the comic that this man made. They didn’t do that. They decided to milk that cash cow for all it was worth, creator rights and integrity be damned.
There was a world of difference in the way these things were made between 1986 and 1987, and it happened practically overnight, and it happened because of Watchmen. They could have respected that. They weren’t legally obligated to, but you’re not legally obligated to stay faithful to your wife either-that doesn’t mean it’s not completely shitty to cheat on her.
I don’t really see the publisher/writer relationship as being in any way analogous to a husband/wife relationship. If it was then it would be a marriage in which the husband was free to go and marry other women at any time…if anything it would be a polygamous marriage, at which point the issue of fidelity becomes rather null and void, no? (And one could argue that while infidelity is legal grounds for divorce that you are, technically, legally obligated to stay faithful to your wife, from a certain point of view).
As you so rightly put, DC had no legal obligation to renegotiate the contract and, quite frankly, it would have been absurd for them to do so. There’s a fairly shaky argument that they should have done it from a moral point of view, but morality is a purely subjective issue. You could equally argue that Moore had a moral obligation to not prevent creator owned books he’s worked collaboratively on from being reprinted, thus preventing those he worked with on those projects from making any further money from them beyond their initial payments (after all, you’d think that working on a creator owned project with Moore would ensure some fairly steady royalty cheques coming your way). And yet he’s done just that. He’s willing to champion creators rights and “morality” when it benefits him…while happy to stamp all over the rights of other creators when it’s in his own interest to do so.
I am in no way arguing that DC are some great, benevolent entity who have never done any wrong…I’m merely stating that in the case of Watchmen they seem to me to have acted entirely properly. In hindsight the deal has benefited them greatly…and one might argue that Moore has, ultimately, done pretty well for himself as a result of the success of Watchmen too…but it entirely understandable that with hindsight he might regret the deal. That doesn’t change the fact that at the time it was entirely acceptable to all parties involved, and acting like it is some great moral issue now is simply absurd.
(via constellation-funk)
…it’s funny how Alan Moore was “perfectly happy,” his words not mine, with the deal on Watchmen until it became the most successful graphic novel of all time. Something which neither he nor DC could have anticipated. He and they both foresaw a time when the book would be out of print for over a…
For Alan Moore, it is not, has not, and has never been about the money. Money is not the issue at hand. It is so not about the money that Alan Moore has gotten in financial trouble for refusing to accept his royalty checks. He does not want to get paid for Watchmen, he wants creative control over characters he made and the story he told.
It is because nobody could have anticipated the success of Watchmen that the deal ended up being a shitty one. It is because he had a gentlemen’s agreement with the company that he would eventually regain the rights to the characters he made that such a thing never happening constitutes a sort of betrayal. This man has made DC Comics millions and millions of dollars over the course of 25 years. He can’t even legally say “these things, which I have made, which have changed the face of comics, changed lives, changed the way stories are told, belong to me.” That is ferociously fucked.
I am going to have to respectfully disagree with you here. If you want creative control over the characters you make and the stories you tell then you do NOT sign the rights over to someone else. He was asked in 1986 if he owned Watchmen and to paraphrase his answer he replied, “No…and I’m perfectly happy with that.” That may well be because he anticipated that at some point in the future he would own it, but he also knew (and it’s clear from what he said in ‘86 that he was fully aware of it) that DC could do whatever the hell they liked with the characters until that day.
I can understand him regretting the deal, I can understand him regretting entering into a “gentleman’s agreement” and not getting something in writing ensuring a time and a date when the right would revert to him…but you learn from these experiences, you man up and accept responsibility for your own errors. You don’t rant and rave about dirty deals when the other party has done nothing but honour the terms of a contract that you were fully aware of when you entered into it.
If you want to own your stories then self publish, because ANY publisher will take at least a share of the rights. Of course, a self published Watchmen wouldn’t have been read by very many people…it’s almost as if DC share some of the credit for the success of the series…
(via constellation-funk)
