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Does corporate ethics enter the conversation when buying your comics?
ChrisBeckett
Posts: 535
With Before Watchmen, lawsuits involving the Siegel & Shuster heirs as well as the heirs of Jack Kirby, the recent Chris Roberson issue, as well as my appreciation of the "Wait, What?" podcast from Brian Hibbs's Savage Critics site, this is a topic that has been weighing heavily with me, in recent weeks and months.
It's been a long time since I've followed a book just because of a characters. For at least twenty years, it's been primarily about the creator, for me. And with that, I have been interested in creators' rights as they apply to this hobby I love. (Being a fan of most everything Alan Moore has written has obviously played into that, as well). Recent writings of comic blogger David Brothers, who writes for Comics Alliance along with his own site, 4thletter.net, have really clarified a lot of things for me - even as he was writing about his own clarification on similar topics - and I think I'm pretty much done buying any DC or Marvel books. Some of Mr. Brothers's articles can be found below (including the one cited by Chris Roberson):
Ethical Rot of Before Watchmen & Avengers
If Newsarama knew better ...
Calling JMS out on his comments regarding Moore and "the controversy"
What I appreciate most about Brothers's writing/arguments is that he is not as emotionally invested in the book Watchmen as others who have argued against the decision by DC to create these prequels are. And it helps that I agree with him, but Brothers is able to argue his points with passion while remaining cognizant of the very real issues underlying this action by DC - along with the problems he sees in the practices of Marvel regarding the Avengers movie - (it isn't sacrilegious because Watchmen is perfect, and Moore isn't saying "don't use my characters because they, in and of themselves, are precious") Brothers makes reasoned arguments about what is wrong with some of the practices of DC and Marvel, using these specific examples, and I think these are well worth reading, if you're a comic fan - though, one's mileage may vary.
Some pertinent quotes from the above pieces:
From JMS:
So, what are your thoughts?
chris
It's been a long time since I've followed a book just because of a characters. For at least twenty years, it's been primarily about the creator, for me. And with that, I have been interested in creators' rights as they apply to this hobby I love. (Being a fan of most everything Alan Moore has written has obviously played into that, as well). Recent writings of comic blogger David Brothers, who writes for Comics Alliance along with his own site, 4thletter.net, have really clarified a lot of things for me - even as he was writing about his own clarification on similar topics - and I think I'm pretty much done buying any DC or Marvel books. Some of Mr. Brothers's articles can be found below (including the one cited by Chris Roberson):
Ethical Rot of Before Watchmen & Avengers
If Newsarama knew better ...
Calling JMS out on his comments regarding Moore and "the controversy"
What I appreciate most about Brothers's writing/arguments is that he is not as emotionally invested in the book Watchmen as others who have argued against the decision by DC to create these prequels are. And it helps that I agree with him, but Brothers is able to argue his points with passion while remaining cognizant of the very real issues underlying this action by DC - along with the problems he sees in the practices of Marvel regarding the Avengers movie - (it isn't sacrilegious because Watchmen is perfect, and Moore isn't saying "don't use my characters because they, in and of themselves, are precious") Brothers makes reasoned arguments about what is wrong with some of the practices of DC and Marvel, using these specific examples, and I think these are well worth reading, if you're a comic fan - though, one's mileage may vary.
Some pertinent quotes from the above pieces:
From JMS:
they flip to the fact that Alan had a bad contract, and that makes it wrong. But how is it any more wrong than the way any comics creators were treated, especially those who came out of the Golden and Silver Age ... If [the contract]'s not great, you take your knocks, lick your wounds, and try to make the next one a bit better. You don't sit there bemoaning it forever.To which David Brothers retorts:
The problem here is that JMS looks at being screwed over as a fact of life. "How is it any more wrong than before?" is not only a disgusting question to ask, but a stupid one ... They got screwed, and the minute you start thinking that that's just the way things go is the minute that you're morally compromised.And more from Brothers:
Put simpler: "Well, at least you didn't get it as bad as that guy!" is neither encouragement nor a legitimate rationale. It's scorn. It's blatant disrespect.
