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Underground > Comic Books >

Issues around work-for hire comic books

  
 
Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo
04:39 / 14.05.05
I have been thinking about this since it was announced that Marvel is having someone do a new version of the 70's Steve Gerber comic "Omega The Unknown", and how much it just feels wrong to me.

"Omega" was a VERY strange Steve Gerber comic (which is saying a lot) that tried to tell a very personal and complex story in the super-hero genre. If it were done now, I'm sure that it would have been a creator owned comic, wouldn't have had most of the super-hero trappings, and would have been a "long form" mini-series like "Sandman", "Invisibles" or "100 Bullets". However, those options didn't exist in 1977, so it was a "work for hire" comic based in the Marvel Universe, during a time when editorial allowed creators to edit themselves and have a free reign as long as they had certain elements needed for sales (fight scenes) and didn't violate the Comics Code. Gerber's story was complex (for the time) and told in such a way that readers didn't quite know what was going on. It also showed that no one else knew what was going on either, because when it was cancelled, the hero was killed and Gerber said he would finish up the story in "The Defenders" which he was writing as well.

He left Marvel shortly after (Thanks, Jim Shooter, you tall, meddling bastard) and the story didn't get finished for YEARS, until some other writer tied it up in a poor story in The Defenders that holds the distiction of being the worst "let's explain all this stuff" stories I have ever read. Marvel used to do this stuff all the time, most notably doing a three part story finishing Don McGregor's "Black Pather vs The Klan" story that turned a story on race releations in the post civil rights era to a standard "Hero figures out who to punch in the face and all the problems go away" story.

Gerber has said for years that the conclusion he had in mind was nowhere close to what Marvel had done, and that he had promised his co-writer that he wouldn't tell how the story was supposed to end unless they wrote it as a comic book.

Now, Marvel has announced they are bringing it back, without even a nod to Gerber, and when asked about it, Steve Gerber said that he hadn't been asked about it and that it shows just how little Marvel cares about creators, because he has been willing to write the story finishing up the series since he left the book.

If this had been 10 years later, and Gerber did the book for Epic, or one of the other creator owned lines, this wouldn't be an option, but it seems that there are some creators who aren't subjected to this treatment.

For example, at DC, they own Sandman, but they still respect Neil Gaiman enough that they have him consult when they use his creator owned work, but DC didn't seem to have a problem when John Byrne said proudly he would ignore everything done by Grant Morrison on Doom Patrol, which was also "work for hire". Marvel itself had mini-series by the 70's team of "Master of Kung Fu" (since the creators didn't have much investment in the comic, and left after less than 6 months), and the only "Howard the Duck" mini-series has been written by Gerber, but on other "personal" creations like Killraven and Omega, they have no problem tossing them to new creators without asking the people who either created or created the best known run on the comic to take part.

It almost strikes me as showing that "creator's rights" only matter if you get a contract saying you own something, or you are an 800 lb gorilla they don't want to piss off...and if Neil Gaiman falls out of favor at DC, the "informal agreement" with DC will be worth about as much as the informal agreement they had with Alan Moore.

So, is this a case of me becoming one of the fans who still pisses and moans about comics being a business? Because I see it as yet another case of comics putting short-term gain ahead of long-term legitimacy and ability to draw in creators who are more than fanboys who want to write about Batman kicking Joker's ass again.
 
 
Spaniel
11:22 / 14.05.05
Lots and lots of issues here.

So, um, you want creators to have an input when work-for-hire writers get on their books? You can't see any problems with that?
 
 
Jack Fear
11:27 / 14.05.05
(A) Comics Industry in "Behaving Like A Business" Shockah!

(B) The OMEGA revival is not being written by "some writer"—it's being done by novelist Jonathan lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn, Gun with Occasional Music, The Fortress of Solitude and more. He's got literary cred out the wazoo, and—if given a free hand—I think he could do a bang-up job on OMEGA, which is essentially a teenage-alienation-in-the-Five-Boroughs story.

(C) I find it amusing that in your universe, Steve Gerber is a celebrity while Jonathan Lethem is "some writer."

(D) Marvel's business model has always been marginally less creator-centric than DC's. Marvel is all about the licensing—it advertises that its greatest asset is its library of characters, and those characters don't so the company and its shareholders any good if they're lying fallow and unused, or if they're being taken in uncommercial (i.e., "personal") directions. The primary artistic rule at Marvel is: Thou Shalt Not Break The Franchise.

