Probably the most fatuous thing you will read about Before Watchmen, at least for today

Part I.

Captain Marvel 1939. C. C. Beck, Bill Parker

Marvelman 1954. Mick Anglo

Swamp Thing 1971. Bernie Wrightson, Len Wein

Jack the Ripper, his poor victims, William Gull, Inspector Abberline et al. 1800s. God or Jah-Bul-On or whatever

The basic premise 1976. Stephen Knight

Thor Ye olden days. Some Viking dudes with ZZ Top beards, presumably

The Avengers 1963. Jack Kirby, Stan Lee

Spider-Man 1962. Steve Ditko, Stan Lee

Doctor Strange 1963. Steve Ditko, Stan Lee

The Hulk 1962. Jack Kirby, Stan Lee

The Fantastic Four 1961. Jack Kirby, Stan Lee

Captain America 1941. Joe Simon, Jack Kirby

Assorted other Marvel characters 1961-1970. Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Stan Lee et al.

 

Superman 1938. Joe Shuster, Jerry Siegel

Assorted other DC characters 1938-1970(ish). A whole heap of people but particularly (for Moore’s purposes) Mort Weisinger and Curt Swan

seriously? okay [deep breath]

Mina Murray 1897. Bram Stoker

Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde 1886. Robert  Louis Stevenson

Allan Quatermain 1885. H. Rider Haggard

The Invisible Man 1897. H.G. Wells

Captain Nemo 1870. Jules Verne

Sherlock Holmes 1887. Arthur Conan Doyle

Professor Moriarty 1893. Arthur Conan Doyle

Fu Manchu 1913. Sax Rohmer

The martians from the War of the Worlds 1898. H.G. Wells

Dr Moreau 1896. H.G. Wells

Orlando 1928. Virginia Woolf

Prospero c.1610, according to wikipedia. Francis Bacon

James Bond 1953. Ian Fleming

Bulldog Drummond 1920. “Sapper”

Emma Peel 1965. The writers of The Avengers, Diana Rigg

The cast of the Threepenny Opera 1728. John Gay

Everyone else in the history of fiction c. 10,000BCE-present Every artist ever

…and, while we’re at it:

Wold Newton 1972. Philip Jose Farmer

Wonder Woman 1941. William Moulton Marston, H. G. Peter

The Spirit 1940. Will Eisner, plus a bunch of ghosts who still aren’t properly acknowledged in the goddamn Spirit Archives

Plastic Man 1941. Jack Cole

Various Standard characters 1940s. various creators

Assorted Lovecraft nonsense 1928. H.P. Lovecraft

Wendy Darling 1904. J.M. Barrie

Alice 1865. Lewis Carroll.

Dorothy Gale 1900. L. Frank Baum

Part II.

I’m not sure but I think I might have forgotten something?

Part III.

Let there be no doubt: DC has treated, and continues to treat, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons unjustly. They’ve exploited unforeseen changes in the market to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of their contract with the artists. And it should go without saying that Watchmen 2: The Watchmening will be wretched.

Still, again, creators like J.M. Barrie, L. Frank Baum and Lewis Carroll might have been just a little bit unhappy with having their own work turned into hardcore pornography featuring rape, incest, bestiality, miscegenation, self-abuse, sex outside marriage, and vigorous hand-holding.

Part IV.

Well, Baum might have been, anyway.

(All images ripped off comics.org)

134 thoughts on “Probably the most fatuous thing you will read about Before Watchmen, at least for today

  1. Moore’s certainly done a lot of work with other’s creations and other’s characters. I guess I’d say the big difference here is that in the original contract, he, Gibbons, and DC assumed that the characters would be owned by Moore and Gibbons shortly after the series ended.

    And another difference would be that Moore has explicitly expressed his opposition to the project.

    Also, I’m sure there’s watchmen fan fic out there, and I’m almost as sure that Moore doesn’t really care about it. It’s not that someone else is using his characters; it’s that the corporation that fucked him over on numerous occasions is cashing in on characters they obtained through legal but still quite unpleasant means.

  2. Most of the creators of these characters are dead. I’m sure Moore wouldn’t mind you using his characters if he was dead. Problem is, he’s not.

  3. Yeah, I’m baffled at the “C.S. Lewis’s Ghost is pissed off in heaven!” argument that keeps coming up. He’s dead, he doesn’t give a shit. That also assumes C.S. Lewis’s ghost or whoever hates free culture and is very invested in censorship when it comes to derivative work decades after he’s been dead (and his views have not changed keeping up with current events in the afterlife! ). It’s a weak argument.

    edit: I got out my ouija board and confirmed C.S. Lewis totally agrees with me, so there!

  4. Correct me if I am wrong but Moore never used those characters in the settings they originally appeared in nor in the same manner or tone. Not to mention by the time he got around to using them most of the them were dead.

    Before Watchmen is different because it places itself within the space of the original overtly and directly where as Lost Girls or LoEG was never directly a sequel to characters in their respective stories, lip service to their past was given but the universe of LoEG & Lost Girls and others were completely new beasts compared to their original homes.

    I don’t think Moore or other people would care if you did a Dr. Manhattan series in a different setting but this is a Prequel first and an interesting idea second.

  5. Most if not all of Moore’s use of other peoples’ creations seems to fall into one of three categories, as I just decided off the top of my head:

    1. Characters that were presumably created with an expectation of being extended by other hands (although Superman and other early superdupers might not have been seen that way by their creators),

    2. Homage/pastiche,

    3. Pomo jazzing around. Lost Girls is basically a coffee table Tijuana Bible, right? I’m not a lawyer, but I believe one legal distinction between protected parody and unprotected ripoff is whether an average lucid person would mistake the derivative work for “official” product. No one’s going to mistake Lost Girls or LXG for “official” sequel to their sources. They’re not trying to provide straightforward extensions of the pleasures their source materials provide, but to use them the way Charlie Parker used “Embracable You.”

  6. I don’t think Moore/Gibbons really assumed that Watchmen would revert to them ASAP, or at all. DC’s contracts have had similar clauses since time immemorial. Marston’s WW contract apparently had the same clause, which is why DC never lets a month go by without Wonder Woman appearing in one comic or another. DC doesn’t want the character to revert to Marston or family even if WW comics aren’t selling…since, obviously, at some point there might be a movie or TV show to be made with the character. Did Moore know about this scenario? Maybe, maybe not…but the notion that he didn’t know the potential dangers of a standard “reversion” clause seems unlikely to me. David Lloyd, for instance, never felt like it was likely or possible that V for Vendetta would end up back in his hands. Moore and Gibbons knew they had something special very early on in the process…and I doubt they thought it was going to go out of print ASAP like most comics of the day. Moore’s claims to the contrary are revisionist history, to some degree, linked to other DC actions.

    DC did a number things to piss off Moore in the aftermath of Watchmen (#1 was the selling of smiley-face pins and cutting Moore/Gibbons out of the profits by calling them “promotional material”)…and have pissed him off in many ways since then (the buying of Wildstorm, the mistreatment of Steve Moore, the false publicity surrounding V for Vendetta, the film). It’s when DC dicked Moore around in other ways, that Moore decided the Watchmen contract was draconian and part of his general exploitation. Initially, he was fine with it. Looking at Dave Gibbons’ response to the same contract should, perhaps, indicate that the results were at least no surprise to him.

    I’m not defending DC here (I’m sure that’s how folks will take it)–but the notion that Moore was hoodwinked by the small print in a contract seems unlikely to me given a whole lot of reading on the topic.

    That said, I think Before Watchmen is an atrocity because it’s a cash-grab with no aesthetic ambition or purpose. When Moore uses others’ characters, he does so because he sees something new and aesthetically interesting to be done with them. Not everyone may like his adaptations…but it’s not just putting the characters back out there so that fanboys will fill the till. If people bought Lost Girls, it’s not as “collectors of Alice in Wonderland related merchandise,” it’s because they are Alan Moore fans…or they thought the idea sounded interesting. The idea of Before Watchmen is merely attaching the name “Watchmen” to something and hoping money ensues. That’s the difference, to my mind. When Moore adapted Marvelman, it was pretty far from the Marvelman of Mick Anglo, or the Captain Marvel of CC Beck. When DC adapts Watchmen, their whole purpose will be to change nothing…and do as little as possible so that they retain the potential money associated with the original Watchmen. It’ll just be treading water, while hoping people will pay money to watch that happen.

    DC has the right to do these things, of course…but it’s a pretty cynical, grubby, sad thing to do.

  7. Eric, I remember his Watchmen complaint as being one of the earliest Moore had about DC. He didn’t foresee the impact of the trade paperback on his contract. These characters weren’t (like Wonder Woman) going to be used in other books, and reprint collections weren’t all the rage at the time that they are now.

    From The New York Times:

    The novelist Jonathan Lethem admitted in a telephone interview to “an instinctive, protective scorn” of any effort to revisit Watchmen.

    “That story was absolutely consummate and an enunciation as complete as any artwork in any realm,” he said. “And it’s just inviting a disgrace, basically, to try to extend any aspect of it.”

    Yet, Mr. Lethem added, the referential nature of the original Watchmen — which was inspired by earlier superhero characters and drew upon a grab bag of influences, including the Bible, the sonnets of Shelley and “The Threepenny Opera” to tell its story — begged for the graphic novel to be reinterpreted.

    “In the greater scheme of things,” he said, “there’s an ecological law, almost, that it ought to be.”

  8. You know, I bet Marston would be at least a little pissed at the way DC has kept the character in print more or less just to hold onto it so that his heirs don’t get the dough. Even if not…it seems like a shitty thing to do. The fact that DC does this on a regular basis (or at least more than once) makes it worse, to my mind, not better.

  9. Eric B, you may be right. And I know you’ve been doing a lot of reading on the topic, but how do you parse the Alan Moore statement from 1986 that’s been going around on the ownership? It almost looks like Moore is engaging in double speak?
    ——
    From the audience: Do you actually own Watchmen?

    Alan Moore: My understanding is that when Watchmen is finished and DC have not used the characters for a year, they’re ours.

    Dave Gibbons: They pay us a substantial amount of money…

    Moore: … to retain the rights. So basically they’re not ours, but if DC is working with the characters in our interests then they might as well be. On the other hand, if the characters have outlived their natural life span and DC doesn’t want to do anything with them, then after a year we’ve got them and we can do what we want with them, which I’m perfectly happy with.

    Gibbons: What would be horrendous, and DC could legally do it, would be to have Rorschach crossing over with Batman or something like that, but I’ve got enough faith in them that I don’t think they’d do that. I think because of the unique team they couldn’t get anybody else to take it over to do Watchmen II or anything else like that, and we’ve certainly got no plans to do Watchmen II.
    Watchmen panel, moderated by Neil Gaiman, at London’s UK Comic Art Convention, September 21, 1986 (as printed in The Comics Journal #116, July, 1987)
    —-
    Moore definitely wasn’t pissed about a Watchmen movie initially he wrote in his twilight of the superhero pitch:

    “Ideally, it might even be possible, while appealing to the diehard superhero junkie, to produce a central story idea simple, powerful and resonant enough to bear translation to other media. I mean, I know that I’m probably still intoxicated by the Watchmen deal, but it never hurts to allow for these things as a possibility, does it? ”

    So obviously his views over the years have changed.

  10. Yeah, I wonder if Gibbons or Lloyd’s acquiescence doesn’t have something to do with finances. Watchmen and V are a bigger part of their income than they are for Moore. Maybe they feel they can’t just cut DC off.

  11. I was just thinking about what the reaction would be if J.K. Rowling’s publisher said, you know, we’re going to have Stephanie Meyer write a Harry Potter prequel, even though Rowling herself is incredibly pissed at us and hates the idea. Would you have tons of fans defending the decision?

    Obviously Rowling’s contract doesn’t allow anyone to do that. But still — that’s the point, isn’t it?

  12. One notion I disagree with is that Moore’s use of others’ characters is fundamentally different than these prequels. He takes the characters, tries to remain true to the original creators’ constraints, while putting them into a common world. How is that not a sequel? Given that Moore buys into a sort of Platonic Idea-world where all creations co-exist, I’d say he’s logically committed to there being no real distinction between DC’s Watchmen prequels and what he’s doing with LOEG and other books. Hell, Watchmen began as a sequel to end all sequels.

  13. Noah, there’s that, but there’s also something like King hating what Kubrick did to The Shining. Should King’s fans reject the latter’s interpretation just because of King’s opinion? Of course, King doesn’t claim to being ripped off, but what if Kubrick had wanted to do a prequel? Would we being doing something bad by seeing it?

  14. I don’t think incorporating concepts like “explicit buttsex” is exactly being true to the original creators’ constraints. I stand by my Charlie Parker/Embraceable You example:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqQfX4j6Mi0

    Parker has created an essentially new thing that no one would mistake for, or even recognize as, Embraceable You. I’d argue that Moore’s pomo patchwork quilts are no more sequels to their source materials than Parker’s realization is a strightforward cover of a familiar song.

  15. I read somewhere an interview with King in which he said, regarding the movie adaptations of his books (including Shining) that he felt he’d been “treated fairly.” (Wish I had a source to cite, but the phrase “treated fairly” stuck with me.) Which is different from “The movies were really good,” but it seems Moore’s complaint has less to do with the aesthetics of whatever comics result from this thing (and given the caliber of talent involved, I expect they’ll be solid enough to please most people who would actually buy them) than with his belief that he has not been treated fairly.

  16. Well, Aaron, I’ll grant you that the Watchmen prequels are more “straightforward” than Alice liking buttsex, but does “straightforwardness” entail a difference in kind here? Is Dark Knight Returns not a sequel of sorts? Isn’t this more a matter of how plausible you find Moore’s continuation?

  17. And King got to go make his own Shining miniseries. And if he chose he could write, or authorize someone to write, Shining 2. Moore can’t do the same with Watchmen.

  18. I wasn’t saying it was a moral/ethical thing to do, Noah. I was saying, I doubt Moore and Gibbons were unaware that this was a likely possibility. That is, it was a fairly standard notion that DC kept successful things in print so that they could continue to profit by it. And, in all likelihood, Moore would have wanted it to “remain in print” for a long time, because that would mean it was successful, popular, etc. If it “failed”–the rights would have reverted back to him, but was he likely to do much with a failure?

