Creators and "properties"

Living in this town allows one to catch the occasional piece of scuttlebutt.

I met someone who has had a few chats with Thomas Tull -- a name that probably does not ring any bells for you. Those bells will ring when you learn that Tull was the Executive Producer of The Watchmen, The Dark Knight and 300.

Tull, I am told, expects the success of the film version of The Watchmen to put his personal fortune over the billion dollar mark.

Please understand that nothing I say here should be construed as an attack on the man. I have no reason to believe that he is anything but a fine fellow who has worked hard for his rewards.

(Side note: David Geffen, they say, was the first person in the entertainment industry to make a billion dollars. I'm not sure if Tull is the second, the third, the tenth, or what. Such things occur outside my frame of reference.)

Still, I think it is interesting, and perhaps instructive, to keep that billion-dollar figure in mind while contemplating the views of Alan Moore, the man who created The Watchmen for DC comics back in the mid 1980s. Moore says that DC Comics (a subsidiary of Warners) "had stolen Watchmen and V for Vendetta from me in the first place, way back in the 80s."

The following quotes come from his 2007 "Exit Interview" (a very long interview, published as a book which you really ought to buy), conducted by Bill Baker:

Back then, I had gone into my relationship with them in good faith, and I think that they had done quite well out of it. And when they suggested that I might want to create something that could be creator-owned under this wonderful new contract they'd got, which would mean that as soon as the book went out of print it would return to the ownership of the creators, then I was very glad to enter into that. And, in fact, it was me who suggested to Dave Lloyd that, since this was such a good deal, we might was well let DC publish V for Vendetta, as well as Watchmen.

(Lloyd was the artist for V, which was originally published in the U.K.) The contract had one snag: Watchmen never went out of print -- an unprecedented situation. In the mid-1980s, no-one could have foreseen that a comic book would stay in print for a quarter century.

I was reshaping the market in a way that was very favorable to DC, and to comics in general. And then we were told that no, there wouldn't be any redrafting of the contract, and that, yeah, they did own this stuff forever.

Moore left DC and created projects for a smaller competitor. DC bought out the smaller company, apparently to secure the rights to Moore's work. Thus was born the not-very-good film version of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

I'd never really been interested in having my work adapted for film. So I decided that the only thing I could do that would be taking the high ground on the issue would be to refuse any future payments for films that were made of my work. This is for the films such as Watchmen and V for Vendetta, things that were owned by companies and which I no longer owned, and where I didn't have a say whether they were filmed or not. In the instance where they were filmed, I would not be accepting money for them, and I would be asking for my name in consequence to be taken off of the films.

I also decided that, with the books that I did own, but where I'd co-authored them with an artist, it wouldn't really be fair of me to deny the artist the chance to make the money if that's what they wanted. So I said that, in those cases, the film people could talk to the artist. I would not be accepting any of the money, and I would not want my name upon the film...

It's the artist and writers who are responsible for every comic book which you've ever enjoyed. And, in most cases, it's the artists and writers who have died distressed and penniless, or alcoholics, or suicidal; whereas, the people at the companies have tended to do rather well, and to have suffered a lot less stress in their dealings with the business.

It isn't right. And I can't really look at comics these days without seeing the immense line of cheated ghosts standing behind every colorful superhero character.

I wouldn't worry too much about Moore financially; I'm sure he still receives royalties on the Watchmen book, on sale right now at Target and other fine venues. He may, in fact, be one of the few occultists who dies with a certain degree of economic security.

But the fact is that he did not want the film to exist. Perhaps he would have felt differently if granted script approval; I have no way of knowing.

His larger point about the "cheated ghosts" is, of course, quite true. Jerry Seigel and Joe Shuster sold the rights to Superman for $130. (They made rather more, after a lengthy court case, for the rights to Superboy.) Bob Kane, co-creator of Batman (and one of the worst artists in history), did rather well for himself, since he was related to a lawyer. Bill Finger, now acknowledged as the character's co-creator, got nothing. He was fired when he asked for health benefits. Finger also wrote the first story featuring the Joker, the main attraction in The Dark Knight.

Jack Kirby, who helped to create the Fantastic Four, X-Men, The Hulk, Thor, Captain America and a vast number of other characters, worked for a page rate -- and kept working hard well into his 70s, even after he began to lose his sight. Marvel, the company he had helped to build, did not provide health insurance.

Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-Man, walked away from the book in the 1960s. I don't know how much, if anything, he has received from the Spider-Man films. Any money he is getting probably stems from corporate generosity or fear of bad publicity, not from the dictates of his original contract with Marvel. I understand that he had lived penuriously for a number of years.

Ditko also created a faceless character called The Question, who functioned as a vehicle for the man's Ayn Rand-ian philosophy. Rorschach of The Watchmen is Moore's answer to Ditko's character.

Alan Moore's final word:

Yeah, there's one really, really important lesson that I've learned from this, and that is: "Don't trust Whitey."