It's always "Marvel's The Avengers," or "Joss Whedon's The Avengers." Marvel owns those characters, but Marvel didn't create them. Joss Whedon wrote and directed the movie, but they aren't his characters, either. The Avengers is based on the work of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, not Marvel Comics or Marvel Entertainment.
Think it through. These are two titans of the medium, men who have done a metric ton of work to push the medium forward ... The people are what makes comics go, not the characters.And, finally, on the straw man argument that Moore does the same thing (using others' characters) that he is asking DC not to do to him [emphasis mine]:
Alan Moore copies peoples characters, too! (It’s not about working on someone else’s properties, and this is a false equivalency, anyway. Moore isn’t writing Dracula 2 or Before Moby Dick. He’s using public domain characters — meaning characters whose creators enjoyed the fruits of their labor before dying and the characters passing into public domain, not characters who were effectively stolen by way of shady contracts and lawyering — in new ways. When he does use non-PD characters, it’s never by name. If you don’t know who they are, you won’t know who they are. That’s demonstrably different than some dude writing Nite Owl: What Happened Before.)I realize this topic could, and probably will, blow up rather loudly and quickly. That's not what I'm looking for with this. I am genuinely curious on other people's thoughts on this subject. It's a personal choice that each of us has to consider, or not. I'm following David Brothers's example. That feels right for me. Maybe it doesn't for you. I don't want this to become a battle over who's right and who's wrong. I hope others can respect that.
So, what are your thoughts?
chris
Comments
If you start from the POV of the law, then you can argue fairness of the contracts, coercion, competence to enter into those agreements, etc.
I think of it as a continuum of progress. Is the world we live in today better than before from a creator's rights POV? Yes. Is it where creators would like it to be? No. Ok, more work to do.
Unless a creator can completely self fund his work, then in all likelihood he is going to have to use his abilities to gain that funding. That is just how it works.
The internet has gone a long way to democratizing the means of distribution, and I think we have seen an explosion of creativity thanks to it. This is just another step toward the full rights that creators want.
Is it unfortunate that DC is apparently chaining their artists to desks and whipping them with sticks? No doubt about it. Do I care? No. DC owes me exactly one thing - nothing. I owe them the exact same thing. They put a book out there and I decide whether or not I want to give them my money for it. If they treat enough of their creators so poorly that they jump ship and the books stop becoming worth it - I stop buying them.
Your case study for this is my attitude toward Marvel. 95% of my Marvel purchases are trades of material from the 70s and occasionally 80s. I have zero interest in what they're putting out these days. When they start doing things I want to read again, I'll give them some of my money. Until then, it goes to companies like GG Studios, Ape, Action Lab, Moonstone, Dynamite, etc. who are giving me stories I actually want to read about.
Do I feel bad about Robeson's leaving DC? No. It's not like Keith Richards left the Stones and they decided to carry on without him. Do I feel bad about Alan Moore's raw deal with DC? No. I'd much rather buy a copy of Lost Girls or League as a way to say "Hey Alan, more like this!" than dwell on the politics behind an almost 30-year old book. And I can guaran-damn-tee you if we'd stop asking Moore about it, he'd stop feeding us these sound-bites we all wring our hands over and start threads about, but we're addicted to it now.
I am a comic book reader, and I want good comics. End of story.
I don't care one lick about the politics. I just care about the product I'm paying for, and if I enjoy it.
I alluded to a conversation with a current creator and basically a legend I just had in another thread and it was so incredibly damning of DC and of how the current state of both DC and Marvel is that it really solidified my view on this all and renewed my effort to not bend here and there as I would do on occasion. I'm not delusional to think my small drop in the ocean sends some loud and clear message but if more people joined in it would, and regardless I can feel good when I look at my shelves at the end of the day and I can read anything on them without one ounce of guilt or negative association.
It sucks that we even have to have this conversation or that I go through this much trouble over things but unfortunately that is the current state of business and the world and while I'm stuck here and need to live I can do my part to keep my beliefs and ideals in tact and jab my singular thumb in the eye of the assholes that don't care and perpetuate this crap.
you have been flagged twice now. One more time and they throw you in time-out I guess.
I'm a little like TS about this, I just don't care.