    Both Gibbons and Moore were also happy with how they were being treated by DC and trusted them not to do Watchmen sequels/prequels without their involvement. Both expressed a willingness, at the time, to do a prequel with the Minutemen. Once Moore was unhappy with how he was being treated in other ways, he began to see his original deal as unfair…but I don’t think this was a result of his not being aware of how the original deal worked.

    Basically, the original deal was of the kind… “Well, if this thing fails and nobody’s interested, you can have it back. If it’s a success, we’ll keep it in print, and we’ll all continue to profit.”

    I actually think that Moore ended up more pissed off about the relatively small percentage of sales he was earning than about the lack of intellectual property ownership. He came to realize that what made Watchmen popular and profitable was all in the Moore/Gibbons combo…and why should they get such a small cut given that fact?

    Anyway… my only quibble is with the notion that Moore was deceived/hoodwinked….not that he was exploited, which he clearly was.
    The bigger question would be, what were his other options if not DC? He had already broken with Marvel, and the notion that Watchmen would have been as successful if published by some smaller publisher (First? Eclipse?) is silly. In order to reach a wide audience, he had to deal with DC (and he was eager to at the time)…and to deal with DC, he pretty much had to sign one of their usual contracts…which were exploitative. It isn’t like he had a ton of options (his deals in England were either more exploitative or making him no money).

    I think Moore signed the exploitative deal with eyes, more or less, wide open…and as long as DC was dealing with him honestly and in collaboration in other ways, he was fine with that. When various other shady things happened, Moore wished he had never made the original deal. This is certainly a reasonable wish…but it doesn’t mean that he didn’t know the original deal.

    “So basically they’re not ours, but if DC is working with the characters in our interests then they might as well be.”

    To me, this quote supports what I’m saying. The only question is “how long” did Moore expect the “natural life” of the characters to be…and, of course, we don’t know the answer…but I think he certainly did not expect DC to let the thing go immediately out of print if it was successful… and, of course, he wanted it to be successful (and, I would argue, expected it to be–though not to the nth degree to which it was).

  19. I think if the studio wanted to do a “Shining II”, and King publicly said, “this is an atrocity, cut it out”, and they went ahead anyway, I think that would be a similar situation to this, yeah. And I suspect you’d also have people saying, in that situation, that the studio was behaving poorly.

    I think the fact that King is saying, “I don’t like this,” rather than, “These people are ripping me off against my will,” is a pretty important distinction.

  20. I agree with your last comment, Aaron, but I was addressing Noah’s hypothetical. Maybe to add to it: if you substitute Delaney for Meyer, then I’m not so sure some of us would care whether Rowling was pissed off or not. That could be interesting.

  21. I think Dark Knight is more an iteration than a sequel to a distinct work. And I think the patchwork quilt nature of Lost Girls and LXG makes them different from a sequel, in the same sense that a hip-hop composition repurposing and recontextualizing dozens, hundreds of samples from various recordings is different from one that loops a single sample and raps over it. Or a cover song.

    I’m crazy ’bout music analogies today!

  22. Charles, Delany does make it interesting, but then it might depend on whether he appropriated Harry Potter as one patch in a quilt that wasn’t simply about Rowling’s work, or if he did a Scarlett-style straight-up sequel.

    I’ve got an unread book on my shelve called Lo’s Diary, an unauthorized sequel to Lolita, which, as part of a legal agreement that allowed the book to be published, includes an irritable forward by Nabokov’s son that may be of interest on this subject… I’ll take a look later.

  23. Well, some hip hop completely manipulates and recontextualizes the sources to such a degree that they’re in no way “covers,” but others (like P Diddy’s use of “Kashmir”) that are arguably “sequels.” The more you remain true to, say, the source’s melody, the more you’re in the “cover/sequel” territory. Do you find Dark Knight less a creative act than Watchmen?

  24. Charles, the Watchmen contract was an early complaint…but it followed the exploitation with the smiley-face buttons…which, to me, is where this thing begins…With DC not living up to the original contract (where Gibbons and Moore were supposed to get money (and maybe the right to approve?) out of any Watchmen merchandise). Once DC was f’ing about with the technicalities of the contract in order to squeeze every last dime out of Watchmen (and deny some of those agreed-upon proceeds to its creators), Moore found himself wanting nothing to do with them…yet his work was still owned by them. This stuck in his craw, certainly—and led him to make more out of the Watchmen contract than there really was (that’s my reading of things, anyway)–or, if you prefer, made him realize just how problematic the original contract was. At that time, he would have wanted to pull Watchmen from DC, but he couldn’t. He certainly never expected the Watchmen characters to be back in his lap by 1988-89…when he left DC….but he was already complaining about it by that point.

    The other issue at the time was the “warning labels” or “ratings system” that the majors were trying to introduce into comics at the time. Moore was also opposed to that…

  25. Noah, potential aesthetic value has something to do with all of this. People feel Moore’s appropriations contribute something of value to the world, irrespective of the original creators’ wishes, whereas not even DC fanboys would likely predict that others working on Moore’s ideas will come anywhere close to adding anything of value to what he’s already done.

  26. Songs aren’t such a great analogy. There’s a standard fee for covers, and everyone who writes songs knows that. A performance isn’t a sequel; it’s a performance. I doubt Moore would object to Darwyn Cooke doing a dramatic reading of Watchmen.

    It’s hard to imagine Delany doing something that would be sequel or a prequel. A pastiche, maybe. But if you’re arguing that Darwyn Cooke is more like Delany than like Stephenie Meyer, I guess we’ll just have to disagree. (And I don’t even like Delany that much.)

  27. Moore himself used Voldemort for LoEG: Century 1969. So, he’s certainly not restricting himself to public domain characters…or characters of dead authors. I doubt the Harry Potter crowd is buying LoEG because of Voldemort’s participation, but certainly it could be argued that Moore/O’Neill are profiting by making “prequels” with others’ characters (Voldy’s appearance predates the Harry Potter books). The only distinction to be made at that point is one of aesthetic interest and/or “sequels” vs. “pomo jazzing around.”

    I think both of those are valid distinctions, btw…but I’m not buying the “living vs. dead” arguments unless folks are willing to say, DC is wrong and exploitative to do this” AND “Moore is wrong and exploitative to use Voldemort and other copyrighted characters.” At least that has the virtue of consistency.

    Anyway…I’m sure Before Watchmen will suck…and I have no interest in reading it…and I think DC should not have done it…

    Likewise, it would have been great if DC had let Wonder Woman go out of print and sent the creative licensing and copyright back to Marston, etc.,…

    but I actually feel like Marston was screwed/hoodwinked more than Moore …because the gangsterish practices weren’t already well established and well known by then. Marston didn’t know what he was getting himself into in quite the same way.

    The whole thing sucks…and if DC had any aesthetic or moral sense they wouldn’t do it. The only thing operating here, however, is the profit motive, which shouldn’t be surprising given the history of comics, and the corporate ownership of DC. Nevertheless, if I could erase knowledge of Before Watchmen from my brain, I would do it.

  28. Weeeell… it seems Alan Moore could have made lots of money of the movies of his work, and he refused it. So I don’t know to what extent it’s about money for him.

  29. Marston’s weird; while he was alive he had tons of creative control, and I think was pretty happy with his relationship with DC all around. Which doesn’t mean he wasn’t screwed though.

    What’s weird in part is that DC didn’t do it for soooo long. Were they waiting for the movie, because they hoped to keep Moore and Gibbons onboard for promotion? Is it just a more cynical group of higher ups in control at the moment? Or what?

  30. Sampling like P. Diddy does with Kashmir is not the same as a cover, either. Nor is it really sampling…since “sampling” implies a small amount of something. Basically, he plays the original song (same with his use of Every Breath You Take), which sounds exactly the same as the original…and crappily raps over it. It’s not a different performance of the same song…It’s playing the same song on a stereo while rapping over it. It’s not a bad metaphor for the DC game plan with Before Watchmen…

    But I don’t know what Sting or Jimmy Page had to say about the appropriation. I do remember Sting participating in a live performance…so obviously he wasn’t “against it” in the same way Alan Moore is against Before Watchmen.

  31. Also, with Marston/Peter, the worst has actually kind of happened. Their original work is largely erased, both commercially and critically; Wonder Woman is completely a creature of the corporation in most every way that matters. That probably won’t happen to Watchmen…but the fact that it’s the baseline business model for the industry is thoroughly repellant.

  32. ” btw…but I’m not buying the “living vs. dead” arguments unless folks are willing to say, DC is wrong and exploitative to do this” AND “Moore is wrong and exploitative to use Voldemort and other copyrighted characters.” At least that has the virtue of consistency.”

    It’s worth pointing out that the modern day references in League are very vague, (i.e. Voldemort is not mentioned by name) almost certainly to allow a fair use defense under copyright law. It’s arguably not the same thing as explicitly using the characters like they are doing in Watchmen prequels. Certainly, there would appear to be a legal distinction.

    (Interestingly Neil Gaiman was interviewed about his unauthorized Narnia sequal and said “Some of it was trying to figure out how to craft the story so that C.S. Lewis’ estate lawyer would say “I probably couldn’t get an injunction against this. This is borderline, but you could probably get away with it.” And I think that I probably did. I hope”

    The Watchmen prequels will of course, very explicitly use the Watchmen characters.

    Now that said there is something inconsistent about the notion that stories exist in some platonic ideal world, like Charles alluded to, and the notion of copyright law, which which assumes stories are man made and author or company controlled has have no existence outside the ownership interests of their creators.

  33. I agree that it is not currently about money for Moore…but I do think that there was a point in his life that being ripped off of the money was important… Even if the money itself wasn’t the main thing, he didn’t like the idea of being ripped off of money that was rightfully his (in the smiley-face pin incident)… Or of getting a tiny percentage of the profits on something where the work was (more or less) 50% his creation.

    I wasn’t trying to give the impression that Moore just wants more cash. This is definitely not the case…but perhaps DC’s penny pinching way back when made him realize how it IS all about the money for DC, and whatever illusions he may have had about their “partnership” dissipated.

  34. Obviously, Moore is “careful” not to name Voldemort (though clear allusions are made to Tom Riddle)… It’s equally clear that it IS Voldemort…and some of the pleasure in reading the book is coming to the realization that it is ol’ Voldy. The whole thing doesn’t “work” or “make sense” if it isn’t Voldemort.

    But this is just legal hairsplitting. DC has the right to name and use the Watchmen characters by those names…so they do. Moore doesn’t have the legal right, so he doesn’t.

    Nobody is challenging DC’s legal right to do this…It’s a question of morality/ethics, etc.

    That distinction only makes sense if we agree that Moore and DC are being unethical in their use of others’ characters….or if we see the distinction as differing aesthetic values. I do see the latter distinction, myself, but it’s not based on “living authors vs. dead authors”

  35. “The whole thing doesn’t “work” or “make sense” if it isn’t Voldemort.”

    Thus my confusion at LOEG 1969. I didn’t catch that reference at all.

  36. I don’t know that fair use is just a legal technicality, it would appear to be an ethically useful concept for society. I mean maybe we’re talking about the same thing and you are just calling it aesthetics instead of fair use?

    “The whole thing doesn’t “work” or “make sense” if it isn’t Voldemort. ”

    But it kind of isn’t Voldemort, because Moore changed the milieu, the character’s back story, and the character’s motivations. I guess its a philosophical question how much of a character you need to change before it isn’t the same character anymore.

  37. “I didn’t catch that reference at all.”

    I didn’t catch it either until I read the annotations, and I’m like, that’s neat, but he was just a random hippy if you don’t “decode” the riddles. He’s Voldemort if you engage in the extratextual jeopardy. It doesn’t seem like Moore is really “using” the character very much at any rate.

  38. In terms of why it took so long (I agree this is weird).

    Internet buzz suggests it was Paul Levitz who was blocking earlier attempts to reuse Watchmen…and when Levitz was replaced by Dan Didio at the top of the food chain…it opened the door for Before Watchmen. I also read somewhere that Levitz may have stepped down over the issue (or that he was forced out over it). If this is true, Levitz deserves some respect for having some kind of moral compass.

    I also think recent shifts in DC organization (DC Entertainment) and closer ties to the Time-Warner megacorp. have put additional pressure on attempting to monetize the comics division. That is, someone up above is paying attention to the possibility that DC has been leaving money on the table…and is pushing them toward not doing so in the future. That is…somebody noticed that this property had been lying dormant for years…and the spike in sales that ensued after the movie certainly drew attention to the property even more. Again…all of this is linked to the reorganization that pushed Levitz out and ushered Lee/Didio in.

    Also…the early 2000’s had Moore working for DC again, at least indirectly. As long as he was generating money and more characters for the company, DC probably had to tiptoe a bit around the reuse of these properties. In fact, my guess is that there was one line of thinking which suggested that DC should continue to “be nice” to Moore by not using Watchmen…by publicly insisting on his genius, etc…in the hopes he would one day return to the fold and more money could be made on his back. After the debacle of the V for Vendetta movie..the LoEG movie, the Watchmen movie, etc….it became obvious that he was never going to come back…and there were no more bridges left to burn.

  39. Obviously I disagree about Voldemort. Yes…one could miss it…On the other hand, he’s one of the most prominent and well known characters in modern fiction. It’s clearly designed that we “get it”—And, in fact, the whole LoEG in recent years assumes you’ll be playing extratextual jeopardy.

  40. Jimmy Page was on board with Puffy’s use of Kasimir. There had been a hip-hop sampling of Kasimir a few years earlier (Schooly-D, I think), that Zeppelin had legally smacked down. (It had been featured in “Bad Lieutenant,” and when the movie came out on –ahem- Laserdisc, the song was replaced; there was a disclaimer about how the substitution was for legal reasons and how the new song was chosen & supervised by Abel Ferrarra… basically justifying the “Director Approved” tag for an altered edition.)

    Diddy knew a good thing when he heard it and got Page’s permission to do his own. Page, liking money, agreed to it. I want to say that I’ve seen a TV performance where Page was actually playing it live with Diddy, but I was drinking at the time.

