Make The Work You Want To Make

So there is plenty of news this week about the WATCHMEN prequels. Plenty for us creative types to think about and talk about regarding the constant interplay between big business and original artistic vision. Plenty of blogs fueling plenty of discussions of our contempt, support or gleeful excitement to see an old iconic comic story rehashed by a new generation of creators hired by the company who owns the copyrighted and trademarked material. It’s the business end leading the artistic end of the animal and it happens in all fields more often than not. The WATCHMEN prequels are coming and there’s no stopping them. Not sure how I feel about it myself, but no one’s really asking me.

But in all this recent commotion over that property, some other really important things might be escaping our attention. Over at THE BEAT last week Torsten Adair posted this very  interesting piece on “creator dangers”. Definitely on my suggested reading list for anyone taking a career in comics seriously these days. Now news is coming out of Marvel going even further to enforce trademark and copyright issues and the environment for young creators is becoming pretty scary.

The “Paper Tiger” Torsten is describing, the idea that artists can be held accountable for every sketch they sell of trademarked or copyrighted characters is, to my mind, a much bigger issue than whether or not there should be other WATCHMEN material from a company that seems well within they’re rights to produce it. Fan sketches and their legal propriety cut at the heart of the comic’s industry and ask the bigger question, “who is the stuff for, anyway?”

Comics is not like other artforms. No wonder it has so many stories of chicanery, abuse of talent and failed ambitions attached to it’s relatively short history. At the heart of that history comics are made from the dreams of fans who want to the story continue after the last page is turned through to when the next issue comes along. Comics, and the people who choose to make them and read them long past their adolescence, work from the premise of that world the stories take place in is a world that we all visit together. Fans have a stake in that world that can’t be easily defined. Are we really prepared to say that a fan sketch of established and trademarked character is in an infringement on the rights of the company who owns it? Isn’t a bold exclusion of the kind of fandom that has supported comics for decades?

Expect to see a lot more on this from me and, lord knows, from the press at large. The idea of copyright/copyleft is one of the big topics in art these days and the battleground seems to here in something as fan-centric as comics.

More on this is coming really, really soon.