DC, on the other hand, was known for honoring a tacit hands-off policy decades before "creator's rights" was even a catchphrase. It's well-known, for instance, that Sheldon Mayer swore to return from the grave and haunt anybody who messed with his creations Sugar and Spike—and DC editorial always abided by that. The "creator-participation" deals, post-Gaiman, seem to me to be a simple codification of a pre-existing informal policy.

But make no mistake: DC is not simply treating Gaiman with "respect," as they did with Mayer. His creator-participation deal is backed up by a hell of a lot more than a handshake—AFAIK he renegotiated his contract in the middle of SANDMAN's run, to the satisfaction of battalions of lawyers on either side.

So why the difference in corporate cultures? I have avague theory that it's mostly because DC is one tiny node of a huge multi-media conglomerate (Time-Warner), a node that serves what is understood to be a niche audience—DC is not expected to be a financial powerhouse, and may in fact operate at a loss. Licensing plays a huge part in DC's model, too, but the comics division is analogous to an R&D department; it's cushioned—it can lean on its corporate parent in lean times, and can burn through a bit of money trying new things and new creator-ownership models. In other words, DC (sometimes) thinks long-term because it can afford to do so.

Marvel, on the other hand, is a more-or-less freestanding company, developing the properties and producing them itself—in its alliance with Toy Biz, it's creating its own licensed product, in effect. It stands or falls on its own properties, and for its own survival must wring from them every dime that it can—hence Marvel's longstanding aversion to creator ownership.

Marvel is perpetually cash0hungry and has a history of crushing debt; unsurprisingly, even in relatively flush times, they always want to build some liquidity, fast, with the short-term cash-grab. And now that the company has moved into producing its own movies (and therefore has even more of a financial stake in whether they succeed or tank) it's only gonna get worse.

(E) You're, like, 40 years old and you're just figuring this out now?
 
 
Jack Fear
11:30 / 14.05.05
Oh—one more thing: would you care to unpack the phrase "long-term legitimacy"? Because you make it sound as if Marvel Comics somehow owes you something.
 
 
Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo
12:44 / 14.05.05
(C) I find it amusing that in your universe, Steve Gerber is a celebrity while Jonathan Lethem is "some writer."

How about the phrase "In my universe, I coudln't remember who it was."

As for unpacking the phrase long term legitimacy...I probably am a bit too tired, but: We have discussed on the board how comics are thought of as a trash medium. One of the hallmarks of a trash medium is treating creators as replaceable, and disposable while keeping the creations going.

Marvel owes me nothing, but I do think that they might owe something to the people who create characters for them.
 
 
The Falcon
18:38 / 14.05.05
I'm sure someone else has used Sugar & Spike, but I can't remember who or where.
 
 
Jack Fear
20:09 / 14.05.05
Whoever it is, they now suffer THE TORMENTS OF THE DAMNED.
 
 
Jack Fear
20:15 / 14.05.05
To answer yr unasked question, BTW...

From the Sheldon Mayer FAQ:

Mayer expressed a strong desire that no one else work on the characters ... and there are well in excess of 2500 pages done by Mayer which should be in print before they even consider getting anyone else to work on it, even if Mayer hadn't expressed his wishes as such.

However, there have been a number of times that the characters have appeared as little cameos in other books by other artists. A partial list would include Joe Kubert (GREATEST FIFTIES STORIES), George Perez (in CRISIS), Sergio Aragones (AMAZING WORLD OF DC COMICS #13), Joe Staton (in SHOWCASE #100), Mark Evanier (cover of GLX SPTZL GLAAH), Alex Ross (in KINGDOM COME), John Byrne (in WONDER WOMAN), Keith Giffen (in various AMBUSH BUG stories), Seth (cover for THE COMICS JOURNAL). They've also appeared by other artists in some DC house ads in the 1960s. There was also at least one misguided attempt by a Mexican publisher to produce new non-Mayer stories themselves (sample available in CBA #11).

Cameos and walk-ons are one thing—but except for the pirated Mexican stuff, there have been no non-Mayer Sugar & Spike stories as such.
 
 
Billuccho!
22:44 / 14.05.05
I'd love to do a comic about a now-all-grown-up Sugar and Spike, and how they cope with adulthood and all that... but I don't think I want to risk a haunting.

Besides, I can probably use the same concept for the Power Pack. Heheh.
 
 
eddie thirteen
01:31 / 15.05.05
The Omega thing is just Marvel acting like Marvel. What I don't understand is why a respected novelist -- someone who I'm sure is very much aware of the issues surrounding creators' rights in comics -- would be interested in doing this in the first place. We aren't talking about a guy like Greg Rucka who churns out potboilers and is *called* a novelist; this is the real deal.