    W/R/T Wonder Woman and the Marston estate: Kurt Busiek mentioned in a comment thread somewhere a few years ago (The Beat, I think) that DC had recently paid off the Marstons and bought them out of their reversion clause. That caught my attention, because I hadn’t seen it reported anywhere else (not that DC would be eager to publicly announce something like that), but Busiek seemed to know what he was talking about. (Busiek had, years earlier, been involved in that Trina Robbins WW book that came out in the gap year before the George Perez relaunch, and was published in order to hold onto the rights, so he had first hand experience with those legal requirements.) I don’t know exactly how much the Marstons would have been paid for something like that, or if the deal was initiated by either DC or the Marstons…

  41. In the early 2000s (during the Wildstorm / ABC era) DC solicited a series of Watchmen action figures, and cancelled them outright when Moore objected. (One of the more obnoxious internet comments that keeps resurfacing whenever Moore vs. DC comes up online is “Good, now I can finally get my action figures.” I have no doubt they’re coming…)

    Levitz is generally credited with looking out for creators getting their due from other media, Len Wein and Denny O’Neil for their Batman characters appearing in the Nolan films for example.

    However, I remember one interview where Moore said that “a highly placed DC executive” framed their protection of Moore’s and Gibbons’ agreement as a passive-aggressive threat: “we’ll respect your rights as long as you have a good working relationship with us” (or words to that effect). This was one of the last straws for Moore. I always kind of assumed this was Levitz (though it may well not have been…) So any respect for Watchmen may well have been more out of desire to keep that working relationship going (as Eric notes), than “the system working.” (Wein and O’Neil were DC-lifers.)

  42. Also: Steve Bissette noted in his mid 90s TCJ interview that Neil Gaiman’s sweetheart deal with DC happened in large part because Moore walking from DC was a fiasco for them, and that they were under pressure to not let that happen again. But this was an earlier DC administration…

  43. “sweetheart deal with DC ”

    What sweetheart deal? Pretty sure Gaiman doesn’t own Sandman… He didn’t do the Sandman issue zero thing because they wouldn’t renegotiate his contract. I also recall he was unhappy with editorial interference on the Sandman short story prose collection.

  44. But Watchmen action figures do exist now…linked to the movie…right? I’m sure I’ve seen them.

  45. Well… no one seems to know the details of Gaiman’s deal with DC. So, sure, it could all be rumor / bullshit. But he’s been reported to have had a generous profit sharing percentage in Sandman. (I’ve even seen the phrase “partial ownership” thrown about in the past, but I take that with a bag of salt, since the books clearly say “Copyright DC comics.”) And I’m pretty sure he’s been involved in a minimal quality-control fashion in the various spinoffs (though I’m sure he has no power to put an end to them altogether.) All in all, it’s probably another case of “we’ll keep you happy as long as you keep us happy”, but he’s seemed pretty happy overall. (I had not heard of the issue 0 or the short story collection problems, so it shows what I know.)

    I (mercifully) blocked the movie-action figures out of my memory; I was referring to some comic-design ones from the early 00s… they were going to be for the 15th anniversary or something like that. Certainly that ship had long sailed by the movie…

  46. I agree with Eric that Moore’s objections to the continuing publication of the Watchmen book collection are of fairly recent vintage and most likely revisionist.

    Marvel and DC have always reprinted popular material. In the mid-1980s, both companies were actively reprinting a lot of fan-favorite work in upscale serial editions for the comics-shop market. Marvel started their TPB-collection program in 1984 with The Dark Phoenix Saga, which has been in print ever since. Moore must have been blind if he didn’t realize that DC keeping the material in print was always a possibility when the Watchmen contract was negotiated in 1985. He had to know they would do so as long as they felt there was money to be made.

    Moore had no apparent problems with DC’s TPB program when they started it in 1986. He contributed an introduction to Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, which was the first book in the TPB line. He also contributed an introduction to the first collection of his Swamp Thing material, which was released a year later in tandem with the Watchmen book. He travelled to the U.S. in late 1987 to do media interviews in support of the TPB release of Watchmen. When Gary Groth interviewed him in 1990, he talked about his problems with DC at length, and the issue of the book collections never came up. He didn’t start complaining about them until after the blow-up over the V for Vendetta film, specifically the producer’s claims that he was enthusiastic about it.

    Chris, Bissette is speculating about the reasons Gaiman was able to negotiate a new deal on Sandman in late ’89/early ’90. He doesn’t know DC’s motives, and his belief that there was pressure from Warners because of Moore is wishful thinking and highly doubtful.

  47. My recollection of the revised Sandman deal is that DC acknowledged that it was a new creation, which allowed Gaiman greater participation financially. Originally, they treated it as a reworking of an existing property.

  48. Chris, it’s likely a false rumor that Gaiman had a better deal than Moore, as far as I can tell. Remember there were Sandman movie treatment Gaiman hated and wasn’t involved in also, they just haven’t been made (yet).

    Sandman was just another DC universe book when it launched, remember, it features the JLA and Constantine. Gaiman wasn’t a name back then. A lot of people seem to have a niave idea of what the deal is with the Vertigo books, I think the contracts really have varied over the years for Vertigo.

    Here’s a reference, Gaiman’s own words:

    “I was honestly disappointed and really upset that I didn’t get to do Sandman’s 20th anniversary thing. What I wanted to do was this thing called “Sandman Zero”—essentially the prequel, the story that occurs before “Sandman” no. 1. We know he was captured because he’d been in a distant galaxy and came back exhausted. No one knows, except me, what exhausted him, what actually happened. I wound up essentially with DC Comics going, we will absolutely do it, if you’ll do it for the same royalty that I was getting for “Sandman” in 1988 as a 27-year-old. And I don’t want to do it on those terms anymore. I would feel like I was being screwed. I did “Endless Nights” for $25,000 and a 4 percent and it went on to the New York Times best-seller list. If I do “Sandman Zero,” you’re going to get a best-selling comic out of it, you end up with a best-selling graphic novel, you also get all the Sandman books that have come out, getting a huge amount of attention, you’ll sell a lot more and that’s great. You really think I should do this for the same terms as I signed up for at the beginning? I don’t think so. In a world where I get millions of dollars for writing novels, if I’ve got the energy, I’ll put it into a novel. I wound up basically doing the Batman thing as sort of a little farewell at the time. I said to myself, OK, this is my last DC Comics thing—it’ll be fun.

    “http://lifestyle.inquirer.net/super/super/view/20100320-259737/The_Dream_King_is_back-and_happily_so

  49. Robert, that makes sense, it if meant Gaiman got a 4 percent royalty instead of no royalty at all, or more royalties on the floppy sales?

    Apparently Moore gets royalties from Watchmen so one would assume he has the same deal as Gaiman, essentially, though Moore’s contract might be slightly more progressive, ironically, since it has the out of print clause.

  50. Let me add that I believe that there is a legitimate grievance to be had over DC’s negotiating of the Watchmen contract. It’s just not what Moore seems to think it is.

    From what I know of how DC operated at the time, I believe DC engaged in bad faith to acquire ownership of Watchmen. They were telling creators that the copyright law prohibited the creator from assigning subsidiary rights–e.g. foreign editions, movie licensing–to the publisher with a project that a creator retained copyright on. And since DC didn’t think a project without the potential for subsidiary income was worth pursuing, they couldn’t publish it unless they were granted ownership. It’s complete garbage. Authors assign subsidiary rights to publishers almost as a matter of course, and they don’t have to give up their copyrights to do it.

    Moore and Gibbons were in all likelihood deceived into giving up ownership. And DC’s copyright ownership is what the company most likely believes gives them the right to publish Before Watchmen without Moore and Gibbons’ joint permission. If one is going to criticize DC, focus attention on DC’s arguments for acquiring copyright ownership back then. That’s where criticism is most deserved.

  51. I bet the Commedian action figure has extra points of articulation…

    Funny business aside, this is a completely ridiculous argument, Jones, as has been fortunately stated rather eloquently by the first few commenters. But–really? Taking public domain characters and repurposing and recontextualizing them is the same as a cash-grab clone prequel of a work by a living author who has been contractually out-maneuvered? That’s a shameful, and nonsensical, argument.

  52. Also, apparantly I need to read article titles before I comment on them, as this particular one now suggests to me your tongue might be at least partially in cheek?

    Anyway, this is still ridiculous.

  53. “It’s complete garbage. Authors assign subsidiary rights to publishers almost as a matter of course, and they don’t have to give up their copyrights to do it.”

    Robert,

    A quick internet search suggests that this wasn’t nonsense up until 1978. The doctrine of “indivisibility” made this an issue before the 1976 copyright act went into effect. It would create legal issues if the copyright wasn’t assigned: http://library.findlaw.com/1997/Jul/1/126175.html

    DC’s actions certainly could have been in bad faith, its also possible that DC’s lawyers are, shall we say, overaggressive and not answerable to the creative parts of the company. Or maybe just their lawyers acted in bad faith.

    More recently, DC’s reportedly refused to allow artists to write and draw a comic unless the artist was incorporated, due to a wacky copyright theory that Marvel and other companies don’t follow. This is just bureaucracy in action as far as I can tell:
    http://comicsworthreading.com/2007/06/27/dc-avoids-writerartists/

  54. That said I’m not well read on the doctrine of indivisibility, and of course Watchmen came out well after that issue no longer existed.

  55. Here are selections from what Dick Giordano told Gary Groth in a 1987 interview, published in TCJ #119:

    The copyright law says, there can only be one owner and you can’t negotiate your rights away. Either the creator owns the property, or the publisher does. There’s no other possible way. You can’t split it.

    […]

    If somebody changed the law, we’d be glad to deal with the people who want to deal with us on whatever level here. You have the comic book rights, I keep the movie rights and the foreign sales, that’s fine.

    […]

    You now contractually can’t give pieces of the copyright. You can negotiate, and we do regularly. O. K., DC owns the rights, but you will get 50% of movies, 30% of licensing, 75%, whatever the numbers are, we negotiate the money, but not the rights.

    […]

    There’s no motivation for me to risk the money that it takes to publish and promote and distribute a magazine for the amount of profit that’s involved. However, if you sell me the rights to that property I can then go out and sell some of the rights overseas. If you own it however, I have to negotiate every additional potential sale or use of that material with you separately. If I negotiate for France, publisher A, and then publisher B comes in and asks me for the same thing, also in France, I have to negotiate all over again.

    […]

    Now, it’s not really a good law at all. I mean, it doesn’t help anybody, it doesn’t help the creator, it doesn’t help the publisher. Believe me, we’re not in favor of that law, we’d love the law to be changed so that we could negotiate each deal separately, based on its own merits, and based on some form of either mutual trust or mutual agreement or something that the creative people and we could work out together. As it is now, we’re prohibited from doing that, so it’s got to be you or me. And it’s me.

    Literary agent Richard McEnroe read this and vigorously disputed it in an article in TCJ #121. Here’s the money quote:

    If Giordano thinks you can’t do business that way, all he has to do is get on the elevator at 666 Fifth Avenue [DC’s then address] and go one floor up to Warner Books, or 15 floors, to Bantam, where they do business in just that way–just as every reputable publisher in the book industry does. [Emphasis in the original.]

  56. The whole Marvelman/Miracleman imbroglio is an example of divisibility. It obviously doesn’t solve all problems… but it’s certainly much fairer than the deal Moore/Gibbons were offered.

  57. Hi everyone. The images are supposed to clarify which of Moore’s works are derivative on which characters, but the post went up with only the last few; sorry about that.

    Anyhoo, my point is just that what is wrong here is not, per se, that others are creating art based on Moore’s characters, or that they’re using those characters in ways Moore doesn’t approve of [but see a-d, below], or even that others are profiting from it…that’s how culture works, and almost every single one of Moore’s major works, and a huge chunk of his minor ones, are based heavily on pre-existing characters, often used in ways that the original creators would absobloodylutely hate. V for Vendetta is the only major work I can think of that isn’t derivative in this way — depending on what you think are Moore’s major works, of course — and, to be fair, Promethea too, even though I put it in the list above.

    What IS wrong with Before Kill Me Now Watchmen is that (a) the characters are not yet in the public domain, and (b) their use in Before Jesus Christ Really? Watchmen obviously won’t be merely “fair use”, whatever on earth that is…and so (c) their creators should be fairly recompensed or else they should have some creative control (including veto?), (d) of which they have neither.

    I also forgot to add the very important point, which others have already raised, that Before All Right You Get It Already Watchmen could reflect badly on Moore’s original work and unjustifiably tarnish his pre- or posthumous reputation, and/or be confused with the real thing. That’s another strike against DC

    And, look, OF COURSE, something like, say, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (which I don’t even like!) or Lost Girls (which I do!) is 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 etc. times better than BW is likely to be. But that strikes me as neither here nor there from a moral perspective.

  58. And, for the record, if we leave aside the reasonable expectation of profiting from and/or controlling one’s creation during one’s lifetime — which, to repeat, is the source of what’s wrong with DC’s decision — then it’s just as possible to harm the interests of a dead creator as a live one. Lewis Carroll is not around to give a shit about Lost Girls; he’s not even up in heaven giving a shit. Nonetheless Lost Girls is bad for Carroll, just as BW would be bad for Moore even if DC had published it a zillion years after Moore’s departure into the Blazing World or whatever. (This is not as crazy a view as it first seems)

    Unless, like, BW is totally AWESOME.

    Actually, I thought J. Caleb Mozzocco was spot on when he wrote how “shockingly unimpressive” the creators are…they should have just given it to Grant Morrison…I see an iconic cover featuring a middle finger (spattered with blood, natch); they’d call it “Fuck You, Dad”

  59. “possible to harm the interests of a dead creator as a live one.”

    No, not unless you believe in Ghosts, or some wacky “The C.S. Lewis of the immateria, who is the idea of C.S. Lewis, is crying!” mysticism nonsense. Only living people can be harmed.

    “see an iconic cover featuring a middle finger (spattered with blood, natch); they’d call it “Fuck You, Dad””

    That would actually make a pretty funny parody comic, “Grant Morrson’s before Watchmen”.

