‘Self-liquidating promotion’ is a common marketing term, typically used to describe an offer where a consumer collects, say, proof-of-purchase tokens and sends them in for a ‘free gift’. In reality, the consumer has paid for their ‘free’ gift, because the cost has been added to the price of the items they’ve had to purchase to get the tokens. So the promotion pays for itself (hence ‘self liquidating’). When a comic shop ‘gives away’ a button to a customer buying a comic, there’s no argument that it’s exactly the same process. The disagreement came when DC’s marketing department asserted that as they were the same item, the buttons were still ‘promotional material’ even if customers bought them. Moore and Gibbons disagreed with this interpretation, and as Gibbons diplomatically put it, ‘discussion and eventual resolution ensued’; he ‘spoke and wrote extensively to DC’s executive vice-president, Paul Levitz, who, whilst not conceding the legal point, agreed to pay a sum equivalent to an 8 per cent royalty on the buttons’.
The dispute nevertheless created ill will between Moore and DC, and demonstrated to the writer that however accommodating they were, ultimately DC held all the power. ‘It was these little bits of meanness. Well, really, to make one happy would have cost a few thousand dollars. And they would have kept my goodwill and that they haven’t kept my goodwill I’m sure has lost them more than a few thousand dollars over the years.’ Moore’s estimate of how much he was owed seems about right. Eight per cent of retail price would be 8¢ per badge, split between Moore and Gibbons. In other words, Moore was due about $1,000 per 25,000 badges sold.
Before this, Moore had publicly expressed his happiness with the Watchmen deal. At a convention appearance in September 1986, he and Gibbons responded to the question ‘Do you actually own Watchmen?’ as follows:
MOORE:
My understanding is that when Watchmen is finished and DC have not used the characters for a year, they’re ours.
GIBBONS:
They pay us a substantial amount of money …
MOORE:
… to retain the rights. So basically they’re not ours, but if DC is working with the characters in our interest then they might as well be. On the other hand, if the characters have outlived their natural lifespan and DC doesn’t want to do anything with them, then after a year we’ve got them and we can do what we want with them, which I’m perfectly happy with.
Rights reversion clauses are absolutely standard across book publishing. The deal is that if a book is kept in print, its publisher retains the rights, and if the book goes out of print then, after a period defined in the contract, the rights revert to the author. What ‘the rights’ include varies from contract to contract, and the Watchmen contract has never been made public, but statements by a number of parties to it indicate that they understand the Watchmen contract to say that DC have the rights to the property lock, stock and barrel – giving them the absolute legal right to publish the book, exploit the characters, publish a sequel, sell merchandise, license foreign language editions, and negotiate movie and television deals. It was only as Watchmen neared completion that Moore came to understand that ‘if DC kept it in print forever, then they would have the rights to it forever.’
It’s easy to gloss this as a howler on Moore’s part, or as the familiar story of an artist signing a Faustian contract without reading the small print. Alan Moore is a man very knowledgeable about the comics industry and had been fully aware that in the past publishers had exploited creators. Did he not read the contract? Gibbons remembers ‘calling Alan when I first received the contract to discuss it. He told me he’d already signed it. I got a few changes made, mainly relating to equalising the starting point of royalties to writer and artist, before I signed.’ Moore rarely contradicts himself, but over the years he has portrayed the Watchmen contract as both a hard-fought victory for creators’ rights … and as a document he never bothered to read. He has even said both things in one interview answer:
That was the understanding upon which we did Watchmen – that they understood that we wanted to actually own the work that we’d done, and that they were a ‘new DC Comics’ who were going to be more responsive to creators. And, they’d got this new contract worked out which meant that when the work went out of print, then the rights to it would revert to us – which sounded like a really good deal. I’d got no reason not to trust these people. They’d all been very, very friendly. They seemed to be delighted with the amount of extra comics they were selling. Even on that level, I thought, ‘Well, they can see that I’m getting them an awful lot of good publicity, and I’m bringing them a great deal of money. So, if they are even competent business people, they surely won’t be going out of their way to screw us in any way.’ Now, I’ve since seen the Watchmen contract, which obviously we didn’t read very closely at the time. It was the first contract that I’d ever seen – and I believe that it was a relatively rare event for a contract to actually exist in the comics business.
