(In which I shall invite the wrath of a great many people,
some of whom will secretly agree with me)
I don’t really care about Before Watchmen. From a reader point of view I’m curious. From a
fanboy point of view I’m happy to see new material from Darwyn Cooke. From a
retailer point of view it’s just another comicbook to guess the numbers on.
I think everybody made up their minds about the project as
soon as it stopped being a collection of rumours and started to be a collection
of actual objects, even if those objects were not actual actual objects but a series of announcements.
The most violent consumer reaction against the project came
from a customer who went into a fully-fledged rant against it, considered the
entire thing an affront to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, but who went ahead and
ordered the full run nonetheless. This same customer won’t read any of DC’s
relaunched titles because they’re not Exactly How He Wants Comics To Be, and
who when we were having the Sky/anti-Sky conversation claimed that Sky was a
necessity because Sky shows Homeland. Homeland is, in the UK, shown on Channel Four, a terrestrial,
free-to-air commercial channel. So that kind of shows you where he’s at.
The most common
consumer reaction was, at first, ‘I’ll wait until it comes out’, a kind of
bet-hedging that gave the best of all worlds: neither supporting nor
castigating the project and allowing the received‘cool’ option of being a bit
snotty about it, while leaving the door wide open for fangasm at a later date.
As the deadline for placing orders grew closer, the most common reaction has
become that people either pre-order, place it on their pull-lists, or ask,
almost side-of-the-mouth, as if enquiring after black market sausages or artistic
photographic studies, ‘You’ll be getting plenty of them in, won’t you?’ I can
see why this happens.
What I don’t quite get – although I understand the arguments
being put forward – is why some people find the concept of Before Watchmen so utterly repugnant.
Sequels happen. Sequels especially happen to corporate
properties. And that’s what
Watchmen
was, and is. It was a work that was created under a specific contract, the
terms of which, we believe (because we haven’t seen it),
allowed a reversion to the creators after a certain time and under certain
conditions.
Well, that didn’t happen. It
did happen, to Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Grey and Phil
Winslade with their Monolith
series for DC, and it happened with Arcudi and Mahnke’s Major Bummer, so we know it does happen. I’m led to believe it may happen with Tomasi, Champagne, Snejbjerg and
Samnee’s The Mighty. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with a
couple of those, given that Monolith has to be cut up or re-done to remove all traces of a major DC-owned
character from a story arc that takes up roughly a quarter of the run, and The
Mighty has to account for a change in
creative personnel half way through.
But the long and the short of it is that we know the
reversion clause – even if the reversion clause as it stands today is not
exactly the same reversion clause in the Watchmen contract, which it may or may not be - isn’t solely there as a sop to creators
and it isn’t a clause that’s there only because the publishers know it’ll never
actually come into play.
That’s an important point, as it shows that DC were, at one
point, willing to give the property up. The fact that Watchmen became what it became is academic. At the time the
contracts were signed, its success or otherwise was purely hypothetical. It was
Schrodinger’s Comicbook.
Whether you like it or not, the entire Before Watchmen argument comes down to contracts. When the project
was offered to him and Dave Gibbons, Alan Moore was, despite his growing
reputation, still only a medium-sized name, and even that purely within the
niche market that is comics. It had been only a short time before that he’d
been cleaning toilets to make ends meet. Ask anybody who’s making a living in a
creative industry and they’ll tell you that it’s ugly, demanding, exhausting,
and so much better than whatever they were doing before.
Chances are -
and I’m obviously speculating here - that Moore grabbed the contract that was
offered with both hands and signed it without having it properly analysed by a
dedicated contract lawyer. If anything, I’m surprised that Dave Gibbons, who
had been in the industry for a long time beforehand, didn’t insist on a full
evaluation of the contract before signing. But sign it they did. .
Yes, it was foolish of them. Yes, there may be a moral
argument that DC Comics/Entertainment should make some form of retroactive
change to the contract. But that’s all it is; an argument. Not an imperative,
not an obligation. Just an argument about whether or not a corporation should consider
morals to be more important than a valuable property, and frankly, expecting a
corporation to consider morals is like expecting a polecat to wear a condom.
That’s what I can’t understand about those who consider Before
Watchmen to be odious or repugnant. All I
can ask them is this: Did you honestly expect anything different? And frankly, aren’t there more important things to
be angry about?
I’m not saying that Moore and Gibbons (although Gibbons
seems to be more accepting of the situation than Moore) are wrong to be angry
about the sequels. I’m not saying that anybody is wrong to hold a negative
opinion of the sequels. What I am saying
is that there’s absolutely nothing that will change the situation. All you can
do, if you don’t want a Watchmen sequel,
is refuse to buy it.
Now, some people have drawn a parallel between Moore and
Gibbons’ contract and the one that Marvel expected Jack Kirby to sign in order
to get a small amount of his original art returned to him.
No. There is no parallel. Moore and Gibbons’ contract was
as, as far as we know because we haven’t seen it, a standard industry contract. Kirby’s contract differed in that
Marvel treated Kirby like a dog. The contract they offered was unreasonable to
the point of cruelty, and no sane person would have touched it. Also, Kirby’s
contract was drawn up at a time when the publisher held the upper hand in all
matters; reprint rates were low if they existed at all, creators were seen as
nothing more than disposable temps to hire and fire at will. Today’s creators,
no matter how much they may complain about corporate policy or editorial fiats,
have a great deal more power and a great deal more flexibility than at any
previous time.
What certainly hasn’t changed, and never will change, is
that a publisher will not give up a thing of value, or the potential of a thing
of value, unless it has no choice. DC will never relinquish its contractual
grasp on Watchmen. If the Before
Watchmen titles are successful, they will
spawn more of the same. Some of these may be produced by creative personnel of
the calibre working on the initial books; it’s pretty much odds-on that they
won’t. Costs will be cut, diminishing returns will set in, and a few years from
now any further Before Watchmen
titles will be given the creative consideration shown to the lowest-selling
game tie-in.
Counter-intuitive though it may seem, that’s one of the few
crumbs of comfort that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons can take from this, if
comfort is what they seek, which they quite probably do not. At least, at the
very least, Before Watchmen is being
produced today, right now, at a time when a small section of the comics
industry is populated by people of astounding ability.
DC have had the option to produce further Watchmen material for many years. For whatever reason,
they’ve held off until now. As I’ve said, it means relatively little to me
either way that these books are being published. They’ll possibly enhance the
original material’s reputation, they possibly won’t. But can you imagine what
monstrosities would have come forth if this decision had been made ten years
ago? Fifteen?
Which is the perfect cue for a ‘think yourself lucky’ final
sentence. This issue, however, isn’t the place for such.