If Lethem's a Gerber fan (which I'm guessing he is), then he surely knows Gerber's feelings on the subject of his creations falling into the hands of others, legally or otherwise (as a major component of the Legend of Steve Gerber is him suing Marvel over ownership of Howard the Duck). I'm not arguing that Lethem shouldn't be allowed to write Omega, but I am saying that it doesn't show much respect for a writer (I imagine) Lethem admires to jump on the book without so much as a phone call or an e-mail in Gerber's direction.

The issue of why is further compounded when you look at the fact that Lethem isn't just some generic hack from another angle -- as a writer used to, you know, actually owning his own work, what the fuck is the appeal of doing work for hire in the first place? (Unless Lethem just loves Omega ten times more than he does any other comic ever published, in which case a courtesy call to its creator really would not seem out of line.) I can't imagine the exposure will expand his audience much (if at all), and if he were going for sales, why not take on something more high profile? The presence of literary respectability will not make Omega outsell Astonishing X-Men, but Lethem's name probably would have netted him an instant sales brand name comic (the kind that sells no matter who's writing it), had he requested it. So if it's not about sales...if Lethem just wanted to write comics because writing comics was something he wanted to do...why not do something creator-owned?
 
 
DaveBCooper
09:19 / 15.05.05
If memory serves, Omega was mentioned in Lethem's novel "Fortress of Solitude", as a title that one of the characters bought and read. I could be wrong, though.

And I seem to recall Marvel operating quite a 'hand off' policy on Elektra for a number of years - the inside front covers of the 'Elektra:Assassin' miniseries even said something like 'Elektra created by Frank Miller'. But then a few years later various other writers started using the character, dunno if there was a specific decision or falling out.
 
 
The Falcon
14:30 / 15.05.05
Omega's definitely mentioned in Fortress.

Yeah, Jack, I'm sure it was Crisis I was thinking of.
 
 
matsya
00:40 / 16.05.05
Yeah, Lethem's got a hard-on for the alienated loner 70s Marvel superheroes, so I reckon he either picked it as his favourite or was offered it and took it because it was his fave.

As for why would a respected novelist write this stuff, JL is a big comic-head, as is Michael Chabon, and they get all excited-like at writing the adventures of their teen heroes. Cf. Joss Whedon and the X-Men.

cute parody of the chabon/lethem tendency here.

m.
 
 
Jack Fear
19:01 / 16.05.05
To be fair, both Marvel and DC have been using "Character X created by so-and-so" in their opening credits for many years now, on and off. It's the barest professional courtesy imaginable, as it does not cede any control of the characters, or right to any monies generated thereby; it's a simple acknowledgement of fact.

On the other hand, in this gushing press release for Lethem's OMEGA, Steve Gerber's name in conspicuous by its absence.
 
 
Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo
04:33 / 21.05.05
(A) Comics Industry in "Behaving Like A Business" Shockah!

I know. But I see it almost as if someone came in and said, “You know, I liked “Duck Soup”, so I think I'm going to make a new version of it.” It really surprised me because the author (Letham) has a lot of literary cred, and should be above what could be termed “fan fic” if everything I have read about his take on the project is true. It's pretty much the same feeling I had about the remake of “Psycho”.

(B) The OMEGA revival is not being written by "some writer"—it's being done by novelist Jonathan lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn, Gun with Occasional Music, The Fortress of Solitude and more. He's got literary cred out the wazoo, and—if given a free hand—I think he could do a bang-up job on OMEGA, which is essentially a teenage-alienation-in-the-Five-Boroughs story.

Which is a good reason for him to do one that didn't use a pre-existing character whose creator has said he would rather people didn't use it. It reminds me of when people would run up to Jack Kirby to get his blessing on their version of his characters, and he'd say nice things but in interviews he's talk about how he wished people would make their own characters rather than just trotting out his old stories again.

(C) I find it amusing that in your universe, Steve Gerber is a celebrity while Jonathan Lethem is "some writer."

As I said, I posted during an overnight shift, but I don't know his work. My fiction reading is pretty limited due to work demands on my reading, and I tend to go with crime fiction or stuff from the early 20th century. Modern fiction overwhelms me with SO many books by modern authors that I tend only to go with modern books people shove under my nose.

Although I think that if Gerber got into his 70's mode for plotting and his current mode for scripting, he'd write a hell of a novel.

And I do not apologize for being a fanboy.

(E) You're, like, 40 years old and you're just figuring this out now?

I've known it for a long time. But, as I said above, I would expect it from a fanboy writer who wanted to play with the toys of his youth (I loved this comic as a kid, now I can have him fight Thor and Kick Thor's Ass!), but not a well-respected author who claims to like Gerber's work.