It should be stressed that this is no replay of the creators of Superman selling the rights for all time in return for $130, or of the countless cases where the creator of a lucrative character lives in poverty while the publisher makes millions. Many would think Moore is in an enviable position. When the ‘graphic novel’ of Watchmen came out at the end of 1987, it quickly sold more copies than any individual issue (although contemporary press reports that it sold ‘millions’ within a year or so of release were exaggerated). The mainstream media attention generated by the original comic piqued the curiosity of readers who’d never dream of setting foot in a comic shop, or of laboriously collecting back issues. Watchmen was sold in ordinary bookshops, and it has kept selling year in, year out. The standard paperback is now in its thirty-third printing, and four other editions have been published in the US market alone. Thanks to the movie adaptation, Watchmen was the best-selling graphic novel of 2009, but even in 2007, before that peak in interest, it sold over 100,000 copies. In 2012, DC’s senior vice-president of sales, Bob Wayne, stated Watchmen had sold ‘over two million copies’ to the mainstream book trade.
Moore’s contract granted a 4 per cent royalty for Watchmen. By 1991, he was able to say ‘Watchmen has made me hundreds of thousands of pounds’, and he has since stated that he has earned ‘millions’ from it and turned down millions more. Before Watchmen #4 was published, the movie rights had been optioned and Moore and Gibbons received money for that. Movie producer Don Murphy has claimed Moore was paid $350,000 for the movie rights, although Gibbons says ‘we got a fraction of that between us’. Although that first attempt to film Watchmen collapsed – as did a couple of others – in 2009, when a Watchmen movie was finally completed, Moore was due some money from the movie and more from its merchandising, even though he passed his share of the latter to Gibbons. Moreover, he enjoyed a windfall from increased sales of the graphic novel thanks to interest in the film (his contract does not, however, entitle him to money from the Before Watchmen follow-up series that ran a couple of years later). The same deal applies to V for Vendetta, his other creator-owned DC work.
Moore’s dispute with DC is not about money, then, at least it is not that he feels DC are withholding cash the contract says he is owed.
Neither is it a legal dispute. Over the years many, many comic book creators have taken their publishers to court. Most of the cases involve the same basic problem: material that has proved to be lucrative for far longer than originally envisaged and has been adapted for media and markets that barely existed when the original deal was struck. It is a situation complicated by the, at best, vague wording of industry contracts, inconsistent or non-existent copyright notices, and the problem that many familiar elements of long-running characters were added over the years by a range of different creators. Just as Superman is the archetype for the superhero, he’s come to be the archetype for the legal dispute over superhero creator rights. Joe Siegel and Jerry Shuster created the Superman strip published in Action Comics #1, the first appearance of the
character, but that first issue didn’t feature the familiar Superman symbol, the Daily Planet, Kryptonite, Smallville, the Fortress of Solitude, Lex Luthor, Jimmy Olsen, Superboy or Supergirl. In his first appearance, Superman couldn’t fly, didn’t have X-ray or heat vision. Which of these elements would the owners of ‘the rights to Superman’ own?
The legal dispute over Superman was underway before Moore started working in American comics, and has continued, literally, for generations. Moore knew this before he started working for DC. Legal issues make Alan Moore very uncomfortable, though, and it’s tempting to see this as a class issue, or one stemming from his countercultural sensibilities: an instinctive distrust of the system. On the other hand, it may simply be that he understands that one tactic the media corporations use is to draw out proceedings to fight a war of attrition, and that if he initiated legal action he could spend the rest of his life, not to mention all his money, in court.
