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Rodrigo castellanos
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 03 July 2012
Location: Uruguay
Posts: 1586
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| Posted: 09 July 2012 at 3:34pm | IP Logged | 1
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Yeah, it's my understanding that Moore and Gibbons only needed any defunct superhero line to make that story work and it was DC that suggested the recently acquired Charlton characters and then backed out.
And Levitz, while disagreeing heavily with Moore in almost every aspect of their continued relationship, respected the work enough to uphold the "gentlemen's agreement" of not producing any new material without their consent. That's gone now with the current management, of course, and I think it's a bad sign.
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Michael Roberts
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| Posted: 09 July 2012 at 3:59pm | IP Logged | 2
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And Levitz, while disagreeing heavily with Moore in almost every aspect of their continued relationship, respected the work enough to uphold the "gentlemen's agreement" of not producing any new material without their consent. That's gone now with the current management, of course, and I think it's a bad sign.
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It's a sign that DC has figured out that Alan Moore is never going to be happy, so why bother. Working in the comic book industry, like with film and television, runs the risk of someone coming along and compromising your contributions. I'm not unsympathetic to creators' moral rights, but Moore's Howard Roark impression just comes across as "I'm special and Watchmen was so much better than all the other crap that the comic book industry was putting out, so we should deserve special consideration that no one else in the industry is getting." Do you think all the Marvel and DC characters today represent the original intent of their creators?
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Andrew W. Farago
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Joined: 19 July 2005
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| Posted: 09 July 2012 at 4:26pm | IP Logged | 3
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Do you think all the Marvel and DC characters today represent the original intent of their creators?
That was along the lines of JM Stracynski's justification for taking on the project, which was probably the worst press DC got out of all of this. He basically said that Moore signed a bad contract, just like previous creators had signed bad contracts, so tough luck. It's too late to do right by Jack Kirby or Siegel & Shuster, so why try to make things right with the people who are still around?
It's a sign of how messed up the comic book industry's priorities are that DC was willing to lose Alan Moore as a contributor over compensation for buttons and lead figurines 20-plus years ago. If a publisher has a runaway blockbuster hit with an author, they'll go out of their way to keep that relationship positive and honor contracts with the author in hopes of getting more best-sellers from that author. If DC had honored their contract with Moore way back when, and if they'd come to some sort of suitable compromise with him once it was determined that Watchmen might never fall out of print ever, they could have had ten or twenty more hit books from Moore.
In a better industry, Moore's demands wouldn't seem unreasonable, since the treatment he wants would be what everyone got. "Things have always been bad" was justification for any number of terrible workplace conditions over the centuries, but it doesn't mean things have to stay bad.
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Brian Miller
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Joined: 28 July 2004
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| Posted: 09 July 2012 at 4:33pm | IP Logged | 4
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Moore's demands wouldn't seem unreasonable... ************** What were/ are his demands?
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Andrew W. Farago
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| Posted: 09 July 2012 at 4:57pm | IP Logged | 5
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Way back when, he had an agreement with DC regarding merchandising. They produced some items without Moore's consent and claimed that they fell outside of his contract, and for some reason, they never managed to smooth things over when that happened. That's a pretty minor thing, and a small check from DC back when that initially happened probably would have fixed everything. Demand number one was that DC should honor the contract they'd written, and I'd say it's all gone downhill between them since then.
The movie was made without Moore's consent and against his wishes, but I think he was fairly diplomatic about that, letting Dave Gibbons have his share of the movie cash and just doing his best to ignore it and all the merchandise that came along with it. Comic book sequels without his involvement or that of Dave Gibbons seem to be especially upsetting to him, because that's not only DC and some film guys going against his wishes, it's a whole bunch of comic book creators, too. I'd bet that feels like an extra twist of the knife to Moore.
