The Four Color Media Monitor

That's doubtless a most challenging question I thought of after reading this insulting post on The Mary Sue, by somebody who clearly dislikes the allegedly conservative positions of Willingham, and if Fables is being released into public domain, she believes it needs to be "saved" from his politics:

While Willingham and TMS have a contentious history over his iffy politics (check out this 2015 article by former TMS writer Carolyn Cox and this Bleeding Cool article about a bookstore responding to the article), where we agree is that copyright law is purposely murky as hell. What was originally designed to protect artists and allow their families to benefit financially from their work through their estates after their deaths has since bloated to protect businesses indefinitely, causing all sorts of confusion and chaos. I understand Willingham’s impulse to simply give Fables away rather than allow DC to treat him unfairly.

Former TMS writer Princess Weekes wrote a piece called “What is the Line Between Author and Character?” where she mentioned seeing Willingham’s politics all over Fables once she learned what his politics were, and that it affected her reading of it. I hope that artists in all mediums who are Fables fans explore the issue more thoroughly and find a way to tell their own stories in that world, if only to create Fables stories that are distanced from its creator and his problematic politics.

So they despise his politics, but want to associate with his production anyway. Sounds more like a bizarre, absurd obsession coming from somebody who believes authors don't have the right to their own creations if they're conservative, and based on that, the work should be drastically altered if it's in public domain to suit a boilerplate leftist agenda. I think I'm getting the picture here.

But all they're doing is making themselves look like a laughing stock, seriously. If they didn't like the exact concept to begin with, they shouldn't continue any more association with it. Yet they go by a bizarre fixation that likely applies to any and all entertainment products, no matter the politics driving them. I guess that's socialism in action. See something that ain't broke, and they want to "fix it" regardless. Quite typical of them. All that does is make clear why they have no place in entertainment at all.

Anyway, El Pais has also written more coverage of this subject, and gives some history of fallouts artists and writers have had with the Big Two:

In the meantime, in a new post, Willingham celebrated the massive support he received. In fact, for the moment, he has declined all interview requests — he did not respond to this newspaper’s request, nor did the publisher — arguing that he preferred to spend the next few days working on new artistic projects. Meanwhile, the dispute continues. After all, Fables is one of the most celebrated graphic novels of the last 20 years, and it has spawned spin-offs and a video game adaptation (The Wolf Among Us). This situation also touches on a key issue, namely, the intellectual property rights of characters and works, especially in a sector where, for decades, dozens of cartoonists and screenwriters have accused comic book giants Marvel and DC of pressuring them to cede their ideas and accept commissioned contracts. Willingham sums it up as a policy aimed to make creators sign “work for hire” agreements and crush them. All of this makes a gesture that was already intended to make a splash even more resonant.

Indeed, the battle over intellectual property is as old as contemporary comics: the copyrights for Superman, Batman and The Fantastic Four all have unresolved disputes and complaints from Jerry Siegel, Bill Finger and Jack Kirby over the contemptuous treatment they suffered. And heavyweight Alan Moore has been lamenting for years that DC took away his ownership of famous works like Watchmen. Along with prestige and principles, tens of millions of dollars are at stake, especially now that the film industry has become interested in comics. “When you sign a contract with DC, your responsibilities to them are carved in stone, where their responsibilities to you are treated as ‘helpful suggestions that we’ll try to accommodate when we can, but we’re serious adults, doing serious business and we can’t always take the time to indulge the needs of these children who work for us,’” the Fables author wrote on his blog.

Following the impact of his original message, Willingham posted two other texts. He maintains that he had thought about sending his work into the public domain when he passed away, but that “certain events” have changed his plans: among them, he lists the changes in management and attitude at the top of the publishing company; the multiple breaches of obligations such as consultations about covers, artists for new plots and adaptations; DC’s forgetfulness when it came to pay, which forced him to demand invoices of up to $30,000; the suspicious frequency with which the publisher attributed it to “slipping through the cracks” (to such an extent that the author insisted that they stop using that expression); and the time and chances he gave them to respect the pact, renegotiate it or even break it and consensually separate.

Does Willingham realize they might've been particularly contemptuous of him due to his reportedly conservative leanings? Or, does the paper's own writer? No doubt, that plays at least half a part in this specific affair, more so than DC/Marvel under the modern management would care to admit. But seriously, what a shame he won't admit some of the people he'd worked for there at the time were a disgrace and shame, like the aforementioned Dan DiDio, and even the now exiled Eddie Berganza. Just because they were seemingly nice to him then doesn't excuse the contemptible way they behaved towards the audience and other authors proper, and if, as Willingham asserts, this fleecing's been going on for years, chances are DiDio and company did wrong him even in the past 2 decades. So why gloss that all over?

There will be additional chapters in this dispute, as well as in many other ones like it: in 2024, the historic first image of Mickey Mouse — the one that starred in the 1928 short Steamboat Willie — enters the public domain in the U.S. and other countries. Copyright in the U.S. lasts for 95 years, and math is an exact science. Therefore, in a few years, King Kong, Superman and Popeye will meet the same fate. But The New York Times has wondered how the “notoriously litigious” Disney will react and how far it will go to fight in court. And who would dare to freely use all these works for fear of a million-dollar lawsuit? The same question surrounds DC and similar companies. Because in the real world, fairy tales are rare. Or they end up in court.

On this, they may be right. Just goes to show how bad corporations can be. For DC, no doubt, they're greedy for Fables because they want to shoehorn it into the DCU proper, even though that kind of merging hasn't worked in a long time, and in Fables' case, it's supremely silly to take something that adult, originally published under the Vertigo label, and merge it with the flagship DCU. I guess because they've abandoned all common sense when it comes to their mainstream superhero franchise, they think Fables would be a good fit. Nope. Nor for that matter is Watchmen, and if memory serves, the movie directed by Zack Snyder wasn't very successful either. So what's their point of all this anyway? Their own flagship universe collapsed a long time ago under DiDio, and where they want to go now is directionless. So to keep selfishly clutching the property only makes them look more like a joke than before, as it does for leftists like the Mary Sue's to continue any association with it. You don't like it's politics, then quit any further contact with the comics. What op-ed readers and company think they're achieving by sticking with Fables is beyond me.

Labels: bad editors, dc comics, history, marvel comics, msm propaganda, politics