As long as there have been comic books, there have been men who have balanced a creative flair with business savvy, men like Will Eisner and Stan Lee. And in the eighties a new generation of entrepreneurs emerged: people like Dave Sim, Todd McFarlane, Neil Gaiman and Frank Miller cut deals, got rival publishers to enter bidding wars for their services, kept a keen eye on rights issues, the merchandising and spin-offs, and weren’t afraid to lawyer up. A veteran comic book creator, who wishes to remain nameless, told me that he realised at some point his career goal had become to earn enough money freelancing for one major US comics publisher to be able eventually to afford to sue them for what he was really owed.
This is not Alan Moore. It is clear that, as Stephen Bissette has noted, ‘Alan hates doing business.’ That is not to say he is naïve or conflicted about the idea that a comic book publisher wants to make money. In pitch documents he would talk about merchandising potential and explain how his plan would increase sales of his and other books, but there was always the implication that it was up to someone else to implement all that. He writes the comic, he’s delighted to do interviews and knows how to generate a headline, but the actual marketing and legal negotiations, the settling of disputes and rights clearances are not his job; that is what the other 92 per cent of the revenue is meant to be paying for.
Moore wants to create art, and to leave the commerce and legal stuff to people he trusts. In 2010, after DC approached him hoping to negotiate over a Watchmen follow-up project, he said (my emphasis): ‘And so I would imagine that given our understanding of the industry standards during that time … there may be … I mean, it’s occurred to me that I could possibly get a lawyer to look into this. There may be some problem with the contract, or some potential problem that may require my actual signature saying it’s okay to go ahead with these prequels and sequels. It might be that they can’t just do this.’ There have been disputes over the Watchmen contract for twenty-five years, with millions of dollars at stake. Was Moore really saying that he had never so much as had a quick chat with a lawyer in all that time?
That interview caused a stir online, and commentators (both comics fans and professionals) accused him of naïvety, irony or flat-out dishonesty. But, no, it would be 2011 before Moore took legal advice: ‘More recently,’ it was reported, ‘Moore says some lawyers involved with another of his projects offered to review the Watchmen contract he’d signed nearly three decades earlier. “It was a nostalgic moment seeing it after all these years,” he says. “There was a clause that essentially said that, if in the future, there were any documents or contracts that I refused to sign, DC was entitled to appoint an attorney to sign them instead”.’ Whether or not DC are able to override the withholding of his consent in the way Moore describes, his falling out with the publisher in early 1987 was not because of a dispute over interpretation of the small print in a contract. Regardless of the legal position, it is clear that at the time he thought DC were following the wording of the agreement he had signed.
Given that he has received millions of dollars, that DC have fulfilled the terms of the contract to the letter, and that his work has been enjoyed by countless more people than he could ever have dreamed of, in what sense has Moore been ‘swindled’? The obvious answer is that he wasn’t swindled, that he’s being irrational and stubborn, and has no grounds for complaint. In 2012, Len Wein, editor of the first issues of Watchmen and a writer of Before Watchmen, said. ‘I think Alan has developed over the years a mindset that’s really his own mindset, that bears no real resemblance to the truth … and somehow decided at one point that he was betrayed by DC.’
The issue is that Moore believes he and Dave Gibbons ought to have certain rights over Watchmen. He believes that control of Watchmen should have reverted to them a long time ago, and that for DC to retain the rights is not in the spirit of what was agreed. Given that DC clearly control those rights legally, he asks that they at least respect him. His position is that DC have consistently made decisions that are at odds with his clearly stated wishes, to the extent that he has, at times, interpreted their actions as being motivated by something approaching malice. (The publisher would, of course, reject this.)
Creatively, he also bemoans the continued exploitation of his work as a dearth of imagination:
It’s tragic. The comics that I read as a kid that inspired me were full of ideas. They didn’t need some upstart from England to come over there and tell them how to do comics. They’d got plenty of ideas of their own. But these days, I increasingly get a sense of the comics industry going through my trashcan like raccoons in the dead of the night. That’s a good image, isn’t it? They weren’t even particularly good ideas. For Christ’s sake, get some of your own ideas! It’s not that difficult.