And, on a more general note, I appreciate the responses and the fact that this hasn't devolved into a personal shouting match.
chris
And I'll just leave it at that, in case any editorializing would get me flagged as well.
chris
I guess one has to be in the "in" crowd or have a popular opinion or else...
The previous two posters stated that they "don't care", @Zhurrie then referred to the "assholes who don't care".
chris
This is the kind of thing that makes me not even bother or care to post on forums. I spend actual time and effort to offer an opinion, even if I know it is not the majority or popular, but an honest and personal response and people always feel the shadow of Internet anonymity gives them carte blanche to do or say things they never would in person. This forum is pretty civil and well-reasoned but as a newcomer and one with a different situation than most it does feel like swimming upstream sometimes.
I'll always be vocal and opinionated but I'm also always the first person willing to help and listen and genuinely care. The flag thing really is pissing me off... I tried to help David D. the other day about a laptop question, I even go so far as to hook him up with a personal contact and my response gets flagged there too. It is just bullshit. /end internet rant.
I still read it that way.
chris
You're right, this forum is pretty civil and well-reasoned. As far as I know, nobody here insulted you for your honest and personal response. You were the one who brought the insulting language into the discussion.
Seriously, though, I boycotted Marvel for about a decade when they pulled the Heroes World shenanigans that ultimately left us with one distributor.
most99% of your posts and the second paragraph of the comment I'm quoting from, but I 100% agree about the flag thing. It's ridiculous and should go. It serves no purpose other than a "strong dislike" for a comment. It's petty.The moderators are on top of these forums and keep it as neutral of a place as you can get. If you have a real problem with a post then pm DavidD, Solitaire Rose, or Torchsong. I've done it in the past and they took care of the issue fairly and reasonably (and not the way I would have handled it). Don't run to flag, even if it is SPAM; give the mods a little credit that they can discern rolex ads from real posts.
I do it from time to time, but having to be honest, it's very inconsistent. I didn't buy a lot of the early Image stuff because it was very slimy how they said they were founded on creator's rights, yet subjected everyone in the studios to "work for hire" contracts, some of which didn't even allow the creators to get their artwork back, or had someone else's name signed to it. Just look at the legal mess that McFarland created when he brought in guest writers who knew what their contracts said.
It was easy for me to do that because I didn't like that style of comic.
Then again, I buy the Marvel reprints of work by Kirby, Maneely, Burgos, etc... even though E know the heirs are given NO royalties at all for the work being reprinted.
It's a hard line to walk, and I am not able to say I maintain my moral and ethical beliefs because I want to be entertained, or have the materials in my collection.
I know...I know...I'm not helping. :)
I caught what Zhurrie meant, though, and there's room for both philosophies out there. Some people choose not to separate a company's practices or policies from what they create, and some do. And there's a third group that just doesn't care. All of us can be "right" <- note the quotes.
But since it came up here, this- from the vanilla forum site description- is the list of the active flags, and what effect they have: So a certain amount of flags can trigger a specific post to end up in a queue for moderation, but a total doesn't shut out a user.
If you think that any or all of these flags should not be active reaction options, and that feedback is important-- please don't have that conversation here, so that this discussion can get back on track-- but the place to give that feedback should either be to post it in this thread, if you want to have a discussion with others about it, or by sending feedback directly to Bryan by PM. He made the initial badge and reaction choices, so I will defer to him on this (as well as because ultimately the buck stops at him).
Thanks,
And now back to the discussion...
I don't think it sounds callous but that could be a bias because I feel the same way. I'm certain that I'm wearing clothes or using a phone or some other product of some sort that was made by underpaid, overworked Chinese children. I don't have the time to research everything I buy and to be perfectly blunt, even if I did have the time, I definitely don't have the money to be more selective. I feel much worse about that and would rather change that than change the way I deal with business practices regarding who gets a bigger share of the billions of dollars generated by fictional characters. And I'm not really saying that to marginalize it, at least not too much, because in a perfect world, proper compensation for the work of a creator should matter, but we don't live in a perfect world and in the world we do live in, I need to prioritize.