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Brian Miller
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| Posted: 09 July 2012 at 7:06pm | IP Logged | 6
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Was he given some kind of contractual guarantee that DC would never do anything else with the characters? With or without him? He had to know that eventually, DC would want to produce new comics featuring those characters. Marvel kept putting out FANTASTIC FOUR and SPIDER-MAN after Jack and Ditko left. Why did he feel he should be treated differently than them? Gibbons doesn't seem to have any kind of problem with any of this. Is he listed as a co-creator or does Moore claim complete control over creating them?
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Shawn Kane
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| Posted: 09 July 2012 at 7:10pm | IP Logged | 7
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I've asked the same question. Did Moore come up with the designs of the Watchmen? I've had people tell me that Watchmen is Moore's story so he has more say. I thought comics were a visual medium so how can the writer have more to do with the success of a comic than the artist?
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Rodrigo castellanos
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 03 July 2012
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Posts: 1586
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| Posted: 09 July 2012 at 7:33pm | IP Logged | 8
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Do you think all the Marvel and DC characters today represent the original intent of their creators?
Not at all, but because some bad decisions were made in the past, I don't think the industry should repeat them in the present. And I didn't mean to discuss the "Watchmen" situation specifically, which is pretty much like beating a dead horse these days: everybody has their mind set about that, one side or the other. But, as a whole, this decision makes DC's status as "Creator Friendly" (or at least more so than Marvel, which isn't much but it's something) take a huge step back, and it's a direct result of their new management (that I think are doing a terrible job so far).
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David Plunkert
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| Posted: 09 July 2012 at 7:44pm | IP Logged | 9
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Feelings are not completely unimportant to a negotiation or renegotiation but they are generally irrelevant after the paper has been signed and speaking as an artist (or "vendor" in most contracts) I'm not sure why feelings should be a publisher's concern particularly if a piece of paper says they can do X with Y for Z.
My guess would be that in the larger corporation of Warner Communications that houses the much much smaller DC that there's not much of a distinction made between comic book writer A and comic book writers B-Z.
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Robert Bradley
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| Posted: 09 July 2012 at 7:46pm | IP Logged | 10
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Moore's agreement with DC is reportedly that as long as Watchmen remains in print DC holds the rights, when it goes out of print, they revert back to Moore (where Gibbons stands I haven't heard).
Moore has no right to complain - he just agreed to a contract that greatly favors DC. And he has no one to blame but himself.
And what does a company do when they have the rights to a popular property? They use that property to make themselves money! DC has actually done a lot less with the Watchmen than I expected - over 20 years before the movie came out and 25 years before new comics were published.
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Andrew W. Farago
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| Posted: 09 July 2012 at 7:50pm | IP Logged | 11
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Was he given some kind of contractual guarantee that DC would never do anything else with the characters? With or without him? He had to know that eventually, DC would want to produce new comics featuring those characters. Marvel kept putting out FANTASTIC FOUR and SPIDER-MAN after Jack and Ditko left. Why did he feel he should be treated differently than them?
I don't know, but I'd bet he negotiated a different deal than Kirby and Ditko, just by virtue of him signing his Watchmen contract 25 years after the Marvel Age began. He and Gibbons seem to have signed something in between "creative input," "creative control" and "creator owned," and it seems that only a gentleman's agreement with Paul Levitz kept Before Watchmen from happening.
Why should he expect better treatment than Kirby and Ditko? Probably the same reason that any worker should expect better conditions than his predecessors. Rob Liefeld has a greater stake in Deadpool and X-Force than Jack Kirby had in the Fantastic Four. It doesn't make you some sort of snob or elitist to realize that you don't want to sign the same kind of contract that Jack Kirby did in 1961.
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
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| Posted: 09 July 2012 at 8:28pm | IP Logged | 12
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Was he given some kind of contractual guarantee that DC would never do anything else with the characters? With or without him? He had to know that eventually, DC would want to produce new comics featuring those characters. Marvel kept putting out FANTASTIC FOUR and SPIDER-MAN after Jack and Ditko left. Why did he feel he should be treated differently than them?++ I don't know, but I'd bet he negotiated a different deal than Kirby and Ditko… •• Given that Kirby and Ditko HAD no "deal", that would not have been difficult.
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