  60. Morrison was supposedly going to revisit Watchmen in one issue of his “Multiversity” miniseries (it wasn’t literally going to be the Watchmen world and characters, but thinly veiled copies). I don’t know if this is still going forward… but I’m pretty sure that “Fuck You Dad” was the working title.

  61. —————————–
    Pallas says:

    [Jones writes:] “possible to harm the interests of a dead creator as a live one.”

    No, not unless you believe in Ghosts, or some wacky “The C.S. Lewis of the immateria, who is the idea of C.S. Lewis, is crying!” mysticism nonsense. Only living people can be harmed.
    ——————————

    Does a person utterly cease to be when their life ends, or don’t aspects of them — memories, an image in the public eye, how history views them — still exist?

    What about when the reputation of a long-dead person is distorted, smeared? Is that of no account?

    ———————————
    Iago:

    Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
    Is the immediate jewel of their souls.
    Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
    ‘Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
    But he that filches from me my good name
    Robs me of that which not enriches him,
    And makes me poor indeed.

    Othello Act 3, scene 3, 155–161
    ——————————-
    http://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes/who-steals-my-purse-steals-trash

    ——————————–
    Jones, one of the Jones boys says:

    …Nonetheless Lost Girls is bad for Carroll, just as BW would be bad for Moore even if DC had published it a zillion years after Moore’s departure into the Blazing World or whatever. (This is not as crazy a view as it first seems)
    ———————————

    Not crazy at all! In the world of business, we see a similar concept:

    ———————————
    Trademark dilution is a trademark law concept giving the owner of a famous trademark standing to forbid others from using that mark in a way that would lessen its uniqueness…

    A trademark is diluted when the use of similar or identical trademarks in other non-competing markets means that the trademark in and of itself will lose its capacity to signify a single source…

    Dilution is sometimes divided into two related concepts: blurring, or essentially basic dilution, which “blurs” a mark from association with only one product to signify other products in other markets (such as “Kodak shoes”); and tarnishment, which is the weakening of a mark through unsavory or unflattering associations…
    ————————————
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_dilution

    When these are combined, as with the Mickey Mouse and the Air Pirates case, the Mickey Mouse character/trademark was not coming from a “single source,” the Disney company, which would be counted on to maintain quality control, inoffensive wholesomeness, in the “product.” And the comic — deftly cartooned though it was — had plenty of “unsavory or unflattering” stuff going on…

    Need we be reminded that Alan Moore’s created plenty of original characters, he’s no mere recycler? Hopefully not. As for his usage of famed public-domain characters, I’m reminded of one reason Hitchcock used famous stars — Cary Grant, James Stewart — as the leads in his movies. Because the audiences, well-acquainted with these stars and their previous bodies of work, would thus be far more emotionally invested in the characters. Those characters enriched by all these previous emotional associations.

    Imagine Lost Girls (which unintentionally proves that Art makes poor porn, indeed) starring a trio of heretofore-unknown women, instead of the famous characters. Would that not thoroughly weaken its effect?

  62. “What about when the reputation of a long-dead person is distorted, smeared? Is that of no account?”

    I don’t think the reputation is effected since most people know that this is not Carrol’s Alice that is being portrayed. But since Moore is still alive, this affects his reputation more since the reader could be mistaken about who authorized this prequel and if he is in any way part of it.

  63. “Does a person utterly cease to be when their life ends, or don’t aspects of them — memories, an image in the public eye, how history views them — still exist?

    What about when the reputation of a long-dead person is distorted, smeared? Is that of no account?”

    Really, Mike?

    I guess you are against folks writing negative criticism about authors, because it might damage their “reputation” in the public eye? Forget the marketplace of ideas, it’s unethical to say mean things about writers or engage in literary dialogue? That’s what you are going for, here?

    What is Lewis Carrol your Pope, and heretics who write unfavorably about him should be burned at the stake?

    “Trademark dilution is a trademark law concept giving the owner of a famous trademark ”

    Corporations aren’t necessarily pro freedom of speech or pro ethics when they lobby for laws.

    At any rate, following the analogy, “Dead” corporations cannot enforce a trademark claim, I’m not sure how this is relevant to “dead” authors, trademark law certainly doesn’t stop people from using the name of dead corporations.

    If coca cola was out of business, the trademark would be abandoned and I could call my comic “Coca Cola Comics” or make my own “Coca Cola” soda.

  64. ——————————
    pallas says:

    I guess you are against folks writing negative criticism about authors, because it might damage their “reputation” in the public eye?
    ——————————-

    No; simply pointing out that your “Only living people can be harmed” argument utterly leaves out the fact that what would be most important for many of these authors (especially since they, silly things, came from an era where what society thought of them was considered important), namely the judgment of posterity, is as prone to injury as living flesh.

    ——————————-
    Forget the marketplace of ideas, it’s unethical to say mean things about writers or engage in literary dialogue? That’s what you are going for, here?
    ——————————-

    Ooo, the “marketplace of ideas”! Where popularity, what “sells”, is the ultimate badge of merit! Let us bow in reverence before the wisdom of the “market”!

    From the Feb. 2012 “Harper’s Index”:

    ——————————-
    Percentage of Americans who believed in anthropogenic global warming in 2001: 75

    Today: 44
    ——————————

    Never mind the fact that, as is the case in any other market, crap products (“Obama in a foreign Muslim,” “Global Warming doesn’t exist,” “Transformers III,” the Kirstie Alley Diet, SUVs) are wildly popular, while worthy stuff languishes and gathers dust.

    ——————————-
    pallas says:

    What is Lewis Carrol your Pope, and heretics who write unfavorably about him should be burned at the stake?
    ——————————–

    Sure; noting that reputations are vulnerable too (which says nothing as to whether or not some reputations deserve to get trampled into the dirt, which many indeed do) equals a hysterical call for anti-Carroll infidels to get “torched.”

  65. Lewis Carroll has actually had a post-death reputation mess that dwarfs anything that Moore or anyone could possibly do to him. This is a guy who most people today think was a repressed pedophile. An opposing camp has argued that he was actually interested in older — that is, grown up — women, and had several affairs. You can read the Wikipedia discussion here.

  66. From Pallas’ link:

    It might be splitting hairs, but I’m not adapting these people, these characters. I’m not doing an adaptation of Dracula or King Solomon’s Mines. What I am doing is I’m stealing them. There is a difference between doing an adaptation, which is evil, and actually stealing characters, which is, as long as everybody is dead or you don’t mention the names, is all right by me…

    Hunh? It seems that Moore is letting past grievances (unwanted film adaptations) cloud his view on these things, which comes out as nonsense. Jones is better equipped than I, but (as I previously alluded to) Moore is pretty much a Meinongian, and when he uses Dracula or some character from Harry Potter, regardless of whether he changes the name, he’s referring to that same character. In fact, Moore is pretty unrepentant in believing that fictional characters exist, which can be inferred here from his ability to steal them. Now, if Moore is correct, then his further adventures with these characters is actually affecting those characters and their history (irrespective of the wishes of the original creators). How could that be dismissed as perfectly okay, but adapting characters in which a new fictional entity is (at least, potentially) created? For example, Spider-Man 2099 would be an adaptation, not stealing according to Moore. Another example would be the female Starbuck from the new Battlestar Galactica. The adventures of these characters aren’t a continuation of the originals’. It gets fishier, I suppose, with film adaptations of From Hell or V, but the reason it does is because they’re closer to being examples of Moore’s stealing. It seems to me that, granting Moore’s (multi-)world view, he should be more worried about his use of others characters than merely adapting such characters to create new entities. Not that he’s being immoral, just that there is a greater possibility of harm in what he does.

    Anyway, wouldn’t the Watchmen prequels be a pretty clear cut case of stealing? (I’m ignoring Moore’s gentleman agreement, where you shouldn’t use characters when the creator expresses disapproval.)

  67. His discussion in the video doesn’t really make logical sense. But, really, his objections aren’t rooted in logic. He felt wronged and betrayed by DC (and rightfully so, in a number of instances), and his response to Before Watchmen (and various other DC activities) is based in those feelings.

  68. Yeah, Eric, but a 100 years from now, when Before Watchmen is recognized as an outstanding achievement, expanding upon what Moore laid down, the personal grievances will be viewed as irrelevant to the creation of great art.

  69. ‘Moore is pretty unrepentant in believing that fictional characters exist, which can be inferred here from his ability to steal them. ”

    No I think “steal” is just a common term used by some folks to describing swiping and the like. Moore isn’t referencing his mystical beliefs here.

    As depicted in Promethea authors don’t create the characters they just look into the immateria and discover them. Some are just better at looking at the fictional world than others.

    This would seem to deny the actual role that authors play with stories, and would seem to be a stance that should be anti- copyright, or at least anti character copyright. It would be like only DC Comics being allowed to write about the civil war or Abraham Lincoln, it doesn’t make sense.

    In fairness to Moore I’m sure he knows his beliefs are irrational, there’s an interview where he talks about creativity from a logical standpoint, as an author adjusting, basically, variables in an equation, so he can look at it logically as well as mystically.

  70. Ha. I never thought of Moore being a Meinongian. Nice one, Charles…although I’m hardly better equipped than you. I always fucking hated metaphysics; commit it to the flames.

    Anyway, Pallas, I agree that it sounds kind of crazy to think that the dead can be harmed. They’re dead!

    But, briefly, here’s the considerations that made me think so: people have desires, and the world is better or worse for them depending on whether those desires are fulfilled. And this is true, *whether or not they know the desires are fulfilled*.

    For instance, I want my friends to like me. I don’t just want myself to *think* they like me; I want the real thing. A world where my friends genuinely like me is better (for me) than a world which seems exactly the same to me, until the day I die, but where they secretly hate me and laugh at my every move.

    In slightly more technical terms, this means that “utility” is not based on mental states alone, as the classic “hedonic” utilitarians believed. Instead, utility is constituted by having your desires satisfied (among which the desire for pleasure is only one). Desires reach into the world, and pleasure or pain are merely signs of success or failure. The philosopher who thinks that all that matters is pleasure or pain is like the general who doesn’t care whether his army wins the battle, so long as he only ever gets reports that they did.

    Now, if you think that the world can go better or worse for you depending on how things are, even if you never know, then you think (e.g.) that the world can go better if certain things are happening, outside your knowledge, halfway across the planet. Or halfway across the universe. (Maybe I really, really want there to be life on other planets, even if we never meet the little green men and women). And if you think that, then there’s no reason to deny that the world can go better or worse for you long after your death, or long before you were born. There’s nothing magical about the present.

    Now, does all this mean that the interests of long-dead creators should outweigh the interests of the living? Not at all! There are plenty of reasons why it might be good to pervert somebody else’s creations. But it does mean that, speaking of perverts, Moore’s Lost Girls makes things worse for Carroll, just as (to repeat myself) DC would make things worse for Moore even had they published BW only long after his death.

    In conclusion, yes, Carroll is my Pope, and all heretics should be punished unto death. I wouldn’t burn them, however; I’d make them read Before Watchmen over and over and over…

  71. Disney became an empire in large part because they rehashed old public domain fairy tales in new, creative ways.

    Ditto for Moore, albeit he cast a much wider literary and comic book character net.

    Ironically, Disney is at the forefront of efforts to emasculate and/or eliminate the public domain portion of the copyright laws.

    Ditto the irony that Moore appears to be upset DC is repackaging his repackaged public domain characters.

  72. —————————
    R. Maheras says:

    Disney became an empire in large part because they rehashed old public domain fairy tales in new, creative ways.

    Ironically, Disney is at the forefront of efforts to emasculate and/or eliminate the public domain portion of the copyright laws.
    —————————-

    Re public domain stuff, what I get is that Disney is motivated to extend their ownership/control over the Disney version of those tales, ad infinitum.

    In other words, people remain perfectly free to create their own “take” on the original stories of Pinocchio, the Little Mermaid, etc.

    Disney certainly would want to retain the ability to pick other public domain tales — say, myths from India, or the adventures of the Hero Twins ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Hero_Twins ) — for “Disneyfication”; so it’s not, I’d imagine, that they want everything that is currently public domain to be locked up in copyright.

    (Correct me if I’m wrong here…)

    —————————-
    Ditto the irony that Moore appears to be upset DC is repackaging his repackaged public domain characters.
    —————————-

    Which are you referring to? His (and Kev O’Neill’s) LOEG comics indeed used public domain characters, but Watchmen, the impetus for this article/thread, did not. (As we all likely know, that book originally was to use Charlton characters that DC had acquired, and instead employed new, even if “inspired by,” ones.)

    And “repackaging” — meaning just putting the exact same product in a new wrapper — hardly does justice to what Moore/O’Neill did in LOEG…

  73. Mike — Some of Moore’s most celebrated work has been the repackaging of other people’s creations. And while I misspoke regarding the use of the term “public domain,” the core of the point I was trying to make is no less accurate.

    That doesn’t mean Moore’s work wasn’t interesting and innovative, or that I didn’t enjoy it. All I’m saying is that it appears that a master repackager is upset that his repackaged characters — characters created by other people — are being repackaged yet again.

    To which I respond: Dial 1-800-Boohoohoo

    If anything, Moore should be grateful he had the means and opportunity to repackage other people’s creations in the first place, and that the opportunity not only made him famous, but it has provided him with steady work and a comfortable living.

  74. Well, the Watchmen characters aren’t really repackagings…They have some connection to the Charlton characters, of course…but these are not 1:1 correspondences (different names, personalities, clothes, backstories, characterization, etc.). Others of Moore’s characters are repackagings, but not these specific ones (at least not to my mind).

    Disney wants to stop Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, et. al. from becoming public domain… That seems to me to be the primary concern—but Disney renderings of fairy tales are also fiercely protected even if other versions are, of course, available to others.

  75. Russ, the issue isn’t repackaging along. The issue is that a company which has repeatedly screwed Moore over now owns the rights to the characters he (and Dave Gibbons) created, and that said company is now the sole arbiter of what gets done with them or what does not.

    Moore has numerous legitimate grievances against DC, which has in general treated its creative talent in a crappy manner for much of its history. The contract he signed with them, where his and Gibbons’creations were owned by the company, is a fucking embarrassment, and would not be tolerated in any other reputable portion of the entertainment industry. That it is tolerated in comics, and even defended by fans, is deeply depressing.

