Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities Gerry Conway Thread (Was: Who Created Caitlon Snow? Gerry Conway on DC Corporate Logic...)

An interesting post by Gerry Conway on DC Entertainment's reasoning behind screwing creators out of royalties and credit.

That is disgusting. My fingers are crossed that Conway and co. can find some way to get the royalties they deserve.

I'd read Conway on trying to get royalties for Felicity Smoak, but this is pitiful from DC.

I don't blame their legal guys. It's their job to try and screw everyone out of every cent possible. If the legal team came back and said "We didn't realise" or "We knew, but we kinda liked him" they would get fired.

So congratulations to that side of the business. It's the absence of anyone in their business having a broader view beyond screwing every last cent out of the people who created all of the characters they mine for shows that's pathetic.

Intolerable.

Ugh. If only the real reason were "good writing".

Its times like this that make me wish people like Levitz and Jenette Kahn were still in charge of DC.

Ah, corporate logic! Why not just pay the creators their equity and make everybody happy? Surely it's less bother than paying high-priced lawyers to split legal hairs.

He has a nice sense of sarcasm.


I think DC has a point on some of the characters. His description of Felicity Smoke for example, or the "one-offs." These really weren't creator "developed." Giving much control over these characters would lead to something I can best compare to the attempts (now illegal) to corner every possible internet domain name ever. Creators could just shove so much crap in that it would be impossible to develop new properties for main characters without insufferable challenges that every supporting or even background character was really.... with a different name.

Was the company actually more mindful of creators' rights back then? Not trying to be snarky. I don't remember that as being the case at all.

They did make some noises in that direction during the Kahn/Levitz/Giordano/Carlin era, but they also stepped on a lot of toes, including Alan Moore's. It's their mistakes that people tend to remember more than what they did right.

They also created "Piranha Press" to compete with Epic over at Marvel. But unlike Epic, they didn't allow the creators to keep character rights.

It's too bad that Dave Sim had to mature [sic] into such a deranged misogynist wanker. Because his rant against DC for their doings with Piranha was spot-on.

It obviously wasn't perfect even back then, but Levitz and co. made an active effort to give credit where credit was due and reimburse creators the best he could.

To quote another poster on the subject:

I remember Chuck Dixon gushing a bit about how good DC were being to him over compensating him for using Bane in TDKR back when Levitz was at the helm, hard to imagine that happening right now.

This is a good point.

How much does a creator actually contribute to the development of a character, particularly when the character's personality and characteristics undergo transformation from writer to writer and from artist to artist.

I'm not familiar with some of the characters Conway refers to, but, when you peel away the layers of character development over the years, perhaps some creators can legitimately be credited only with creating a the character's name.

And yet... if I record an electronic-Polka version of "Smoke On The Water" in which the lyrics and melody are barely recognizable, I'd still better credit and pay the original artists before recording it. Or I'll get my pantaloons sued off in a big hurry.

In theory, you can call any song "Smoke On the Water." Titles cannot be copyrighted. (How many songs called "Lady" have there been?) Of course, whether or not Deep Purple's lawyers would see it as infringement and whether or not a court would agree with them is another matter.

I'm not talking about a new song with an old-time title, though. I'm talking about a drastically reworked version of something which is already widely recognized in its original form. My point is, if you recognize more than, say, a bar or two of Deep Purple's melody in my space polka version of the song, somebody else will, too. And they have a case.

If DC keeps changing aspects of the character, but not the name or a few other recognizable factors, they're playing on earlier cache the character got from the original creator and his/her original fans. Otherwise, why not just remove the original name altogether. C'mon, Suits. At least make the effort to file off the serial numbers when you steal.

Yups.

Felicity Smoak was a fairly prominent part of Firestorm's supporting cast for a while. She brought a law suit against Firestorm for wiping her computer business clean of data. To complicate things further, she then started dating Ronnie's dad.

So, if you're going to rip off the character (sorry, but "reimagining" is pathetic) pay your dues. Or change the character beyond a law suit and put a different name on it.

>Ring Ring<
Hello?
Oh, it's Phillip Wylie returning form the grave to claim that everything DC have ever done is derived from a character derived from his book. Everything DC own is to be turned over to his heirs.

Obviously DC won't protest because they're screwing everyone else out of money by pulling similar nonsense.

The thing with Felicity is that they were clearly trying to avoid a Chloe-from-Smallville type situation, where you have a completely original character created for the TV series who becomes seriously popular and then DC doesn't have clear rights to her when they want to introduce her into the comics. If you use a name of an existing DC character, then even if the character is nothing like the character in the comics, you avoid that situation. But then if you try to turn around and try to use the fact that the character is completely different on the tv series to not acknowledge the actual creator of the comic character, you're being completely two-faced about it.

I can't figure how sampling is fine but cleome's deep purple polka gets trouble. "Copyright," complicated.

Most sampling these days involves gaining the permission of and paying royalties to the copyright holder.

Well, yeah.



