TOM SPURGEON: Do you think other professionals share your concerns working for a big company like AOL/Time Warner? To what extent is there any kind of political consciousness among mainstream pros - even in the way that directly affects them?

JOE CASEY: The cynical answer is, "Very little." I know there are mainstream creators that have strong political leanings. But it's inherent in the nature of what we're all into, escapist fantasy, that you're not going to engage too much with the real world.

SPURGEON: What about just in terms of a set of professional ethics? Do professionals hold companies to a set of obligations? Certainly it's not like 20 years ago: Art is returned, checks are paid promptly and credit is given. But are there issues of creative control and accounting-type issues that are important to creators currently?

CASEY: The problem now is that the value of the proverbial "good idea" has lessened in the last couple of years. The emphasis placed on creators having a good idea, the value placed on that is incredibly low by the publishers, in an economic sense. They're not so interested in telling great, lasting stories. The value is placed on what's going to juice sales. Let's put this creator on this book. Let's put Jim Lee on Batman. There's your prime example. Now luckily, Jim's a smart guy. He and Jeph Loeb had an approach to Batman that worked. Look at what happened to me on the X-Men. I did have some grounding with the characters, everyone had liked Children of the Atom. Quesada and Jemas had really liked it. But what's the emphasis now? Brand identification and marquee names. If we put Writer A on Big Franchise B, we'll goose sales. Change for change's sake. Whether or not Writer A has a good idea, a good story worth telling, is irrelevant. It's getting worse with that. There are plenty of interesting career moves happening, but what about memorable stories? How 'bout a few of those? After all, isn't that what comics do best?

SPURGEON: Is there an expectation of good treatment by the companies?

CASEY: I don't think there's any of those kind of moral imperative issues floating around. I think it's become such a Hollywoodesque industry lately that it's about deal-making and who can we announce going onto what title, or who can we sign to an exclusive deal? It's become a chess match. Let's make this move to grab headlines and, by extension, hopefully maximize our earnings.

SPURGEON: It's hard to worry about interests when people are worried about their livelihood.

CASEY: And any creator worth their weight works in the mainstream because they want to contribute to tapestries in which they probably have no financial stake except the monthly paycheck. There's probably something to the fact that I gave over a large percentage of my professional life to franchises like the X-Men and Superman -- things I don't really have a long-term creative stake in. I'm certainly not going to top the things that have gone before. To me, nobody who does anything with Superman is going to top Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel. No one. Anyone who comes onto X-Men is not going to top what Claremont/Byrne did. So if you're going to take those gigs, I guess there's a weird need to at least shepherd it for a while. That in itself, if you have any pride in your work, is some responsibility.

SPURGEON: Is there frustration that the competition has damaged the industry as a whole?

CASEY: The only frustration is that companies don't seem to be able to adapt fast enough to a changing market without panic setting in. And when panic sets in, it's chaos. No one can get any real perspective on the situation, it's just scrambling to find the biggest piece of that ever-shrinking pie. The smart attitude would be to step back and just assess the situation. It wouldn't take long to realistically assess this business and build a plan that works. Occasionally, they do try and do things. They still haven't realized they're not quite doing it right yet. But I can only go so far on this topic, because at the end of the day I have reconciled my own involvement in this business. Until I do that, maybe I should just shut up about it.

Ethics Part Two

SPURGEON: Bear with me for a second, because I'm trying to reconcile two different things I'm hearing from you.

CASEY: Oh shit. God help us both.

SPURGEON: What do you think your obligations are as a professional, as someone working in an industry? Do you have obligations to the past? Obligations to ethical practices?

CASEY: I think one thing that the business is lacking is just basic integrity.

SPURGEON: Meaning?

CASEY: Meaning that there's a lack of it. [Laughter.]

SPURGEON: People don't do what they say they're going to do?