  76. We don’t know. My guess is that even if the original contract stipulated that both men would be compensated, Moore will turn down his share (as he’s done with movie profits). Likewise, my guess is that even if the original contract did not stipulate money for both men, Gibbons will get a slice of the pie, securing bland “approval” from his pen/lips (as we’ve seen in recent days). In either case, my guess is that Gibbons will get money, and Moore won’t… but that’s just a guess based on previous behavior and attitudes of the principals. I have no idea what the original contract stated. Somebody should ask Gibbons…He’ll give a straightforward answer, is my guess.

    For a long time, for instance, Gibbons was opposed to the idea of prequels, sequels, or spinoffs (“Blot the Dog” as one interview had it), esp. if both Gibbons and Moore were not involved…but now he seems ok with it. Why? Obviously, he could have had a change of heart removed from material concerns…(and he already threw his support behind the movie)…but my guess is that he will receive compensation here and that that has something to do with his willingness to support the project (if lukewarmly).

  77. Noah — I have very mixed feelings about artists who are “screwed” by a publisher — which is why I always try and put things in context.

    In Moore’s case, when he signed the contract, he wasn’t some dumb, fresh-faced high school kid. So, obviously, at the time he signed it, it seemed like a reasonable contract he could live with — otherwise he wouldn’t have signed it in the first place.

    Now if DC did not honor some portion of the contract, then Moore has a valid beef and should consider taking them to court. But if DC honored the contract, then his beef is nothing but grousing after the fact about the shoulda-coulda-woulda-beens. After all, no one knew going in if “Watchmen” had any commercial legs.

    As far as the comic book industry agreements being different than they are in outher industries, that’s highly debatable.

    People get screwed regularly in the film and publishing business, and the vast majority of creators in the video game and animation business have zero creator ownership — just like in comics.

    For example, in the film business, there are countless examples of film talent and investors agreeing to a percentage of the “profit” only to find out afterwards that because of creative bookkeeping, there allegedly is no profit.

    In another example, an author friend of mine who has authored more than a dozen books gets 1/2 up front, the other half on publication, and is allegedly supposed to get a percentage of the profit. Well guess what? If he gets any residual checks at all, they are a pittance — again because there is allegedly little or no profit. Yet at least two of his books keep going back to print again and again.

    In the video game industry, most of the staff is on a fized salary with no bonus or profit-sharing. While talking to one developer about the mega-successful game he helped create, I said something like, “Wow, you guys should be getting a nice bonus check at the end of the year!” He looked at me like I was goofy and just shook his head and laughed.

    The bottom line? Know what you are getting into, try and get the best deal you can, and if you can’t live with the deal, find some other line of work.

  78. I don’t think the shady business practices of other businesses should dictate our thoughts about comics’ shady business practices. The history of the comics industry making sizable profits on the backs of barely acknowledged and hardly paid creators is execrable…. The actions of the music and film industry that are similarly execrable doesn’t excuse the behavior.

    Moore and Gibbons actually have made a good deal of money off of Watchmen, since a percentage of the profits was always part of the deal…but did they earn a percentage commensurate to the work they put in (as compared to the work DC put in, which was essentially to say, “holy shit, this is good”–and covering printing and PR costs)? Hardly. From that angle, Moore has a valid complaint. (Again… “Holy shit! DC has made a ton of money off of this, and I haven’t, despite being the artistic prime mover that made it all happen. They screwed me on the terms of the contract!”) The parenthetical complaint here seems perfectly reasonable to me… He has no legal grounds (except maybe the indivisibility lies RSM refers to) to recoup the money, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t screwed at the time.

    As I state ad nauseum above, though, I do think he kind of knew what he was getting into…and in fact wouldn’t have wanted it to go immediately out of print so that it could revert to him (if it did, it would have been a failure). To me, it’s that which muddies the waters of his complaints a bit…

    Truth to tell, though, he got screwed either way. It’s just a question of when he knew it.

  79. Eric b. — Yet, if “Watchmen” had the short-term commercial legs of other critically acclaimed/interesting concepts from the 1980s, such as “The ‘Nam” or “D.P. 7”; or had totally bombed like “U.S. 1” or “Skateman,” we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

    Regarding the historical pros/cons or fairness/unfairness of the comic book industry, I just can’t totally side with the creators. Creators, when working under the safety net of a publisher, bore no risk if a comic bombed (except, perhaps, in the area of future work). They got their agreed upon page rate regardless.

    That’s why, when, historically, creators have become publishers themselves, and have had to shoulder the entire financial risk of publishing, they adopted pretty much the same work-for-hire arrangement as the non-creator publisher did. That situation has changed somewhat in the past 20 years or so, but there are still some creator-publishers who do things the “traditional” way.

  80. When Moore went the creator/publisher route…he almost lost all of his Watchmen money…and the independent publishing arrangement bankrupted. So…there’s definitely truth to what you say.

    At the same time, capitalism is about “biggest profit margin”–not about “fairness.” The people at DC did know they had something (and someone) special on their hands with Watchmen and Moore…and could have profited by it and him while still giving him a more fair deal. Instead, they gave him the “standard deal” even though they knew he wasn’t a “standard creator”—and then looked for loopholes in the standard deal (like the smiley-face pins) in efforts to squeeze even more $$ out of an already profitable venture. In the long run, I think they screwed themselves (as Moore would have kept producing popular and profitable work for them if they had been more accommodating) by their greed. They got more $$ out of Watchmen (even now), but they left alot of $$ on the table by acting greedily as well.

  81. Eric b: I really can’t fault capitalism because greedy people can take advantage of it. Greedy people can take advantage of all of the other “isms” as well, including socialism and communism.

    The nice thing about capitalism is that it is the only system around today that allows for the creator, the specially skilled, and/or the hard worker/entrepreneur to elevate himself/herself from one social level to the next. It doesn’t happen all of the time, but it happens a lot.

    And while DC may have been looking out for Number One when they drafted the contract, Moore would have never been where he is now if they hadn’t allowed him to tap into DC’s customer base, DC’s distribution network, and the DC’s marketing machine that helped “Watchmen” become the big hit that it has become. DC has a helluva lot more overhead that Moore does, employs a hellava lot more people than him, and they stand to lose a helluva lot more when books aren’t profitable. Can you blame them for trying to squeeze out as much profit from a successful property as they can?

    But Moore now has leverage too, and he can get far sweeter terms today than when he was a no-name writer. He has DC to thank for that negotiating power.

  82. “The nice thing about capitalism is that it is the only system around today that allows for the creator, the specially skilled, and/or the hard worker/entrepreneur to elevate himself/herself from one social level to the next.”

    This is utterly meretricious bullshit.

    Khruschev came from a far poorer background than any American President. I think that was probably the case for the Communist leadership as a whole. The U.S. has much less social mobility than much more socialist European countries. Capitalism has its virtues, but it is absolutely not the only system around today, or ever, that allowed people to advance by dint of hard work or skill.

    “Can you blame them for trying to squeeze out as much profit from a successful property as they can?”

    Yes, you can, actually. Adam Smith did, as just one example. The expectation that people in business will treat their employees ethically is a bedrock social necessity. There are all sorts of laws about it, and, indeed, the earliest theorists of capitalism discussed its importance.

    Other creative industries certainly have a long and ugly history of exploiting their talent; one that continues to some extent today. However, comics is fairly unique in that the largest companies continue to treat clearly original creative effort on a work for hire basis. It’s an embarrassment, and your apologies for it are not especially convincing. Yes, it’s true that Moore could have gotten a worse deal and yes, he gained benefits from the contract, including fame and the ability to make more money. But if someone punches you in the face, it’s not clear to me that you should be incredibly grateful to them just because they didn’t kick you in the stomach as well. Moore and Gibbons got screwed; the fact that they didn’t get screwed out of everything doesn’t change the fact that they got screwed. The fact that they are more successful than you or me doesn’t change the fact that they got screwed, either.

  83. Russ–

    In 1985, it was standard practice in all publishing fields for the authors to retain ownership. It was even standard in the comics industry. Moore and Gibbons could have taken Watchmen to Marvel and retained copyright ownership by that point. DC was the last comics publisher to insist that authors relinquish ownership when acquiring new properties.

    Every penny DC has made on Watchmen up to this point they could have made under the terms of a contract that allowed Moore and Gibbons to retain ownership.

  84. RSM:

    I have serious issues with Russ’ comments on capitalism, but doesn’t your post sort of support the specific point regarding Moore?

    If Marvel could have offered a deal that didnt screw him over, then there was an in-industry alternative. If I take a shitty deal because thats the only way to get my work published then I’m being screwed by the industry. But if I take a shitty deal because I either have some loyalty to a particular company or because I don’t feel like shopping around for a deal, then I have to take partial responsibility for screwing myself. As Eric says, Moore wasn’t just some naive starstruck kid…

  85. I would also say that capitalism has survived longer than Karl Marx expected because it figured out (well, pseudo-anthropomorphically anyway) that the crudest and cruelest of exploitive practices was actually counterproductive in the long run. It would/could lead to strikes and worse (revolution, etc.) that crippled or destroyed the system. If you give people enough to live on (or maybe a little more), they can be seduced by capital’s pleasures and never want to revolt or cause trouble…greasing the wheels of the system. DC and the comics industry in general kind of figured this out belatedly by making it somewhat possible to own your own characters (Vertigo, occasionally) and by giving a (small) percentage of the profits to its creators based on sales, etc. In other words, being the absolutely most exploitive they could be was, in the end, less effective than being merely very exploitive.

    Likewise, with the Moore/Gibbons situation…Things could have been worse for them, certainly….but it also could have been better. And…making it better might well have helped DC in the long run… since Moore was and is one of the most bankable commodities in comics (insofar as he’s still in comics at all).

    To some degree, you might say DC was running things like a 19th century factory, pre-child labor laws (and pre-weekends and pre-laws against 22 hour workdays, etc.). They loosened up a bit by 1985 certainly, but they were still operating by the most base of capitalism’s core principals (biggest profit)…even when it worked against their long-term best interests. They were willing to do things which were quite obviously against the terms of the contract (smiley-face pins) to get every last cent out of Watchmen… and it’s that kind of penny pinching which led to the departure of Moore and this PR brouhaha.

  86. Noah wrote: “Khruschev came from a far poorer background than any American President. I think that was probably the case for the Communist leadership as a whole. The U.S. has much less social mobility than much more socialist European countries. Capitalism has its virtues, but it is absolutely not the only system around today, or ever, that allowed people to advance by dint of hard work or skill.”

    The communist leadership from Khruschev’s era reached their positions by murdering millions of intelligencia, business owners, aristocrats, military leaders, religious leaders and lord knows who else. That’s some wonderful system of social mobility you are heaping praise on.

    As far as your other claim that the U.S. has much less social mobility than much more socialist European countries, you better cite some examples. Come to think of it, I doubt you can because there ARE no hardcore socialist societies in Europe (i.e., places where there is no private property and the government runs everything). All European countries allow capitalism in varying degrees. Now why do you suppose that is?

    Noah wrote: “Yes, you can, actually. Adam Smith did, as just one example. The expectation that people in business will treat their employees ethically is a bedrock social necessity. There are all sorts of laws about it, and, indeed, the earliest theorists of capitalism discussed its importance.”

    There’s nothing wrong with aspiring for fair and ethical, but unfortunately, in real life, things are rarely that simple. Subject A thinks they should get more than Subject B who thinks that Subject C is a slacker and contributed little to the final outcome. In the meantime, while it was really Subject D who pulled the whole thing together, Subject D didn’t really have anything to do with the initial creative idea. These ego-driven battles happen all the freaking time in the creative community, and you know it!

    That does not mean ethics be damned, but I’ll wager that when Moore signed his contract, at that brief moment in time, he was satisfied with what he got. And if he, in fact, was, then that was an ethical contract.

    Regarding your work-for-hire argument, how the hell do you figure that the comic book industry is any different than lots other industries in that regards?

    The video game industry has many work-for-hire examples, as does the toy industry. The same goes for traditional game developers. Many animators, be it traditional cartoon or film CGI, get paid by the job, with no ownership of the final product. At the appliance manufacturer I worked for, the developers had no ownership of their creations. The engineers and design people all signed condition-of-employment forms stating that the company owned whatever they created on the job. Everything government employees create on the job is public domain, whether it’s art, stories, photographs or videos. Many magazine, newspaper or TV production companies own the fruits of their employees’ labor as well. For example, does that guy behind one of the zillion cameras filming the Super Bowl own the copyright of the video he shot? Hell, no. Not even his network owns it. The NFL, by contract, does! The list goes on and on.

    The fact is, despite your protestations, and RSM’s argument, creative ownership is NOT the norm. And in industries such as the film business, where it literally takes hundreds of people to complete a given product, there is absolutely never a fair and ethical distribution of conpensation and residuals for all involved, and there probably never will be.

  87. Russ:

    Obviously all current societies include capitalism to some degree (its virtually unavoidable in the global economy), but almost all of them also include socialist policies to some extent or another. The best way to illustrate this is to look at tax rates and government expenditure. High tax rates and government spending (as a proportion of GDP) are largely indicative of socialist policies (particularly in OECD countries), such as large scale state health care and education. So an easy test is to plot tax rates and government expenditure against social mobility measures.

    Everyone else:

    Forgive the imminent (and slightly tangential) statistical argument

    Now, I don’t have a Blog anymore to post the graph which results, but here’s two data points:

    The U.S pays 24.8% tax as a proportion of GDP
    U.S Government Expenditure accounts for 38.9% of GDP

    Sweden pays 45.8% tax as a proportion of GDP
    Sweedish Government Expenditure accounts for 52.5% of GDP

    If you deny that this indicates Sweden is more Socialist than the U.S then I suggest you revisit your economics classes.

    Now, Intergeneration Income Elasticity – Social Mobility (Lower is more mobile):

    U.S: 0.47
    Sweden: 0.15

    You can just take my word for it that the graph follows that pattern with a pretty neat correlation. Feel the wrath of the statistics.

    More Socialist Policies = Higher Government Spending Taxation = Less Inequality

    There have been multiple academic studies which show the same correlation. It’s not exactly groundbreaking news.

