From Tom Spurgeon at The Engine, on the subject of DC’s new online initiative, quoted in its entirety:
“I’m sorry, but while I agree that everyone should rigorously examine their contracts, and that this takes care of a lot of problems, the notion being floated here that no one can possibly get screwed over if contracts are examined falls somewhere on the spectrum between childish and ignorant.
“It’s childish because when you stridently defend something or someone based primarily on your own personal experience with them, you’re re-casting a company’s wider conduct into your own world writ large. In actuality, the existence of ethical conduct in one area or in one relationship often has nothing to do with the ethical misconduct elsewhere. That’s why such arguments used as a defense depend on recasting the original criticism as a 100 percent attack that it probably wasn’t, or drift towards the most strident examples of rhetoric rather than the bulk or substance of what’s being said. “You say that company is always evil, but I had a good experience with them, so you’re clearly wrong.” That’s also why there’s always a huge element of 13-year-old defensiveness in all of these arguments — “How dare you suggest I’m a victim because this other guy might be. I know what I’m doing.”
“It’s ignorant because the construction of such arguments restrict ethical conduct to a wretched, deplorable minimum: following through on whatever contract they can get someone to sign that’s applicable to right now. When you restrict the argument that way, it knocks 98 percent of all potential hideous business conduct from the beginning of time right off the table. Apply that low of a standard to you and me, and most of us are Christs.
“That someone is satisfied by a contract in no way gives moral impetus to exploitation or profiting at the expense of creators’ work. Siegel and Shuster were reportedly delighted with their pensions, and everyone was happy they got them, and their situation was a lot more complicated than selling Superman for $200 or whatever the Urban Myth says, but there should be no doubt that they did not benefit from their creation as much as they should have.
“Similarly, Jack Kirby made a comfortable living, and had certain expectations about the way the business worked, and was generally fine with it, at least enough to continue working, but that doesn’t make it just or fair when Marvel executives get creators royalties for the creation of toys based on Jack Kirby designs and Kirby’s family gets nothing for actually creating those characters. Let alone that this is cool if the current writer of Devil Dinosaur thinks his contract rocks. Give me a break.
“If you don’t think elements of this stuff exist today, and if you don’t think that companies screw people as opposed to contracts screwing people, and that landscapes shift, and that screwing involves applying elements of a contract (sometimes in ways they were never intended) and pressing advantages rather than contracts existing as words on stone tablets with easy to discern rights and wrongs, I don’t know what to say to you except to assure you this stuff is out there.
“The notion that specific conclusions shouldn’t be drawn before we know something for sure is a sound one. I agree. The idea that DC should be given a grace period to publicize their latest publishing venture without people rightly targeting the ownership and money situations as keys? Fuck that. They’ve done nothing to earn a free trip around the campfire giving high-fives. Besides: they know what they’re doing; if they didn’t want a grace period driven by empty-headed blowjob articles and general boosterism, they would have made all the information they’re promising public from the start.
“I don’t believe there’s been a rush to judgment here; I believe there’s the usual Internet reaction and then the usual, depressing assertion of a rush to judgment in order to further a mindset designed to limit longterm creator reward to what the institutions are willing to give them.” – Tom Spurgeon
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Thanks Tom, you know exactly what to say sometimes.
– Chris