(Commentary) Let's dip into the inbox and see what's piled up over the past week, shall we? Our first email comes in response to this entry on Tokyopop's recent success in bookstores with the Chobits softcover series:
"This news doesn't surprise me in the least. Chobits is an interesting read. The central metaphor (of computers being animated in female form) is intriguing. The subplot of a series of 'children's stories' having a resonance beyond just their simplistic art and story works as a meta-comment on the attempt in this series to move beyond the more simplistic shojo girl-hero type stories that the CLAMP collective is best known for.
"This is the first TokyoPop collection that I tried, and it's gotten me to read more of them. I still avoid the Sailor Moon/Magic Knight Rayearth stuff for the same reason that I avoid a lot of American spandex stuff, but I have found some solid storytelling in the manga section of the bookstore, and some are leaning strongly toward solid literature."
Thanks for writing. Last Monday I speculated about the possible reasons for bookstore returns showing up in comics-shop orders. This prompted San Francisco retailer Brian Hibbs to reply, beginning with a quote from myself:
" '...though if this is the case, it would have to involve the actions of employees in multiple warehouses, since the retailers I've heard from are in different parts of the country.'
"I don't have any real data to add to this (we're far more likely to get copies sent back from other comic book stores than from bookstores), but a quick note that Diamond's backlist inventory is overwhelmingly processed at their Memphis facility.
"All the 'local' warehouses (all, what? 4 of them?) seem to have on hand is (if they even have that) the Top 100 TPs.
"One other possibility is that Diamond has a 'consignment' program -- they run it in the summer and at xmas -- I suspect that it is ENTRIELY possible that certain book stores (or even individual book stores within a chain) have direct DCD accounts and that they're buying under Direct Market terms. (better discount, etc.)
"In other words, while they might be 'returns from bookstores', that doesn't neccessarily imply that they are 'bookstore returns' (if that makes any sense).
"Certainly, most of the 'not like new' copies I've gotten (we'll get copies in plastic bags, with other store's stickers attached, shelfworn copies, copies with strange liquids spilled on them, etc.) are clearly returns from the consignment program -- they spike a few weeks after the return deadline, then begin to dwindle back down until the next consignment period.
"Diamond has never, not once, failed to take unsalable material back from us, at least."
Always nice to hear from a retailer willing to speak on the record. Before we go any further, however, it's time for the ¡Journalista! Fuck-Up of the Week™ -- and here's our next correspondent, ready to set me up for my "D'oh!" moment:
"I think I've seen you write a couple times that Diamond represents almost all the comics publishers to the book market (with the exception of Fantagraphics and D&Q). Actually, Marvel, Tokyopop, and Crossgen are with CDS and Viz has gone with PGW. DC is distributed by Warner Books.
"Really, Dark Horse and Comicsone are the biggest Graphic Novel publishers to stick with Diamond. Here's a link.
"You may have already known this, but it has been clear in your recent entries and I'm just trying to be helpful."
Thanks for sharing the link; I missed that one. I was under the impression that Marvel had dropped CDS and was now back with Diamond, but cannot for the life of me find anything to corroborate this. I suppose I must have somehow hallucinated the whole thing. Anyway, it seems clear that at least one of the companies I've heard named as sending bookstore returns out to the comics shops is not, in fact, being distributed through Diamond -- another grand theory shot all to Hell.
Moving on. I mentioned Brian Hibbs' name in the first item in this entry, which prompted him to again reply:
"Must be my week for e-mailing you!
" 'In an interview that I strongly suspect was conducted before Marvel's proposal to solve the dispute through mediation...'
"Nah.
"That was... Saturday, I think? Maybe Friday. I've known about the mediation offer for nearly a month now. Just haven't had anything REAL to say about it because, it's just an 'offer' -- we'll go, talk, see if we can hash things out like adults (which is what should have happened BEFORE I was forced to file suit, natch!), and if not, the case proceeds.
"I was sorta vague and general in the ICv2 'interview' because, really, there's nothing to say until AFTER I hear from the lawyers to see what Marvel is ACTUALLY offering, y'know?
"(That's the same reason why the Newsarama piece doesn't have any quotes from me -- nuttin' to say.)
"Hopefully I'll have some 'proper' news tomorrow...."