  88. Russ–

    Creator ownership is and has been the norm in the book-publishing industry for decades. It was the norm for new-property acquisitions in the comics industry during the mid-1980s for just about every publisher except DC. And it has been the norm with DC since at least 1995. We’re talking about publishing practices. The norms of the film and gaming industries are beside the point.

    DC was making false claims about the copyright law in order to get creators to surrender ownership when the Watchmen contract was negotiated. That is not excusable under any circumstances. If DC fed Moore and Gibbons the nonsense Giordano was spouting–and I fully believe they did–they swindled Moore and Gibbons out of ownership of the property. Just because other people get swindled too doesn’t make it right.

    And while Moore was not “a dumb, fresh-faced high school kid,” he was a citizen and resident of Great Britain who was negotiating with a U. S. company. He was not in a position to easily check out their claims about U. S. law. I don’t blame him for taking them on faith.

  89. Russ: “there ARE no hardcore socialist societies in Europe (i.e., places where there is no private property and the government runs everything).”

    Sorry, Russ, but that is the definition of some kind of idealized communist country, not of a socialist one. I can tell you this having spent the first fifteen years of my life in an Eastern Bloc country. We were constantly taught that the ultimate ideal was “Communism,” but that society wasn’t there yet, so we lived in a socialist state, not a communist one–and in a socialist state private property very much existed. Not only did most people own their houses or apartments, their cars, etc., but there were also small business owners.

  90. Out of all this, one thing struck me.
    Noah: “Obviously Rowling’s contract doesn’t allow anyone to do that.”

    Of course not. Why would it?
    Of course not. A clause like that ought to be illegal.

    Holy crap! Publishers are taking liberties that We the f…… People ought to not allow them to take!
    To arms, to arms! Enemy within the gates! Pitchforks and torches for everybody.

    Are ya with me?

    I mean, art is theft, always will be. Publishing-the-Business, it appears, is slavery at its core. Not only that, but it strangles the creative theft that bears it, and us all, up.

  91. To get back to one of the points raised earlier…appropriation of a writer’s characters is an ancient practice, and has encountered different levels of approval or condemnation according to the norms of the culture in which they were practiced.

    I can assure you, from research I am doing, that two of the authors “homaged” in LOEG — Jules Verne and H.G.Wells — had their creations ‘pirated’ in their lifetimes, and they were not at all happy with it; in fact, they vigorously prosecuted the offenders. Were they alive today, I doubt they would approve of Moore’s use of their concepts.

    I am not impressed with the argument that the wishes of the dead count for nothing. This is a sort of greedy ahistoricity that undermines the very notion of culture. A civilisation should respect its past. LOEG is a very mild offender in this regard, but in the absolute one would avoid the ‘slippery slope’ of revisionist appropriation; thus, for example, modern restorations of antique architecture and paintings are careful to leave the restored object as close to the original as possible– avoiding such Disneylandish horrors as Viollet Le Duc’s extravagant “improvements” of Medieval cathedrals — and to make sure that any change is reversible.

    BTW, H.G.Wells’ work is still copyright in Europe (Wells died in 1946.) In the USA much of it isn’t as it was published before 1923.

  92. “That’s some wonderful system of social mobility you are heaping praise on. ”

    Wasn’t heaping praise on it. Just pointing out that it was a system of social mobility. You claimed that capitalism was the only one. That’s not true.

  93. A quick example of how socialism can help social mobility is to think about health care. With private health care tied to employment, people lower down the social scale who have only intermittent employment, and even people in the middle class, are in a position where a medical emergency can be devastating economically. It also makes it much harder to change jobs or start your own business; without health care, the risks are just very high.

    On the other hand, with a single payer health care system, starting your own business, or moving from job to job, is much easier and much less risky. People are more able to take risks, which means they’re more able to take advantage of opportunities, and more able to potentially move up the income ladder.

    The same is the case for public education, which is also a government/socialist endeavor. Your giving people the tools for upward mobility. The U.S. does this to some extent — though it’s underfunded and poorly constructed, which is part of the reason that social mobility in this country sucks.

  94. ————————–
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    …The issue is that a company which has repeatedly screwed Moore over now owns the rights to the characters he (and Dave Gibbons) created, and that said company is now the sole arbiter of what gets done with them or what does not.
    —————————

    More accurately, DC always owned the “rights to the characters”; Moore/Gibbons hoped they’d revert to them, but they didn’t.

    Which is one of those chances you take when hitching your creative star to a big corporation; on the one hand, you get better pay right off, have the advantage of their massive production/publicity machinery…

    [As, reading further down, I see Russ eloquently noted: “while DC may have been looking out for Number One when they drafted the contract, Moore would have never been where he is now if they hadn’t allowed him to tap into DC’s customer base, DC’s distribution network, and the DC’s marketing machine that helped “Watchmen” become the big hit that it has become.”]

    …on the other hand, you lose ownership and control of your creation.

    Am reminded of Clive Barker getting the chance to screenwrite/direct his first big-budget (relatively speaking), theatrical movie — Hellraiser — but contractually losing control of what would turn out to be his most memorable, iconic horror characters: Pinhead and the Cenobites.

    Most go the former route and it works for them; occasionally, though, as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles guys’ example shows ( http://www.tcj.com/the-kevin-eastman-interview-part-i/ ), if you hit the jackpot via self-publishing or using a more creator-friendly contractual deal, you REALLY make out well.

    From S. R. Bissette’s blog:

    ————————-
    After working hard all through 2010 with former 1963 creative partner(s) to arrive at a planned (with Alan’s permission throughout 2010) reprint edition of the original 1963 series ([created] circa 1993) that would adhere absolutely to Alan’s demands—including that of not using or mentioning his name or affiliation with the project (yes, we found a publisher despite that)—it all ended in a heartbeat early in 2011.

    Alan simply pulled the plug, and thus it was all over but the tears.

    …For what it’s worth and not worth, 1963 will never be legally reprinted in any language in our lifetimes.

    …So, consider this:

    In creator co-ownership, one partner can forever and willfully deep-six any future in any co-owned work—even completed, published work, that still has perceived or potential market value.

    That, too, is part of creator ownership, and co-ownership, and creator rights, and must be taken into account in any discussion of the subject.

    All of us who worked hard on 1963 back in 1992–93 earned whatever we would or will ever earn from that work back in 1993, and that was that.

    We will never see a dime from any of that work again, while the quarterly royalties from the DC/Vertigo collected Swamp Thing editions…and John Constantine/Hellraiser arrive, for the most part, like clockwork.

    If you had told the Bissette of 1990 that he’d never see a dime on any work done with Alan save the work-for-hire collaborative ventures we’d already put behind us by 1990, the Bissette of 1990 would have laughed and spit and ranted about the evils of work-for-hire.

    Given the past decade’s long-distance and close-range spectacles related to Alan wanting to remove his name from, and/or the existence of, key collaborative works from prior decades, and experiencing first-hand the repercussions of his doing just that (with 1963), and surviving first-hand being exiled forever by said previous pal and creative partner, the Bissette of 2011 can only thank his lucky stars that he did his most extensive and lasting work with Mr. Moore under work-for-hire conditions for DC Comics.
    —————————-
    http://srbissette.com/?p=13933

    Re public perceptions of characters being warped by “reimaginings” of those characters, in less-than-respectful hands, some sort-of-related stuff, from the Feb. 8 post in Caitlín R. Kiernan’s blog:

    —————————
    Oh, I did refuse an interview with “Paranormal Haven,” because the last thing in the world The Drowning Girl: A Memoir* needs is people associating it with ParaRom. I don’t believe that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Or, rather, I believe there are harmful associations that color perceptions. Predispose us to see Thing A as such and such, even if it’s obviously and most emphatically not. …
    —————————
    http://greygirlbeast.livejournal.com/

    —————————
    AB says:

    …I am not impressed with the argument that the wishes of the dead count for nothing. This is a sort of greedy ahistoricity that undermines the very notion of culture. A civilisation should respect its past.
    —————————-

    Yes. (Which does not mean that, say, unsavory deeds should be covered up or ignored; yet it’s a mistake to wholly condemn its greatest figures because they didn’t in every way conform to our “enlightened” attitudes of today…)

    * http://www.amazon.com/Drowning-Girl-Caitlin-R-Kiernan/dp/0451464168/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1328721849&sr=8-1

  95. I think the fact that Moore seems to mistreat Steve Bissette in a number of contexts (though I’m sure Moore’s version of the story would be different), doesn’t have much to do with the issue here. It indicates that there are pitfalls to creative co-ownership….which is true. It doesn’t tell us anything at all about the fairness or unfairness of corporate ownership.

  96. Mike, yes, it’s true Moore’s business dealings have been a complete train wreck, but I suspect they could have done better by making the contracts explicit in plannning for what would happen if they have a falling out.

    Presumably small businesses have to deal with this sort of thing all the time.

    BTW the Millestone partnership has similar issues but seems to have turned out more successful:

    http://digitalpriest.com/legacy/comics/milestone.html/

  97. ———————————
    eric b says:

    ….[Bissette’s story indicates] there are pitfalls to creative co-ownership….which is true. It doesn’t tell us anything at all about the fairness or unfairness of corporate ownership.
    ————————————

    Yes. However, it certainly helps as a warning against taking simplistic views of either approach: “If you had told the Bissette of 1990 that he’d never see a dime on any work done with Alan save the work-for-hire collaborative ventures we’d already put behind us by 1990, the Bissette of 1990 would have laughed and spit and ranted about the evils of work-for-hire.”

    As Bissette concluded, “Suffice to note, the ironies cannot be overstated.”

    ————————————-
    pallas says:

    …it’s true Moore’s business dealings have been a complete train wreck, but I suspect they could have done better by making the contracts explicit in planning for what would happen if they have a falling out.
    ————————————-

    I wonder if those problems occurred precisely because the participants were coming at things from a naively idealistic point of view: “We’re not like those crooked, exploiting corporations, we don’t need 100-page contracts! We’ll just be totally fair with each other; what could go wrong with that?”

    As a horrible example of what that sunny attitude can lead to, consider the countless messy legal divorce battles, which a pre-nuptial contract could’ve avoided or minimized. But, what couple getting married considers it even remotely possible they might someday split up?

    ————————————-
    …Presumably small businesses have to deal with this sort of [principals falling out] thing all the time.
    ————————————-

    No doubt! It seems to be such a problem that the Tallahassee Democrat‘s former, long-time business columnist simply strongly advised against businesspeople having any partners at all.

    That Milestone partnership link wasn’t working; Googling the term, couldn’t find anything that seemed right…

    Ah! Is this the group in question?

    ————————————–
    Although Milestone comics were published through DC Comics, they did not take place in the DC Universe. Under an arrangement similar to the one DC and Wildstorm established later, all Milestone characters existed in a separate continuity that did not fall under DC Comics’ direct editorial control (but DC still retained right of refusal to publish). Unlike Wildstorm, whose properties were bought by DC Comics, Milestone Media retained the copyright of their properties.

    Fundamental to Milestone’s agreement with DC was they would not relinquish any of the legal or creative rights to their work. Throughout the negotiations, Milestone, and their lawyers, insisted on three basic points: (1) that they would retain total creative control; (2) that they would retain all copyrights for characters under the Milestone banner; and (3) that they would have the final say on all merchandising and licensing deals pertaining to their properties. In essence, DC had in effect licensed the characters, editorial services, and creative content of the Milestone books for an annual fee and a share of the profits.[1]…
    ————————————–
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milestone_Media

  98. Yeah that Milestone. If I recall correctly, One of the original partners left the group but was nice enough to sign away his rights so the projects could go forward Presumably when they originally started creating the characters they didnt have contracts.

  99. Ben wrote: “Obviously all current societies include capitalism to some degree (its virtually unavoidable in the global economy), but almost all of them also include socialist policies to some extent or another.”

    To you, I repeat my question to Noah: Why do you suppose all current socialist societies include capitalism to some degree?

    To me, the answer’s obvious: Because, for a lot of reasons, socialism (and communism) simply do not work. And even though that fact is pretty damn clear, European and American refuseniks keep trying to find a hybrid socialist model (liberally sprinkled with elements of capitalism) that CAN work. But all one needs to do is look at Greece, Italy or some other countries that have robust socialist elements, to see that the more socialism one injects into a country, the worse off that country will be in the long run.

    And the reason that happens boils down to this: If more people are sucking on the governmental teat than are creating the milk, the whole system becomes unsustainable and collapses like a house of cards. This is where Ditko and I agree 100 percent.

    The U.S. is in a precarious situation right now. Our debt level is frightening, the government safety net is expanding, and for maybe the first time in our history, there are more people not paying taxes than are paying taxes. And the alleged solution of some to increase the taxes on the rich is really no solution at all. It’s like putting a band-aid on an arterial wound. Because, even if you took every single dime from the top one percent of earners, this country would still owe something like 12 trillion dollars, and it would still have expanding debt due to expanding unfunded commitments.

    I’m not saying the U.S. economy should have no socialistic elements. To some degree, it always has had them. The U.S. military, for example, has strong socialist elements to it. Welfare has been around for a long time in one form or another, as has Social Security. But what entitlement-happy liberals tend to forget is that if an economy has too many socialistic elements to it, it starts to become unsustainable. Citing the Greek dilemma, Greeks are notorious when it comes to tax avoidance, yet much of Greece’s population does not think twice about getting lavish handouts (by U.S. standards) from the government. They would have reached a tipping point years ago if they hadn’t been shielded for a time by the advent of the European Union. But their system is a total mess now, and other socialist-heavy countries will almost assuredly follow Greece’s lead.

    But exactly how much socialism is too much for the U.S.? Beats me. But I would think that with a good accountant and a realistic balance sheet, and no partisan influence from either the right or the left, it wouldn’t take more than an afternoon to figure that out.

  100. RSM wrote: “Creator ownership is and has been the norm in the book-publishing industry for decades. It was the norm for new-property acquisitions in the comics industry during the mid-1980s for just about every publisher except DC. And it has been the norm with DC since at least 1995. We’re talking about publishing practices. The norms of the film and gaming industries are beside the point.”

