Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* people are scalping Comic-Con International badges now. Also, Mark Evanier was I believe the first comics person to notice that San Diego's Kansas City Barbecue -- a longtime cheap eats and meets place that I never mentioned on my Con guide out of deference to older pros I know that loved that place like a local bar -- got all burned up.

* Mark Heath began his last week on Spot the Frog yesterday with his final Sunday. It's been a charming strip, and I firmly believe if that business operated in ideal fashion, Spot would have had a much longer life than its still-impressive five years or so. I urge you to check it out before it's all the way gone.

* from Sequential comes word that Gareth Lind has already ended Weltschmerz after an almost 15-year run.

* goofy mainstream comics crossovers are hard enough to endure on their own; the growing tendency of reviews (like this one) to imply or outright declare that people that don't like these comics simply don't get them or are reading them in the wrong state of mind or are just stupidheads may drive me insane.

* this is a fine interview by Gary Tyrrell about R Stevens' decision to end the newspaper syndication iteration of Diesel Sweeties. Here's what I found curious, though. I thought the minimum syndication deal paid $26,000 a year. Is that not true, or is Stevens making over $200K on the Internet? Either answer would be fascinating.

* Don MacPherson suggests that mainstream comics companies aren't doing themselves any favors by clamping down on the flow of information.

* finally, I'm glad that creator DJ Coffman got paid for the work he did for Platinum. However, the issue brought to bear by his not being paid was never about the check arriving or not arriving, at least not outside the Coffman household. For the rest of us, it was about the abusive relationship in which that creator willingly placed himself, the fact that he had to depend on Platinum coming around, and why this is bad. That Platinum would shaft one of its most loyal public supporters for any length of time says far more about the way in which such companies conduct themselves than Platinum eventually living up to its side of the deal.

As I've said a million times, I'm sympathetic to creators that sign bad contracts. I've signed bad contracts. However, the lengths to which some people will go in order to justify such moves depresses me to the extreme. To begin with, even tacitly comparing one's dreams of becoming a minor-league screenwriter or penning a Killraven revival to the struggles of Depression-era craftsmen to feed their families should result in your being automatically launched into the sun. More importantly, the "realism" stance suggests values of entitlement and self-gratification over all other values, it propagates self-hatred among creators by suggesting that making money for what one does is a reward against which systemic penalties can be applied instead of simply receiving what you've earned, and the history of comics just isn't on the side of people using bad contracts as a career builder. Combined with a recent spate of actual grown-up people declaring with a straight face that such matters are no one's concern but the screwer and the screwee, and it's clear that there will always be a welcome place in comics for exploitative business practices.
 
posted 7:30 am PST | Permalink
 

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