Maybe it's because there are some comics characters that were made to be "series" that could be handed off, and some really aren't. It's hard to make the distinction, but (for example) Batman was ALWAYS done by a bunch of different people who worked under a single studio and doesn't have as much individualized investment.
 
 
matsya
00:49 / 23.05.05
Yeah, it is an interesting point, that if Lethem's such a fan he'd know about Gerber's wishes. It'll be interesting to see if anyone asks Lethem about this point blank.

In terms of why does JL need to write this when he's a respected novelist, I'd point to his love of comics. Even if I personally achieve my goal of winning the Booker and the Pulitzer and the Miles Frankin all in the same year, I suspect that I'd be all squealy fanboy excited if someone called me up and said "we want you to write spiderman" and would go to great lengths to accommodate the conditions of that contract.

And if you like crime, Solitaire, JL may well be your man. His debut novel, Gun with Occasional Music is a nice little noir thriller with scifi overtones. And in terms of not having time to read larger works, his new short story collection, Men And Cartoons, is a good thing that can be dipped in and out of with ease. There's even a story about The Vision in it.

m.
 
 
matsya
04:37 / 15.06.05
Well, the latest on this whole Gerber/Lethem saga can be found in this week's Lying in the Gutters and on Gerber's recently-registered omegatheunkown.com.

He don' like it one bit, no surprise, but he's called Lethem out. Will be interesting to see where this goes.

m.
 
 
FinderWolf
13:32 / 15.06.05
Hate to say it, but the terms of the deal back then were work-for-hire. That's the way it is, too bad. It's business and it's a business. To hope the company would retroactively give more credit and more money to a writer for work done back then is unrealistic for a small character.

Regarding characters like Superman, Batman, etc., however, I'm glad DC finally gave the creators larger financial packages since they pretty much made DC Comics exist. Marvel seems to have done Stan ok by his $1 million a year and then finally (due to Stan suing them and a judge's order recently) giving him the percentage of royalties from movies based on characters he created that was in his old contract. Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, however, those are other matters where Marvel wasn't as considerate. But to complain and moan about characters like Blade (Marv Wolfman complained when the movies hit it big), Howard the Duck and Omega? Sorry, dudes. You were in the industry when it wasn't as kind to creators. Your contracts were work for hire. It's like thinking that artists who drew art for ads in magazines in the 60s should have gotten large checks and letters of apology from those magazines and their bosses in the 80s. Not gonna happen. Think of this applied to any other creative business with 20 years gone by and it doesn't sound as outrageous. Sure, the companies took advantage of creators back then, but those were the rules then. Thankfully, the rules have improved and changed in many ways now, though they still have a way to go. But this is like reparations that creators want applied retroactively -- my feeling is unless you created something as big as Superman or Batman that kept the industry alive as we know it today, you're not going to win a lawsuit or action when your contract at the time stated it was work-for-hire.

Marvel has every right to have Lethem write Omega because it's a work-for-hire character. Simple as that. I don't think this is Marvel being scummy greedy pigs in this case. The book should say "Omega created by Steve Gerber" out of respect, and maybe if it sells really well they send Steve a little bonus-type check down the line if they're feeling especially altruistic.
 
 
matsya
22:34 / 15.06.05
Well, in that interview Gerber makes it pretty clear that issues around creator rights and royalties and stuff (and I think Gerber's more annoyed that he gets no royalties than he is that Marvel uses his creations) were nowhere near as clear as you make out.

m.
 
 
eddie thirteen
00:34 / 16.06.05
Even if creators from thirty-forty years ago "knew" what they were getting into -- which seems like a slightly spurious assumption* -- what was true of the comics industry then is not true of it now. I doubt many of these creators (many of whom were just out of high school) had the wherewithal to consider that their creations might still be profitable decades later (whereas many of today's creators seem much more focused on their comics as pitches for Hollywood than as actual comics). We're talking about people in their early twenties who saw what they were doing as a fun alternative to journalism, commercial art, or possibly the night shift at 7-11. It's safe to say that such people were taken advantage of, which is how we tend to define the term "exploitation." In Marvel's defense, the company itself didn't seem to understand the value of its own properties for a pretty long time (which led to things like selling the Fantastic Four movie rights to Roger Corman for the price of a large pizza). Things change, though, and other companies have renegotiated rights and royalties to keep up with the times and not come across like sleaze. But as long as Marvel has apologists in its corner, I don't see why they'd bother.