    Whoa! You’re picking and choosing your examples here to stack the deck in your favor. Why should the book publishing industry count and not the game and film industry? I say they ALL should count, since creating is creating, regardless of the industry.

    If anything, comics has more in common with film and video game production than with book publishing, since most productions in comics are collaborative efforts.

    RSM wrote: “DC was making false claims about the copyright law in order to get creators to surrender ownership when the Watchmen contract was negotiated. That is not excusable under any circumstances. If DC fed Moore and Gibbons the nonsense Giordano was spouting–and I fully believe they did–they swindled Moore and Gibbons out of ownership of the property. Just because other people get swindled too doesn’t make it right.’

    You’re making a lot of assumptions here and some serious charges. How do you know Giordano intentionally misled Moore and Gibbons? The copyright law became so loopy after the changes in the 1970s I’ll wager that 99.9 percent of the people in comics did not understand it (even DC or Marvel lawyers) when that contract was written. I’ve been following copyright law since 1974 (I filed my first formal copyright in 1975), and it STILL makes me scratch my head.

    RSM wrote: “And while Moore was not “a dumb, fresh-faced high school kid,” he was a citizen and resident of Great Britain who was negotiating with a U. S. company. He was not in a position to easily check out their claims about U. S. law. I don’t blame him for taking them on faith.”

    That’s a pretty weak argument. When I lived in England, I could not use the argument “I don’t understand your law” as a legal excuse. I was as liable as any native Brit.

  101. Andrei wrote: “Sorry, Russ, but that is the definition of some kind of idealized communist country, not of a socialist one. I can tell you this having spent the first fifteen years of my life in an Eastern Bloc country. We were constantly taught that the ultimate ideal was “Communism,” but that society wasn’t there yet…”

    Well, as you probably know better than anyone then, there are many definitions of socialism. The definition I cited was just one.

    But, as you point out, in Marxist teachings, socialism — regardless of the type — is but a stepping stone to the ultimate ideal: communism.

  102. “And the reason that happens boils down to this: If more people are sucking on the governmental teat than are creating the milk, the whole system becomes unsustainable and collapses like a house of cards. This is where Ditko and I agree 100 percent.”

    That’s not really a critique of socialism, but of a pure welfare state (which no one but Miracleman has proposed as far as I can remember). The reason a pure socialism wouldn’t work, as the argument goes, is that it relies on central planning of production that can’t feasibly keep up with the myriad demands of the economy. As Hayek says introducing radical democracy into the central planning would fail, a fortiori, because of an increased lag time in making decisions (as well as the inherent problem of voting never being able to accurately reflect everyone’s needs). He suggests that the natural outgrowth of this situation is dictatorship, because of the need to get something done. (He’s very clear, though, that a welfare state is not socialism proper.)

  103. Noah, in an ideal world, what you argue may have some validity, but in practice, in a dependent society (which is what socialism and communism breeds) there is less incentive to compete and achieve (i.e., to be upwardly mobile).

    In the old Soviet Union, waste and inefficiency were rampant, as were the byproducts of a low incentive society: absenteeism, low productivity and apathy.

    I saw the same thing during the four years I was in a union. The overall mindset of union workers was to do only what you had to do. Where I worked, there was no incentive to rush, and there was no incentive to improve processes and be more efficient. It simply did not matter. As a matter of fact, if you milked your workload during regular time, you might even get some overtime out of the deal.

    And since the wages were decent living wages, with good basic benefits, there was no incentive to move up for most people. As a matter of fact, when I quit my union job and took a 66 percent pay cut to join the Air Force in 1978, most of my co-workers thought I’d lost my marbles.

  104. Charles — The problem is, socialism and communism breed a welfare state mindset. And when money the entitlement bloc gets eclipses the amount of money paid by the taxee bloc, that state’s society reaches the economic tipping point I talked about above. When that happens, it’s all just Economics 101.

  105. “The overall mindset of union workers was to do only what you had to do. Where I worked, there was no incentive to rush, and there was no incentive to improve processes and be more efficient. It simply did not matter.”

    Unions don’t create the alienation of workers from their work, comrade. People will cheat whatever system they’re in provided (a) they can get away with it and (b) they have little if any moral attachment to the work being done.

    And putting the efficiency of getting the product out there over workers’ comfort is precisely what made the coal mining companies so great, right?

  106. Russ–

    The book-publishing model is the one the comics field has followed, and those are the standards it should be judged by. There’s also the fact that a film or video game requires the creative contributions of dozens if not hundreds of people. If those were not put together as a collective work under the terms of work-for-hire, they wouldn’t be feasible. Beyond the writer and artist, a comic requires at most two or three support artisans, and those artisans are largely optional and mainly employed to facilitate production speed. There’s no good reason for them to follow the model of the film or video-game field.

    Actually, I don’t think Giordano or anyone else in DC editorial intentionally misled Moore, Gibbons, or any other creator who got fed the rubbish spouted in that interview. Giordano was in all likelihood parroting what he was told by Warners’ legal department. He was on the record with an interviewer whom he knew had no compunction about embarrassing him and DC if circumstances called for it. He even complained elsewhere in the interview about being blindsided by a TCJ article that exposed rampant plagiarism on the part of a prominent DC artist. He’s not going to knowingly lie about a verifiable matter in those circumstances.

    Sergio Aragonés, for one, has said that DC told him erroneous information about the copyright law along the lines of Giordano’s statements when he was shopping Groo around in the early ’80s. That lends support to the view that Giordano was spouting the company line.

    Was DC confused by the law? I doubt it. Marvel, their biggest competitor, wasn’t confused. Several smaller competitors, including Heavy Metal, Fantagraphics, and Eclipse, weren’t confused. Warner Books, a sister operation that employed the same legal department, wasn’t confused.

    It is in a company’s short-term interest to have ownership on any property they work with. If they have a dispute with the creator, they can ignore the creator. They also can keep a property out of the hands of their competitors if they decide it isn’t worth doing anything with. I believe it was and is Warners policy to secure ownership as often as possible with acquisitions. Now, they can’t tell lies about the copyright law to the authors Warner Books was dealing with because those authors were invariably represented by agents and lawyers who knew the situation. But in comics in the mid-80s, comics creators as a rule did not employ representation in their negotiations with publishers. And it was taken advantage of. DC stopped pulling this crap around the time that Neil Gaiman and others began using agents and lawyers with book-industry experience in their dealings with the companies. I don’t think it was entirely a coincidence.

    I didn’t write that Moore’s difficulties in vetting DC’s legal claims was “a legal excuse.” It isn’t. It’s just why I think it’s off-base to blame him for being suckered.

  107. Charles — The point is, it’s a helluva lot easier to cheat in a socialist or communist system than in a capitalist system. In addition, in a capitalist system, there are far more rewards — things that George Carlin would call “stuff.” But in a communist system, you get what the state gives you; you live where the state tells you to live; you go to the school the state tells you to go to; you do the job the state tells you to do; and you own next to nothing.

  108. RSM — The fact that the comic book industry chose to follow the book publishing model when they could have continued paying for creative services like so many other industries still do is a good thing then, right?

    You why are you busting DC’s balls? Did you expect a smooth, quick transition from one radically different method of securing creative services to another? Considering the checkered past of so many comics publishers during the Golden Age and beyond (Charlton, anyone?), the fact that the system changed at all should be celebrated. That there were problems and resistance by some along the way should be expected. But the bottom line is that the transition is nearly complete — unless, of course, one happens to be an inker, colorist, letterer, editor, or some other important production person who doesn’t get squat when a character enjoys long-term financial success these days.

    That’s why when I do draw comics, I work alone, baby!

  109. Russ–

    DC deserves criticism for perpetrating swindles for as long as they insist on exploiting the benefits of that conduct.

    If it weren’t for the Before Watchmen project, I wouldn’t be criticizing them for how they’ve dealt with Moore. They swindled him out of ownership, but as long as they treated that ownership as strictly nominal, I don’t see how it mattered all that much. If Moore and Gibbons had retained copyright, I wouldn’t begrudge DC their right to continue publishing the book. It’s standard for a publisher to retain a publishing license for as long as it keeps the book in print. Problems such as the cloisonne-pin situation Eric mentions are hiccups that likely resulted from interdepartmental miscommunications at DC and were fairly quickly resolved in Moore and Gibbons’ favor. Before Watchmen is different. It’s a game-changer. DC is now taking advantage of their ill-gotten gains, and they’ve earned condemnation.

    Who, here or elsewhere, is seriously arguing for the authorial rights of support artisans, editors, and production contractors? It’s a red herring.

  110. “In the old Soviet Union, waste and inefficiency were rampant, as were the byproducts of a low incentive society: absenteeism, low productivity and apathy.”

    And in our awesome capitalist society, we just had an orgy of corruption and stupidity that resulted in the catastrophic tanking of the world economy and enormous suffering across the globe. Would that there had been more apathy and low productivity in the housing market. Then maybe a bunch of greedy assholes wouldn’t have been inspired to create junk products and swindle homebuyers, resulting in the massive mess that we still have not dug our way out of.

    No system is perfect, but the U.S. system does not work appreciably better, and by many measures works significantly worse, than places like Canada or Britain or Scandinavia, all of which are much more socialist than the U.S., but none of which is seriously considering communism from what I can tell.

    The main problem with the Soviet Union was really not worker apathy, and the main cause of worker apathy was really probably not Communism. Rather, the central problem was that there was a paranoid mass murderer at the helm of the state for a good long stretch (was it two decades? I think it was 34-52 or so…) That’s the sort of thing that doesn’t endear you to your workforce. I was just reading Emma Goldman, who figured out that Stalin was an evil bastard long before lots of people who should have known better (like Churchill.) Here’s what she had to say about it:

    [T]here is more governmental terrorism in Soviet Russia than anywhere else in the civilized world today, for Stalin has to conquer and enslave a stubborn peasantry of a hundred millions. It is popular hatred of the regime which explains the stupendous industrial sabotage in Russia, the disorganization of the transport after sixteen years of virtual military management; the terrific famine in the South and Southeast, notwithstanding favorable natural conditions and in spite of the severest measures to compel the peasants to sow and reap, in spite even of wholesale extermination and of the deportation of more than a million peasants to forced labor camps.

    The point is, the Soviet Union was a seriously, horribly fucked up place under Stalin, and to a lesser extent under his successors. In other contexts, unions and some socialist institutions have worked quite well. While capitalism, alas, has had its share of disasters.

  111. Russ:

    I don’t want to defend the Welfare State particularly, I’m just critical of the idea that pure market capitalism is somehow better. As Noah’s pointed out, pure socialism (in so far as it ever existed) had some awful consequences. Pure Capitalist free markets (in so far as they exist) are currently causing the largest financial crisis in history. Neither provides an ideal solution on its own. So I’m not objecting to the idea of capitalism so much as I’m objecting to your idea that it is in any way a ‘superior’ system.

    The idea that Greece etc (the PIGS) provide an example of what occurs when too much socialism dilutes capitalist tendencies is HUGELY simplistic. For a start, as pointed out, the Scandinavian countries run far more socialist policies than the PIGS and are surviving as well as any. For the PIGS themselves, the primary cause of the current problems stem from the consequences of the Eurozone experiment which drove down competitiveness and encouraged (through the free market no less) extensive borrowing and lower exports. The socialist policies are largely a symptom of those market forces, rather than an initial cause. And, of course, the Eurozone itself is an essentially capitalist, and essentially flawed, notion, aimed at creating a common market.

    On a larger point, the idea that these current problems provide any defence of free market capitalism in the face of naughty socialist spending is a very flawed view of the causes of the current crises (sub-prime, financial and sovereign debt).

    Now, I could turn your question around and ask ‘why do you think all capitalist countries insist on including some level of socialist policies eh’? Well, partly, as the previous stats indicate, because statistically, social mobility is improved by more socialist policies. Capitalism alone is not an effective system for society in general (and no, I don’t think pure socialism is either). The reality has always been that capitalism allows for the entrenchment of huge wealth through the age old problem of political influence. It’s not a coincidence that capitalist policies are also closely correlated to high inequality.

    However, even if you’re doing it reluctantly and from a rather dubious starting position, you do seem to agree with the idea that a combination of the two philosophies is the best option we currently have. But that’s not a new idea, and the idea that a bunch of accountants could work out the optimum level in a few hours is ignoring the fact that societies have been searching for this balance arguably since the Roman Republic. Economics isn’t maths, and maths is very poor economics.

    As it happens, I tend to think that Rawls envisaged something pretty close to the ideal.

  112. ——————————
    Andreas says:

    I mean, art is theft, always will be. Publishing-the-Business, it appears, is slavery at its core. Not only that, but it strangles the creative theft that bears it, and us all, up.
    ——————————-

    Sheesh! Is it possible to cram more nonsense into a few lines?

    ——————————-
    R. Maheras says:

    …You’re picking and choosing your examples here to stack the deck in your favor. Why should the book publishing industry count and not the game and film industry? I say they ALL should count, since creating is creating, regardless of the industry.
    ——————————-

    Yes; in theater, playwrights are treated like royalty, have a vast amount of control over productions of their work. Yet in cinema screenwriters — though exceedingly well-paid — are treated like crap, everyone free to do whatever they feel like with their work. Both are expensive performance-based art forms, but what a difference!

    ——————————-
    If anything, comics has more in common with film and video game production than with book publishing, since most productions in comics are collaborative efforts…
    ——————————-

    Not to mention, the routine usage in comics of continuing characters, or a specific “universe” created by others…

    ——————————-
    Robert Stanley Martin says:

    DC deserves criticism for perpetrating swindles for as long as they insist on exploiting the benefits of that conduct.
    ——————————–

    (??) So are swindles OK if you don’t make any money from them? (“Just trying to keep in practice,” says the old grifter.)

    ———————————
    …They swindled [Moore] out of ownership, but as long as they treated that ownership as strictly nominal, I don’t see how it mattered all that much. If Moore and Gibbons had retained copyright, I wouldn’t begrudge DC their right to continue publishing the book. It’s standard for a publisher to retain a publishing license for as long as it keeps the book in print.
    ———————————-

    Moore and Gibbons didn’t retain copyright, because they never had the copyright to begin with. Don’t have my original periodical issues handy, but in my accessible first Watchmen collection, it notes in the indicia:

    “Copyright (C) 1986, 1987 by DC Comics Inc. All Rights Reserved…WATCHMEN and all characters featured in this publication, the distinctive likenesses thereof and all related indicia are trademarks of DC Comics Inc.”