CASEY: It's still an industry that came out of the pulp tradition -- which was really trashy, disposable fiction -- and started as an industry filled with artists and writers who couldn't get jobs anywhere else. We had already started out behind the eightball in terms of holding our heads up and high and saying, "Not only are we proud of our industry, but each of us as individuals will conduct ourselves with integrity and dignity and respect for the people around us." There's just a lack of that. People are too willing to act in a despicable manner, whether it's business practices or simple human interaction. When editors lie to freelancers when a deadline actually is -- that to me is a lack of integrity on the editor's part. That's just outright lying. And I don't like that.

Passive-aggressiveness is rampant. To me, it's perhaps the most loathsome of all human behavior, and my chosen, beloved industry is filled with it. This is a business where people will tell you thing that they think you want to hear, just to make their lives easier.

SPURGEON: Is that the reason they act this way? To make their lives easier?

CASEY: Absolutely. The one thing that most people in general probably hate, is confrontation. Who wants to argue? But part of conducting yourself with a degree of integrity in any field is to be able to stand up for what you either believe in or -- as an editor representing a company -- what you have to represent. There's going to be arguments, there's going to be disagreements, and there's going to be fights. To passive-aggressively try to circumvent those disagreements constitutes a lack of integrity. Now, I don't like to fight. I hate arguing as much as the next guy, but I'd rather have an argument where a creative conflict can be settled in a professional manner rather than feel I'm being lied to or told things they think I want to hear to avoid any complications. I wouldn't even treat children like that.

SPURGEON: So what's the difference between this desire for integrity in interpersonal business relationships and your resigned realism about corporate malfeasance?

CASEY: Well, because I'm not God [Spurgeon laughs] and I realize that just because I say that there should be more integrity doesn't mean there will be. The only person I have control over is me. I'm the only one who can control the amount of integrity I try to live with and project, and I'm trying to get better at it.

SPURGEON: Now despite your feelings of alienation from the rest of the field I'm going to make you answer for everyone in comics your age and younger.

CASEY: Bring it on, Tom.

SPURGEON: There's a sense that if something like the Jack Kirby art fiasco were to happen now, that there is such a lack of moral backbone, even a bare interest in those kinds of things, that if that exact thing were to happen today there would be a lot of shrugged shoulders and people opining about what Jack did wrong. Instead of the line in the sand outrage that happened 20 years ago.

CASEY: Right.

SPURGEON: Do you sense that difference?

CASEY: Yes, and I'll tell you why. The majority of creators that signed the petition to support Jack Kirby were all born of or were influenced by the hippie generation and that "pick up a sign and march" mentality. That's indicative of the time they grew up in. People in my generation are aware of a different set of social circumstances. It happened in the '80s with the rise of big business. Reagan's America fostering the control that big business has over our lives. Which, in turn, publishers have co-opted and used to try and instill fear in the hearts of freelancers everywhere. They've adopted that big-business mentality of being all-powerful.

Creators of my generation have lived with this ever since we were pretty much aware of the world around us. It's not a foreign concept to us, that big business looms over us in this manner. We're not apathetic, we're just not surprised. We've always known it was going to be like this.

SPURGEON: There are a lot of signs that there is a shift in attitude. Image was formed -- well, they said Image was formed partly to correct business abuses and then those same abuses took place at different Image studios.

CASEY: Right.

SPURGEON: There was DC making secret deals with Diamond. That kind of thing. And in response it's like that Bugs Bunny cartoon where there's nothing but the chirping of crickets in the theater. So I guess my follow-up question is, "Isn't this horrible?"

CASEY: Yes, it's horrible. I'm not quite sure how to combat that. Again, is any individual in this business going to change the minds of the rest of us? Probably not. In the end... [sighs] what could be mistaken as apathy is, in my mind, merely a display that we're not playing their game. I'm not going to let big business place me -- as an individual creator -- in a situation where I rail against it, and thus big business becomes even more powerful. This may be a dodge, but it's a way to -- let's see if I can word this correctly -- defuse the situation to some extent.