Now with that said, I do believe that indirectly, it will make a difference. When a company treats their creators like crap, the cream of the creator crop no longer wishes to work there and the quality of the product drops off and as a result, I buy less and less of it anyway. Look at Marvel in the nineties. They became a notoriously poor creative place to work for and they ended up in bankruptcy. I don't believe that's a coincidence (yes, horrible business decisions also factored in, but how many people do you know who dropped out of comics during that time because of the content of the books being released?).
Do people that say they "don't care" bug me when it is clearly the polar opposite to what I believe and what I believe helps keep this stuff going on? Yes. Do I think they are assholes? No. I think the companies and the people that allow the company and money to overtake decency and reason and ethics are assholes (and since corporations are now people I can call them that and they can feel free to flag me).
The foundation of Image is an awesome look at contradiction. The founders left the bridges to the Big 2 burned to ashes (in Marvel's case they left the company razed and the earth salted) over "creator rights". Within a few months Image was filled with contract labor, and the founders had boatloads of cash. It's very interesting and continuing with the Moore/Kirkman suit (note: I have no dog in this fight and have enjoyed Image comics going back to its founding. please see below).
It's fascinating watching peoples' rhetoric hit thier wallets, and it's always easier to criticize when it's someone else's money.
That said, it really is a personal choice of how far reaching one want to make their entertainment buying about ethics.
I can understand why some might be soured enough by behavior they hear about to want to skip a whole publisher, but for me, at least so far, I am not at that point. Big corporations make a lot of different decisions, bad, good, and neutral. They make a lot of decisions we don't even get visibility on. They can make some choices I disagree with at the same time support other books that, simply judging by the end result, are the sorts of entertainment I want to consume. So those I will support.
For me, it becomes a sort of a la carte yes or no to support or not support the product I do or don't want. It is not, at least not yet, a total up or down vote for the entire corporation. As I don't find myself in a very good position to judge the entire entity that way.
And when your entertainment spending becomes as much about ethics as it does about taste or entertainment, just how far does one have to follow the money to remain ethical? Is it just about how creators are treated? Does one have to know about whether or not, say, the people in the licensing or ad sales department are treated and compensated? Should it affect my enjoyment of a G.I. Joe comic if I find out that Hasbro, the licensor of the comic, has been accused of supporting child labor in factories in China*? If I am reading a Transformers comic, should I wonder whether the original animators and character designers were fairly compensated*? You know what I mean?
(*Please note these are hypothetical, not sourced allegations. My point is that if you are following the money behind some of these long-lived IPs, it can be a pretty long trail, and could include a lot of things that are hard to know just looking at a comic book.)
Again, I am not saying that this is an excuse to entirely remove ethics if they are on your mind. I am just saying that, if one starts to consider the ethics involved in whether, I guess you could say, you are buying a Fair Trade Comic from a work for hire publisher, then how do we even go about measuring that standard? Especially when the assembly line behind it is vast, and there isn't necessarily a standard for what is capital F Fair, and how many of the people involved in the production of a given funnybook are expected to get a slice of that Fair?
TO GET POSITIVE FOR A MOMENT, though--
On the flip side of feeling the drag of more negativity, I think the many things that have been getting discussed and thought about when it comes to corporate comics have had a positive effect on me, too. I have always enjoyed, and therefore supported a lot of creator-owned comics. More than ever I feel good about what the yes vote of those pre-orders say.
I think I feel better about the positive advocacy of saying yes than I do about boycotting. Again, nothing against those who are dedicated to the latter, but I feel like the former speaks even louder.
So, in an atmosphere of hearing more and more bummer things about how the sausage gets made at certain places, my yes vote for the many creator-owned works does make me feel good about those books. Now, the main reason I am buying what I buy is because these are the things that I want to read. But I will admit there is that extra little kick of advocacy when it comes to the creator-owned comics, because my feelings about them are less muddled.
I guess it is sort of like that feeling you (which is to say, I) get from donating to my local NPR station. Or supporting some of the local, non profit theater companies whose work I really love. Given what they compete with in their given markets, you feel a bit like you are, I don't know, helping to support the way you want things to be.
It is definitely an interesting, and complicated, issue. And definitely a personal kind of decision.