    Now I’m not a lawyer, but that could hardly be more explicitly clear…

    ———————————-
    Before Watchmen is different. It’s a game-changer. DC is now taking advantage of their ill-gotten gains, and they’ve earned condemnation.
    ———————————-

    There’s nothing ill-gotten about the profit they’ve made. There’s not even any “swindling” involved in their continuing to publish the book, and thereby the rights/ownership not going to Moore and Gibbons.

    If the book had failed to continue selling, and DC had published a token amount of copies every few years solely to keep the creators from gaining ownership (which has been done in other situations), that would indeed be a swindle, in the moral if not the legally actionable sense.

    But the book has remained popular and a steady seller; DC has kept reprinting it because it makes money, not only for the company but in the percentages allotted and going to the creators.

    Not that DC is necessarily always on the moral high-ground; far from it. But here (aside from that contemptible move with the Watchmen “promo” buttons) they’re in the right.

    For that matter, whatever a creative fiasco Before Watchmen might turn out to be, they’re perfectly in their legal rights to do whatever they wish with the characters.

  113. Mike–

    No, swindling people isn’t OK as long as one isn’t benefitting. However, there are only so many hours in the day that I’m going to spend criticizing people’s conduct. I prefer to reserve it for situations where people are being wronged beyond having their feelings hurt. Until Before Watchmen, there has been nothing DC has done that they couldn’t or wouldn’t have done under a book-industry standard contract in which Moore and Gibbons retained copyright. And yes, I wrote retained copyright. Under U. S. copyright law, creators own the copyright for their material until they explicitly give it up contractually.

  114. ——————————
    Robert Stanley Martin says:

    …And yes, I wrote retained copyright. Under U. S. copyright law, creators own the copyright for their material until they explicitly give it up contractually.
    ——————————–

    From the very inchoate beginnings, Moore planned for what became Watchmen to employ superheroes owned by other companies:

    ———————————–
    In 1985, DC Comics acquired a line of characters from Charlton Comics. During that period, writer Alan Moore contemplated writing a story that featured an unused line of superheroes that he could revamp, as he had done in his Miracleman series in the early 1980s. Moore reasoned that MLJ Comics’ Mighty Crusaders might be available for such a project, so he devised a murder mystery plot which would begin with the discovery of the body of The Shield in a harbour. The writer felt it did not matter which set of characters he ultimately used, as long as readers recognized them “so it would have the shock and surprise value when you saw what the reality of these characters was”. Moore used this premise and crafted a proposal featuring the Charlton characters titled Who Killed the Peacemaker, and submitted the unsolicited proposal to DC managing editor Dick Giordano. Giordano was receptive to the proposal, but the editor opposed the idea of using the Charlton characters for the story. Moore said, “DC realized their expensive characters would end up either dead or dysfunctional.” Instead, Giordano persuaded Moore to continue with new characters. Moore had initially believed that original characters would not provide emotional resonance for the readers, but later changed his mind. He said, “Eventually, I realized that if I wrote the substitute characters well enough, so that they seemed familiar in certain ways, certain aspects of them brought back a kind of generic super-hero resonance or familiarity to the reader, then it might work.”

    Artist Dave Gibbons, who had collaborated with Moore on previous projects, heard the writer was working on a limited series treatment. The artist said he wanted to be involved, so Moore sent him the story outline…

    After receiving the go-ahead to work on the project, Moore and Gibbons spent a day at the latter’s house creating characters, crafting details for the story’s milieu and discussing influences..
    ————————————-
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen

    “…receiving the go-ahead”? Does that sound like the pair created the entire comic, then offered it to DC, or that the most of the work was crafted and realized under the aegis — and financing — of DC?

    The article goes on to note…

    ————————————-
    …Not wanting to work under a work for hire arrangement, Moore and Gibbons had a reversion clause in their contract for Watchmen. Speaking at the 1985 San Diego Comic-Con, Moore said “The way it works, if I understand it, is that DC owns it for the time they’re publishing it, and then it reverts to Dave and me, so we can make all the money from the Slurpee cups.”…Moore explained in 1986 that his understanding was that when “DC have not used the characters for a year, they’re ours.”…Both Moore and Gibbons said DC paid them “a substantial amount of money” to retain the rights. Moore added, “So basically they’re not ours, but if DC is working with the characters in our interests then they might as well be. On the other hand, if the characters have outlived their natural life span and DC doesn’t want to do anything with them, then after a year we’ve got them and we can do what we want with them, which I’m perfectly happy with.”
    —————————————-

    There’s much use of “reverting” there; but as dictionary.com notes:

    —————————————-
    re·vert

    1. to return to a former habit, practice, belief, condition, etc…
    2. Law . to go back to or return to the former owner or to his or her heirs.
    —————————————–

    Were Moore & Gibbons “former owners” of Watchmen, with DC buying them out? Nope…

    From the U.S. Copyright Office website:

    ———————————-
    What does copyright protect?
    Copyright, a form of intellectual property law, protects original works of authorship including literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works, such as poetry, novels, movies, songs, computer software, and architecture. Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, although it may protect the way these things are expressed. See Circular 1, Copyright Basics, section “What Works Are Protected.”

    When is my work protected?
    Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.

    Do I have to register with your office to be protected?
    No. In general, registration is voluntary. Copyright exists from the moment the work is created. …

    [From Copyright Basics:]

    Copyright protection subsists from the time the work is created in fixed form. The copyright in the work of authorship immediately becomes the property of the author who created the work. Only the author or those deriving their rights through the author can rightfully claim copyright.
    ———————————
    Emphasis added; from http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html

    Surely, Watchmen was not “created” when Moore “…contemplated writing a story that featured an unused line of superheroes that he could revamp.” Anything going on past that early stage — never mind when the issues were “created and fixed in a tangible form” — happened with Moore and Gibbons under contract to DC, getting paid by them…

    On a thoroughly silly vein, “…I’d watch the crap out of the infamous (and fake) Saturday Morning Watchmen cartoon: ” http://comics.ign.com/articles/121/1217966p1.html

  115. Mike–

    DC did not have ownership of the property until after the contract was signed. Copyright law forbids it. Their offering feedback on an unsolicited proposal is irrelevant for legal purposes.

    The Wikipedia article references a 2005 piece in Entertainment Weekly. The EW writer says “sealing the deal”; the Wikipedia writer extrapolates from that and elsewhere for the phrase “gave the go-ahead.” That’s very slippery language. It does not mean “the contract was signed,” although that is what a reader will likely infer.

    You might also want to consider the very real possibility that Time-Warner, DC’s parent company and the owner of Entertainment Weekly, is manipulating the language in order to reinforce a self-serving perception of the situation. Wikipedia articles are notorious for this sort of thing. The EW article is a puff piece that makes no mention whatsoever of Moore’s conflicts with DC, and it heavily downplays his outright hostility to film adaptations of his work. That article was published in 2005, right around the time of Moore’s final break with DC, his subsequent denunciations of the company as swindlers with regard to Watchmen and V for Vendetta, and his infamous demand that his name be taken off all work he published with them. In any case, why would EW publish an extended feature-length article about Watchmen in 2005? It was not, to put it mildly, an urgent subject at the time from a general reader’s perspective. Now, I’m not saying Time-Warner had this article published to help deal with a public-relations problem with regard to Moore, but you can’t discount the possibility, either.

    By the way, I can pretty much guarantee that no contract was signed until after all merchandisable character names and designs were finalized. It would create too big a legal briarpatch to do it beforehand, and would require multiple riders to get everything sorted out to the satisfaction of any halfway competent legal department. They would in all certainty insist that no contract be signed until after a detailed proposal was complete. That would mean an extended story outline, as well as verbal descriptions (including names) and visual designs of all principal characters. And once the contract was signed, Moore and Gibbons would be heavily discouraged from deviating from the accepted proposal, as that would likely require contractual riders to accommodate. DC editorial may have informally told Moore and Gibbons to proceed, but as I write above, that’s irrelevant for contractual purposes. You can’t sign something away unless the contract can specifically and unambiguously describe what you are signing away. Descriptions like “a character similar to The Question” aren’t good enough.

  116. ——————–
    Robert Stanley Martin says:

    DC did not have ownership of the property until after the contract was signed. Copyright law forbids it. Their offering feedback on an unsolicited proposal is irrelevant for legal purposes.
    ———————

    Speaking of copyright law, the work could not be under copyright protection — as the U.S. Copyright Office noted — until “the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.”

    Could that be any further from Moore’s “unsolicited proposal?

    ———————-
    By the way, I can pretty much guarantee that no contract was signed until after all merchandisable character names and designs were finalized. It would create too big a legal briarpatch to do it beforehand, and would require multiple riders to get everything sorted out to the satisfaction of any halfway competent legal department. They would in all certainty insist that no contract be signed until after a detailed proposal was complete. That would mean an extended story outline, as well as verbal descriptions (including names) and visual designs of all principal characters.
    ———————–

    Perhaps so. But, from that Wikipedia article (couldn’t find anything more substantial about the book’s creation online):

    ———————–
    Artist Dave Gibbons, who had collaborated with Moore on previous projects, heard the writer was working on a limited series treatment. The artist said he wanted to be involved, so Moore sent him the story outline.[5] Gibbons told Giordano he wanted to draw the series Moore proposed and Moore approved.[6] Gibbons brought colorist John Higgins onto the project because he liked his “unusual” style; Higgins lived near the artist, which allowed the two to “discuss [the art] and have some kind of human contact rather than just sending it across the ocean”.[3] Len Wein joined the project as its editor, while Giordano stayed on to oversee it. Both Wein and Giordano stood back and “got out of their way”; Giordano remarked later, “Who copyedits Alan Moore, for God’s sake?”[2]
    ————————

    …so all these people — experienced comics industry pros, Moore included — were “on board” and working away, on a substantial mini-series, without contracts being signed? Because it was after that team was put together, that this stage happened:

    ————————
    After receiving the go-ahead to work on the project, Moore and Gibbons spent a day at the latter’s house creating characters, crafting details for the story’s milieu and discussing influences….
    ————————
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen

    Wouldn’t that mean that Moore and Gibbons, after developing the story and characters further (presumably with DC footing the tab; would these and other pros be likely to be working away “on spec”?) could after having fine-tuned the premise and characters then, say, take Watchmen to Marvel? Wouldn’t DC, paranoid about every possibility, as big corporations tend to be, want to protect themselves against such an eventuality?

    Mebbe I’m wrong (another of my copies of Watchmen — the Big-Ass Jumbo-Sized “Absolute Edition” one (also not easy to get to) — might have more details of the comic’s inception), but…

  117. Mike–

    I don’t know specifically how DC handled things. The accounts I’ve read don’t provide any concrete information about the project development from a business standpoint. Hypothetically, though, DC could have had Moore and Gibbons sign a right of first refusal agreement. That means DC would be the first to see the proposal once it was complete, and Moore and Gibbons couldn’t offer it to anyone else unless DC passed on it. That’s a guess, though. It seems the easiest way to deal with the situation, but I emphasize it’s just a guess.

  118. While it’s a technical possibility that Moore/Gibbons could have shopped it around to Marvel and other lesser competitors, it’s a matter of practical truth that Moore/Gibbons were actively pursuing employment by DC (Gibbons was working on Green Lantern at the time…and Moore on Swamp Thing, of course)…and that Moore had already sworn never to work for/with Marvel… DC was the only likely home for Watchmen regardless of when the contract was signed. The only reason Marvelman didn’t end up there as well was because DC didn’t want to create a fight with Marvel.

  119. Eric B- Neverminding the practical legal matters, I still think you’re making assumptions concerning DC’s contributions to the marketing of the book. If Watchmen had been been published by a smaller publisher it would’ve been equally as successful one way or another. Maybe it would’ve taken a little longer to reach its audience, but this is one book where surely audience reaction has had a life of its own. Commercially speaking, DC didn’t make things worse, but that’s about it.

    “Russ M- That doesn’t mean Moore’s work wasn’t interesting and innovative, or that I didn’t enjoy it. All I’m saying is that it appears that a master repackager is upset that his repackaged characters — characters created by other people — are being repackaged yet again.”

    You’re being completely reductive. “Repackaging” isn’t exactly what Moore has done in his work. Besides that, the real issue is living artist’s moral rights and the ludicrous extent that public domain has been pruned back worldwide.

  120. “There’s nothing wrong with aspiring for fair and ethical, but unfortunately, in real life, things are rarely that simple. Subject A thinks they should get more than Subject B who thinks that Subject C is a slacker and contributed little to the final outcome. In the meantime, while it was really Subject D who pulled the whole thing together, Subject D didn’t really have anything to do with the initial creative idea. These ego-driven battles happen all the freaking time in the creative community, and you know it!”

    Yes, it does happen in other art forms. The Band, anyone? But having poor interpersonal communication skills should not be conflated with the cutthroat practices of megacorporations.

    “You why are you busting DC’s balls? Did you expect a smooth, quick transition from one radically different method of securing creative services to another? ………
    ………. But the bottom line is that the transition is nearly complete — ”

    If it’s ok for corporations to cheat and steal then obviously the transition is not “complete.” This country has obviously a long way to go.

    “AB-I am not impressed with the argument that the wishes of the dead count for nothing. This is a sort of greedy ahistoricity that undermines the very notion of culture. A civilisation should respect its past. LOEG is a very mild offender in this regard, but in the absolute one would avoid the ‘slippery slope’ of revisionist appropriation; thus, for example, modern restorations of antique architecture and paintings are careful to leave the restored object as close to the original as possible– avoiding such Disneylandish horrors as Viollet Le Duc’s extravagant “improvements” of Medieval cathedrals”

    Your comparison doesn’t work. Ill-considered restorations of paintings is not the same thing as appropriating characters from long-dead artists. It’s not like Moore was defacing original editions of HG Wells’ books. After a certain period of time, an author’s creations should belong to the world, not to him. The real insults to civilization are the current copyright laws and the culture that permits corporations to manipulate it.

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