{"id":1934,"date":"2008-10-20T20:51:56","date_gmt":"2008-10-21T00:51:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/comics212.net\/2008\/10\/20\/why-i-hate-the-comics-industry\/"},"modified":"2009-01-01T23:23:08","modified_gmt":"2009-01-02T03:23:08","slug":"why-i-hate-the-comics-industry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comics212.net\/?p=1934","title":{"rendered":"Why I Hate The Comics Industry"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul><em><br \/>\n&#8220;I have seen contracts within the comics industry shift frequently. Why, one of the biggies has a clause that grants them Universal rights to the work. You know, for the huge comics audience on Mars. Mark Smylie of ASP is a longtime friend of mine &#038; one thing I can vouch for 100% is his honesty. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think he would strong-arm anyone. Both of us had witnessed another indie publisher do that to other artists. If Mark says that the contract he came up with for Archaia artists was the direction the industry is headed, then I am sure that is his experience. Image is (to my knowledge) the only major *comics* publisher with a contract as creator-friendly &#038; rights flexible as it is.&#8221;<\/em> &#8211; <strong>Eva Hopkins, from my comment section.<\/strong><\/ul>\n<p>BAD BEHAVIOUR ISN&#8217;T EXCUSED BY ITS FREQUENCY: IT&#8217;S STILL BAD BEHAVIOUR.<\/p>\n<p>I am going to be completely inappropriate here, but maybe that means I&#8217;ll get quoted everywhere and people will get the message:<\/p>\n<p>Saying that because most companies in the comics industry have shitty contracts and take advantage of people so it&#8217;s okay for one more company to have a shitty contract and maybe take advantage of them too? That&#8217;s a lot like saying that most guys at the bar you drink at are date-rapists, but you&#8217;re willing to take your chances with the new guy. Just go drink at a different fucking bar, it&#8217;s right-the-fuck next door.<\/p>\n<p>Stop defending the comics industry when it behaves badly! Go get yourself deprogrammed from this Stockholm Syndrome Nightmare that tells you that this is just the way things are! It&#8217;s a lie! If your work really wasn&#8217;t worth anything, these assholes wouldn&#8217;t want a cut of you.<\/p>\n<p>Image Comics! IDW Publishing! Slave Labor Graphics! Fantagraphics! Drawn &#038; Quarterly! Five great companies that offer contracts that don&#8217;t take media or ancillary rights. All of them have published stories that have been turned into film or animation.  Five comic book companies, bang! Then there&#8217;s a whole book industry with dozens of publishers doing graphic novel work ethically, working within a medium with a history of respect for creators&#8217; rights. There&#8217;s self publishing, for fuck&#8217;s sakes. You have options! You don&#8217;t get the fake-prestige of working with someone blowing smoke up your ass telling you they&#8217;re going to give you 10% of your own movie deal which is practically in-the-bag, they-gotta-guy, but so what? If your work is marketable, people will come to you. Agents, lawyers, hollywood people, they swarm up and down the aisles at Comic conventions, on the web, the whole nine.<\/p>\n<p>Quit shrugging your shoulders, comics. Quit giving in. Quit saying &#8220;that&#8217;s just the way the industry is going&#8221; like you&#8217;re powerless to stop it.<\/p>\n<p>This guy&#8217;s got it:<\/p>\n<ul><em>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153What they want to do is make a deal to do the graphic novel, which would be great, and there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no money there, which is fine \u00e2\u20ac\u201d obviously you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re doing it for the fun of it \u00e2\u20ac\u201d but if a movie comes out of it, then they guarantee that they will not pay you for it, that they will screw you.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/em> &#8211; <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/splashpage.mtv.com\/2008\/10\/17\/eric-bogosian-on-publishers-and-pitching-your-graphic-novel-they-will-screw-you\/\">Eric Bogosian, MTV Splash Page Article<\/a><\/ul>\n<p>Go to another bar.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; Chris<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;I have seen contracts within the comics industry shift frequently. Why, one of the biggies has a clause that grants them Universal rights to the work. You know, for the huge comics audience on Mars. Mark Smylie of ASP is a longtime friend of mine &#038; one thing I can vouch for 100% is his &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/comics212.net\/?p=1934\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Why I Hate The Comics Industry&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comics212.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comics212.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comics212.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comics212.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comics212.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1934"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/comics212.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1934\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2098,"href":"https:\/\/comics212.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1934\/revisions\/2098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comics212.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comics212.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comics212.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}