(*Check out the Comics Journal that features the transcripts of Marv Wolfman's failed legal attempt to get paid for Blade, et al, for a typically entertaining glimpse into the addled mind of John Byrne, who testifies on Marvel's behalf. After expounding at length on how Wolfman "knew" exactly what he was getting into, Byrne is shepherded by Wolfman's attorney into admitting that when he himself created Alpha Flight in the late 1970s, he did so thinking he retained ownership of the characters. Clearly, what we take for granted about work for hire now was much less than clear to creators of decades past.)
 
 
Jack Fear
01:24 / 16.06.05
So either Jim Shooter and Marvel corporate were devious eeevil geniuses and intentionally deceived John Byrne, or John Byrne was a bear of very little brain who didn't bother to read his contract before he signed—or, worse, who read it but figured that it didn't really mean what it said it meant, and that he could rely on Marvel to be good and kindly and benevolent—in other words, that the person who deceived John Byrne was... John Byrne.

Can you guess which theory I subscribe to?
 
 
matsya
05:52 / 16.06.05
But then of course you get the argument that perhaps Marvel weren't being evil, per se, just taking advantage of Byrne's (or anyone else whose story is similar) naivete, like any corporation or big company would, of course. Which is still dodgy. Just because you expect someone to be dodgy doesn't make it less dodgy when they act dodgily.

Heh. Dodgy.

What interests me is how Steve Gerber's arguments about not writing books for companies you know to be behaving 'dishonourably' (my word, not his - used approximately in this case) or writing characters you know to be part of a dispute regarding royalties or ownership, how these arguments hold up in relation to his post-Howard The Duck/Omega work-for-hire on things like that Superman Elseworlds story he did for DC.

And also, what about writers who give not two shits about this ownership thing? Young Morrison's given a heap of new characters to DC and Marvel (the characters in Marvel Boy and Aztek, for example) in his career - it doesn't seem he minds if someone else starts writing them or making money from them.

m.
 
 
FinderWolf
12:40 / 16.06.05
Good points all, and it's clear that I've been mistaken about creators thinking it was cut-and-dry work for hire at the time and just wishing they had gotten a bigger piece of the pie & wanting that to apply retroactively. Interesting tibit about Byrne contradicting himself on the stand - I hadn't heard that one.
 
 
eddie thirteen
22:00 / 16.06.05
Well -- and this is total speculation on my part -- my guess is that Marvel never thought of what it was doing as evil at all; work for hire certainly predated the company, and was generally how business was conducted. But you have to remember the hue and cry that was raised after the release of the first Superman movie, when Seigel and Shuster made their grievances with DC public...most people (comics-reading and otherwise) evidently had never given the question of ownership much thought. I imagine most young comics creators were the same way, though I could be naive in presuming their naivete. Any sentiment that smacks of "it was a simpler age" is usually bullshit, and I'll admit that when I read Wolfman's side of the story, my initial reaction was a lot of eye-rolling at what I was sure had to be his disingenuity. But...

Y'know, these people were kids, number one, and number two, they probably didn't see any other options if they wanted to work in comics (at least profitably). Then as now, the small press and underground publishers were doing something quite different from Marvel and DC, and favored writer/artists besides. For all of that, people like Kirby and Ditko, who'd both definitely been burned enough times to know better by the early 1970s, kept working on Marvel and DC books -- and creating characters for them -- well into the '80s. These publishers must have seemed like the only game in town, and while it's easy to sit back and say they should have known better, stuck to their principles, etc., creating comics was their job. Even if they could have done it elsewhere, they probably wouldn't have made a dime in the process.

It's pointless to ask these companies to surrender their copyrights -- there's nothing in it for them, and they'd go out of business. And to be honest, and this is probably fodder for a whole other thread, I think the existence of work for hire comics is ultimately a good thing for creators; it's a structure that provides income, steady work, and exposure to young writers and artists. Because the only thing that's harder than getting people to see an independent comic by an unknown or unknowns is making any money off it. I just think treating the original creators with a lot more respect (and that includes paying them fairly when, say, their creations spawn film trilogies that rake in hundreds of millions of dollars) would make the whole setup seem a lot less shady, and would probably be to the benefit of everyone involved.
 
 
matsya
23:22 / 16.06.05
I think the thing that people like Gerber are looking for, more than anything else, is some kind of royalty arrangement. I read an interview with Jim Shooter last night about his establishment of a royalties system at Marvel in the late seventies (and I think Gerber makes reference to that in his n/rama interview), so I think these days the work-for-hire thing is a bit fairer than it was back in Gerber's day.

But you know who we should be asking about this? The pros who grace this board. Mister Stewart? JHW3? What kind of arrangements do you guys have with the various companies you've worked for, in terms of royalty and copyright issues?

m.
 
  
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