People Writing Smartly About Comics

* the writer and retailer Christopher Butcher wrote what might be the final word on last week's flurry of objections to the Tokyopop Pilot Program contact. In doing so he makes a severely interesting point, in that while one may certainly find problems with contracts that explicitly tie properties up forever (and I'm unconvinced this one allows the clean break claimed for it), and that this is the traditional way creators have been screwed over, the way that properties are valuable to publishers right now you can get almost exactly the same benefit simply by making sure that properties are tied up during an initial window that companies in the past used to get by tying them up in perpetuity.

* the writer and prominent blogger Valerie D'Orazio hits on something that more people should: there's nothing intrinsically wrong with a project that aims at a core audience like a superhero crossover. Such projects are generally profitable, and something like Final Crisis or Secret Invasion shouldn't have to shoulder the burden of being an audience-broadening agent, just as something like Maggots shouldn't. It's not a point that often gets made, I think because of certain occluding values held by the comics community.

There are unfortunate things about such series. They're frequently terrible, and bad comics are their own poison. There's also an argument that an over-reliance on them exhausts the target audience and thwarts the success of more standard, less universe-shattering plotlines in an already tired genre. Something that's potentially damaging about such series isn't their content but the fact that the big companies in their dick-measuring competitiveness have warped that part of the industry around them in a way that maximizes sales on such series at the expense of fostering a healthier, wider-optioned playing field that might more frequently result in multiple hits, even within those companies' own offerings. It's a market that I call ossified, where there are definite limits to what will hit and how many copies comprise a ceiling for what kind of project. In a way, it's kind of ironic. Those companies have been hostile towards their competition in the DM for years, and now there's blowback where their works more like those of their DM competition suffer the same effect.

* the television writer/producer and one-time prominent comics scriptwriting wunderkind Gerry Conway has penned a fascinating post where he essentially admits that he and his peers from the 1970s knew exactly what they were getting into when they wrote for the big companies: they were signing away their rights. While that sucks, and it would be nice if the companies were more generous in apportioning credit and paying royalties, Conway seems to be saying it would be intellectually dishonest to try and argue that that generation didn't know what it was doing.
 
posted 8:05 am PST | Permalink
 

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