It is fair to say that Moore has added other grievances to his list over the years, and that time has obscured, elided or added some details. To take one example, he now remembers ‘starting to feel a little put out and used in the fact that I had revamped the entire occult line’. It is entirely true that DC would build on the success of his run on Swamp Thing and launch a number of other horror-fantasy comics in a similar vein, often using the same characters. This hadn’t happened in early 1987 when Moore split with DC, though. It didn’t come to fruition for a couple of years and, early on, had his blessing. Moore’s successor on Swamp Thing, Rick Veitch, had worked as an artist on the title and was a friend. Moore encouraged one of his oldest friends, Jamie Delano, to pitch for the John Constantine comic, Hellblazer, and the first issue appeared only in January 1988. Another friend, Neil Gaiman, created The Sandman, which did not debut until a year after Hellblazer, in January 1989. The Vertigo line, launched in 1993, incorporated those and other ‘DC occult’ titles, but the line-up also included many other comics like Enigma and Sebastian O that were entirely independent of Moore’s work.
Over the years, Watchmen has continued to sell and Alan Moore has grown increasingly more resentful of DC. It is crucial to understand, though, that his objection to the collected version of Watchmen was not an example of clouded hindsight, or something that only began to brew after the book became a success. It’s easy enough to prove this: Moore had fallen out with DC before Watchmen was finished, let alone before the graphic novel version had been released. Moore was talking publicly about his split with DC by February 1987; the collected edition didn’t come out until December of that year. When Moore first raised the issue it was a dispute about DC’s plans to issue a collected edition and keep it in print as long as there was a demand for it.
DC’s position is perhaps best summed up by Len Wein: ‘It’s not our fault the book continues to sell.’ When Moore signed the contract for Watchmen in 1984, there was no ‘graphic novel’ section in every bookshop, the business models of the comics publishers did not depend on trade paperbacks of every monthly title. At the time, as Moore knew probably as well as anyone, there was simply no market in the US for collections of recent comics. But the market was changing, and these changes were endlessly discussed at the time by those in the in
dustry and by the fan press. Many creators had seen how innovative approaches might be rewarded.
The most visible of these changes was the advent of the ‘graphic novel’ itself. Will Eisner, a pioneer of the medium since the 1940s, came up with the term in 1978 when pitching his book A Contract with God to Oscar Dystel at Bantam. Dystel wasn’t interested, but Eisner went on to publish it regardless, and would write other personal, often directly autobiographical works. That same year, Don McGregor and Paul Gulacy, popular with comics fans thanks to their freelance work at Marvel, made their ‘comic novel’ Sabre solely available through comic shops, and its success would lead to the establishment of Eclipse Comics (eventual publishers of Moore’s Miracleman and Brought to Light).
The first graphic novels were usually fairly slim albums, self-published by the artists, advertised in comics fanzines and hawked at conventions. But by the early eighties, Marvel and DC had got in on the act with original graphic novels that often used existing characters, like the X-Men book God Loves, Man Kills or Jack Kirby’s Fourth World book The Hunger Dogs. But these were all new stories. Even series like Camelot 3000 and Frank Miller’s Ronin, the comics closest in form to Watchmen, were never intended to be collected in one book. If you wanted to read them, you bought the back issues. Comic shops dedicated most of their floorspace to the section where their customers could catch up on comics they had missed. Fans might have to pay a premium for ‘hot’ comics they’d been foolish enough to ignore on original publication, but that was all part of the game. Ronin was published in 1983, but the collected version was not released until 1987, thanks to intense interest in Miller’s work after The Dark Knight Returns. It would be fifteen years before Camelot 3000 was collected. There were digest-sized reprints and ‘graphic albums’ – usually oversized replicas of the first appearances of popular characters, or a repackaging of movie adaptations – but there weren’t any books which collected recent comics.
Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore Page 26