I don't want to sound like I'm defending Big Brother, but most of these characters were created under work-for-hire contracts, so DC owns the characters, whereas the songwriters of a given song own that song (unless they've sold the rights to someone else). So it's apples and oranges.

I guess my larger point is that when people talk about creators' rights and equity pay, it's much more complicated than it first seems. Back when there was a movement to give Jack Kirby back his art from Marvel, the Comics Buyer's Guide rightly pointed out that any such decision would impact Dick Ayers, Joe Sinnott, and countless other inkers who had inked Kirby's pencils over the years. Who decides who gets what pages?

That said, DC Entertainment makes mega-bucks off these characters in other media, so they should compensate the creators in some way. The question is, how?

Although they were work for hire contracts, wasn't the creator equity participation programme there to give creators additional financial rewards based on the success of those properties.

To get people to create properties, reward them, and then turn round and say that their work was derivative and that they don't count as the creator is insulting. Making it worse is then running off and using those properties everywhere else.

I think the returned pages example is a bit of red herring here?

Any equity programme could reward inkers as well as pencillers to varying degrees, without having to split up physical work.

This would certainly work for sales success on a book, where the inker is part of it's success. Creations are a little different as they could be the writer working things out with the penciller first. But there's nothing to stop the inker being involved and receiving creator credits too. Al Gordon is credited for some Legion character presumably for a start.

I've no doubt inkers get much less, if anything, for the programme but I'd argue that this is no reason to dilute rewards due to the others who have been credited. It was tough enough getting anything even for that.

Then there's the equity programme as a reason why creators stayed/joined to pitch ideas in the *first* place. To have that company weasel out of that deal at a later date out of sheer greed is lousy.

I've read a few things down the years where creators admit to retreading the existing properties, because there's just no point introducing their own characters into work for hire contracts. That was with the equity programme.

Now you'd want any contract to state upfront that DC accepts your creation *is* your creation and not derivative in any way that will prevent future payments. Not likely DC will want anything like that.

I guess creators will want to use DC as an access point into other media even more. As a way of getting the exposure to other markets. *Then* they might try the new idea. But it won't be with DC or only with a contract that raises it out of reliance on the programme as it is.

I wonder what comics history would be like if the people in charge had learned any of the messages from the stories they published.

Yes. Conway says as much in his post.



Agreed.



But that was the point: Fans and creators wanted Jack to get his physical artwork back. But in order to fairly compensate the inkers, the artwork would have to be split up in some fashion. This was not the same as paying creators a certain amount of money for past creations. It was doing something with the physical products of their work.

I suppose inkers might have been willing to accept monetary compensation instead of actual pages, if Marvel had been willing to given them such payment, but the point was that fans and creators did not want to see the original pages languish in Marvel's warehouse or be thrown out. The thinking, from a fan's perspective, was that it would not cost the company anything to return the pages (well, except for the pesky matter of postage).

Of course, when you start returning artwork to pencillers and/or inkers, it opens a potential can of worms with colorists and letterers, who may also claim, legitimately, that they contributed in some small way to a character's success.

I think this example is relevant to the discussion because it illustrates how attributing credit and fairly compensating creators is more complicated than it seems. In the examples we've been discussing, characters tend to change in terms of personality and appearance every time a new creative team takes over. Sometimes the changes are subtle; sometimes they are more drastic. I haven't been following Arrow, but if someone wanted to create a TV series based on the Green Arrow of Denny O'Neil/Neal Adams reinvention--the guy who had lost his fortune and was devoted to social causes, the guy who had only tenuous resemblance to the "Batman with a bow and arrow" character who came before--who gets the credit for Green Arrow's creation? How should equity pay be determined for creator who came up with the names "Green Arrow" and "Oliver Queen" but little else in the new version?

I do agree that once equity pay/compensation has been established for creators, it is weasily to go back and say their creations are "derivative."



Gordon's case was unique in that he was actually a co-writer on the series. If he were going to be compensated, I imagine it would probably be as a writer moreso than as an inker



True. And this thinking is not new. Image Comics was started in part because its creators allegedly saved their best ideas for their own creator-owned projects. Now with so many avenues open to writers and artists--games, movies, webcomics, etc.--it will be much harder to keep new characters and ideas coming from the Big Two.

Hm. Maybe that's why all the enduring characters/franchises are at least 40 years old.



Learn lessons from funny books? Sheesh!

After writing my post, I looked up Arrow on Wikipedia and saw that Green Arrow's creation is attributed to Mort Weisinger and George Papp. I suppose neither one of them are going to complain about lack of equity pay.

Was Gordon the cowriter that early on? I thought he started as inker, but had come up with a couple of characters before launch. Happy to be corrected as I don't have me books handy.

As for Arrow, it's ol' Mort and George's as far as I'm concerned. If you want to take the punt of introducing a brand new "relevant" character *and* want the pennies, then you're going to have to come up with a new name and power set for a start.

I was thinking of Image as I was typing. There's Kirkman with Walking Dead, but do they have particularly strong links with any media outlets? I'm not n=much in to TV to comment.