Anyone ever notice that we never see Batman hosting "Saturday Night Live"? Coincidence?

Many years ago, I was part of a discussion about comic book creators rights on Rick Veitch's Comicon.com message board.  Honestly, I was one of the few people contributing.  I had no professional experience, what was the excuse of the other pros on the site?

Anyway, I still think about this stuff and I've finally decided to try putting down my viewpoint.  I wasn't a professional but I did make comics, over a thousand pages worth before I finally gave up.  Nobody in their right mind would pay me to draw or letter a comic but I could write and layout a page very well.  I could give my finished work to an artist/letter and tell them to remake this and do a better job than I did.  To this day, I assume that if I ever have enough money to spare, I'll look for an artist and do exactly that.

So I was coming from the perspective of someone who knows the concept of making comics from start-to-finish and starting with the position of all rights belong to the individual who makes them.  Which is a given, it's only when more people get involved that the issue comes up.

For instance, what rights would I be taking from the artist?  If a third person is involved to do the lettering or inking, what rights do they keep and what rights can be purchased?  Then there's the possibility of an outside company getting involved with all of us, what are they paying for and what do we keep?

For one thing, I was always very consistent on maintaining the defense of creators rights to run from an individual creator to a major company-owned work, i.e. Marvel and DC.  I don't think it's workable to break up the medium professionally and in addition, there's simply the nature of history where most of the examples we have to go from come from those companies.  There's simply too much knowledge of Stan Lee/Jack Kirby/Steve Ditko to simply ignore it, then there's including Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman or whoever.  'Such-and-such an attempt failed, we can examine it and try to figure out what it failed or we can decide to always avoid that attempt' but this requires acknowledging what happened.

There's a lot of areas where I don't have a clue how to work out some of the elements I'm bringing up, but I think I am identifying elements that need to be worked out.  Start with the concept of individually-created comics and work out what needs to be changed as the creators become a pair, a group, a company or employees.

We simply don't have that sort of history to work with if the companies aren't included.  Just moving on to the 'pair,' we can look at Dave Sim/Gerhard on Cerebus, Kevin Eastman/Peter Laird on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Wendy and Richard Pini on Elfquest or, allowing company-published creator-owned books, Reed Waller and Kate Worley on Omaha the Cat Dance and we have four very different examples which can't form any consistent standards that can be followed.  Sim created and published Cerebus for about a decade before hiring Gerhard to draw backgrounds and eventually made him a co-partner.  Eastman/Laird started TMNT together with both of them doing everything.  Wendy wrote and drew Elfquest, her husband ran the company.  I've never read it but as far as I know, he did contribute to the story during dinner conversations and such but obviously didn't write and draw.  Waller wrote and drew the first issue of Omaha, had no idea for the second issue and his girlfriend came up with a few ideas.  Then a few more ideas and eventually she was just writing a script for each issue.

Then you can add partnerships where the artist draws a bunch of pictures and the writer just adds dialogue afterward, or the writer writes a script and the artist changes whatever he wants.  Then there's the idea that I actually get an artist to redo my comics.  He can't really qualify as co-creator for work that I did many years ago but what rights does he have?  They're my characters but he'd obviously have to add something to their design, so how does that work out?

These are examples of why I think needing to include the companies is obvious, there's just far more examples to look at of what can be done and what might be done.  We can work out the individual as 'plot,' 'script,' 'pencils,' 'inks,' 'letters,' 'colors' and work out how the positions can be spread to multiple people while 'company/editor/owner' can be added.  I can understand the argument that at a certain level, no-one can give-up or sell 100% of their rights to their work but I think that's just foreshadowing where someone desperately wants to do exactly that.  We're trying to prevent future problems as much as we can.  The business can't exist without such concepts, like it or not, so I think the best way is to simplify them and make them universal as much as possible.  'These are the rights you're giving up, this is the minimum required to pay for them.'

I could see a universal requirement that someone who sells all their rights has an option to come back in five or ten years.  They certainly wouldn't be given any ownership from whoever they're making the deal with but making a bad decision to sell everything for a chunk of money or just to get away is probably something that can be reversed down the line.  As I said, I don't have much in the way of solid answers for how things should be done, I'm just trying to identify what needs to be done as simply as possible.

For instance, Dave Sim made a suggestion at some point in the discussion, something along the lines of paying the artist a vast amount of money compared to the writer and keeping that pay-rate going for the first several printings of the finished work.  I totally agree that the artist should be paid far more, any viewpoint I have would just be a suggestion here or there, but I totally disagreed on however many printings he had said it should last.

It's closer to a quibble than major disagreement, I think it should be done this way, Dave thinks it should be done a different way.  I'm just using the numbers as an example, people actually in the business would probably change them, but I would say start off with the artist getting 99% of the profit, the writer gets 1%.  On the second printing, the artist gets 90%, the writer gets 10%.  On the third printing, they either split 50-50 or the writer gets enough of a percentage to make up for the first two printings.

My stance is that the writer should start getting more from the second printing onward.  We can quibble about how much for each printing, but my stance is that at some point, the work needs to be 50-50 profit.  Ok, fine, you might disagree on percentages, but that's a place to start.  But then we have to figure out what will change if a co-artist comes in, or a letterer or colorist.  How does that change percentages?  It's not unheard of for an artist to come up with story ideas, how does that effect the writer's percentage?  Then there's the possible addition of a publisher or ownership of the characters.

That's an obvious problem of the comics medium, everyone's going to disagree on stuff like this so how is it possible to come up with commonly-agreed solutions?  Well, we still haven't, but anyway, that's an example of what I mean.  There will be people who say the inker is just an employee and others who say he's part of the team and deserves an equal share.  At least the companies have had to think through that far, that's why they've been so opposed for so long.