SPURGEON: So there's an aspect to this where you're not becoming invested, you're not going to dash your brains out on the rocks outside the corporate tower.

CASEY: I'm invested on an awareness level, but I'm not going to stoop to the level where I've put myself in the position where big business can crush me, thus validating their opinion of me all along. It's the hope that we as individuals can rise above it all in some capacity.

SPURGEON: So is there a middle ground? [Long pause.] Or should every professional under 35 be exterminated? [Casey laughs.] Can it get better?

CASEY: If there's a middle ground, that's where the concept of integrity comes in. What can you live with and what won't you stand for? It's going to be different for everybody. And again, if we live by example, and future generations of comic-book creators take the time to look at how we conducted ourselves -- just like I looked at guys who were my heroes in the business and learned from them -- and form some sort of value system, the next generation of guys will look from us and either learn from our mistakes. Or not.

That sounds like such a dodge.

SPURGEON: Let's take a step back and not have you solve the problems of corporate America through comics.

CASEY: Thank you. [Laughter.]

SPURGEON: Are there business practices about which creators have a consensus -- equivalent to the issues of art returns or royalties in the '70s and '80s?

CASEY: These are issues that have pretty much resolved themselves for me in my career, but for the longest time editors didn't want artists and writers to communicate with each other. They wanted to be the single person that was the go-between for every step of the creative process. And I just don't like that separatist attitude. It's bad enough I'm not a pure cartoonist, now I'm not even supposed to have any contact with my collaborators in this endeavor? That's ridiculous. But for a long time, editors fostered that non-communication. They wanted it that way. Some editors still do, but I try not to work with them. The writers that I'm friends with, we welcome a close collaboration with the artists we work with. Even the colorists and letterers. One of my best friends in the business is Richard Starkings. I met him because he was lettering Cable. He's since become one of my great friends, a valued relationship even beyond the business aspect of it. But had we been operating under the old system that editors tried to keep in place, I never would have had the chance to communicate with Richard at all.

That's a pretty minor point, but it's important to me...

SPURGEON: It's a start. Let me ask you about a recent industry issue. Marvel's new Epic line seems to be shying away from creator-owned work, one would guess in order to maximize saleable concepts and characters to television and film. Do you worry that the Hollywood motive for these companies means there will be less of a place for work you own?

CASEY: It concerns me, but I think it's another pendulum issue: It swings back and forth. We may be swinging away from the corporate-owned superheroes, the big franchise characters, because as we see the proliferation of movies about these characters, they start to run out of characters to make movies about. Like I said before, we're the artists. I take great pride in being the idea man, as opposed to the ones who exploit the ideas. That's why they call us "creators," even though to be more specific you say writers, artists, inkers, colorists and letterers -- we're all creators. We all contribute to creating art. At the end of the day, if there's not a good idea there, then there's nothing to sell, there's nothing to exploit, there's nothing to make a movie about, there's nothing to make money from.

SPURGEON: Do you have participation in WildC.A.T.S.?

CASEY: No.

SPURGEON: In an ideal world, would you want that?

CASEY: Well, sure, but I knew the score going in. But again, in the more romantic areas of my brain, I still adhere to genre as a vehicle for individual expression. So I certainly don't bat an eye when I think about putting more of my personality into WildC.A.T.S. or whether or not I put more of my personality into Automatic Kafka, which I did have a piece of. It doesn't do me any good from a creative standpoint to differentiate between them. I would be doing a disservice to the WildC.A.T.S. material if I felt like I was holding back things. Now would I create a brand-new character and stick him into WildC.A.T.S.? Probably not. But those are my parameters going into it. Now, any time a new character shows up in WildC.A.T.S., there's always some connection to the original Jim Lee material, even if it's just a thin thread. That's my way of saying, "I'll bring as much as I can to the party, but I'm not going to procreate here. I'm not having children here."

[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #257.]

All site contents are © 2002