Well, soon anyway, let's hope. I should note that further down in the same entry, I responded to the minor controversy I kicked up when I discussed the compromises made by much of the comics press, who are dependent for stories on the good graces of the very same people they cover. Franklin Harris had a riposte to all this, but it's neatly summed up by our next correspondent, who quotes me as follows:
" 'It does however make us untainted by direct collusion...'
"Except in the case of Fantagraphics."
When you're running a magazine of commentary from out of a company that also publishes comics, you're pretty much stuck with such allegations. It's a no-win argument... and an old one. R. Fiore responded to such criticism, leveled at the time by Comics Buyers Guide editor Don Thompson, back in The Comics Journal #122 (June 1988), going so far as to count out the number of reviews of Fantagraphics product compared to those of other publishers' work. More recently, co-publisher Kim Thompson remarked that cartoonists Ethan Persoff and Dan Clowes -- both of whom have seen their Fantagraphics comics savaged in the pages of the Journal -- would probably have a bitter laugh over the "easy touch" they received. Hell, Milo George inaugurated his editorship of the magazine by slamming the fifteenth issue of Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library (TCJ #240, January 2002).
There's not a lot I can say to satisfy such critics. I could note that I've never seen a single example of the parent company interfering with Journal, and that the magazine's traditions were established long before Fantagraphics began publishing comics on the side, but as an employee of the same company my word must necessarily be suspect. I could point out that at four cents a word we don't exactly pay enough to ensure that our reviewers compromise their integrity, but the same rule applies. In the end, you'll just have to read the magazine and decide for yourself.
Our final email comes from comics writer Micah Wright... you remember, I called him on swiping most of a Laurie Anderson song without attribution in a recent issue of Stormwatch: Team Achilles? That Micah Wright. He crossposted this email to his message forum, so I'm taking the liberty of reprinting it here under his name. Micah responds as follows:
"Hi.
"Someone pointed this out to me:
" 'Admirable sentiments in that last bit. Given that, it's interesting to note that in issue #8 of Wright's new Wildstorm series, Stormwatch: Team Achilles, he shows considerably less regard for another artist's work. On the first page -- stop me if you've heard this one -- a character named Jukko walks into a flower shop and asks the florist, 'What flower represents days go by? And they just keep going by. Endlessly. Endlessly pulling you... into the future.'
"Sound familiar? If you're a Laurie Anderson fan, you probably recognize the lyrics to her song 'White Lily' (from the album Home of the Brave), a full half of which Wright passes off as his own writing -- more, actually, if you include the implied stage directions ('And the florist says...'). I checked throughout the comic book, but could find neither copyright information nor an acknowledgement of Anderson's authorship of the words she wrote -- odd, given Wright's inspiring regard for the legacy of James Montgomery Flagg, don't you think? "
"While you're scouring my web forum for choice quotes with which to smear me as a Plagiarist, I might point out to you two things:
- "On October 16th, 3 months before the book saw publication, I acknowledged the source of this quote. It's what people call an homage, friend. While you're at it why don't you slam me for ripping off Italo Calvino in #9? Be sure to forget to mention that I acknowledged my source material there as well. Oh, and the terrorists who attack the United Nations in #1-3? Thinly veiled versions of the Charlton Heroes. Oh, and in #10? The Homeland Security Squad? They're secretly the Justice League. Hell, I'm a plagiarist from WAAAYYYY back... if you read the 8-page Wizard preview of this book, it's a thinly-veiled New Mutants that the StormWatch team attacks... you've got your Cannonball, and Professor X.
- "Laurie Anderson herself is quoting a Fassbinder film. So I guess she's a goddamn plagiarist as well.
"So you and your pal Kevin can just stop it with the smear tactics, 'kay? My email is online on EVERY SINGLE ONE of my pages. If you thought you had a story here, you should have emailed me and asked for a comment. The way you guys run your anoymous Blog Smear campaign game is for punk ass bitches. If I hadn't had this pointed out to me, I would never have had a short at replying.
Now, let's see if you run a correction."
As the above email indicates, Mr. Wright seems more than a little unclear on the difference between a cultural reference, an homage and outright plagiarism. This is actually quite understandable; even the most ardent supporters of sampling and collage will acknowledge that there's a grey area where such terms meet. Still, they maintain that the difference between incorporation and outright theft can nonetheless be determined. A good example, from people who've been hip-deep in these issues for years now, can be found in Negativland's essay on the subject:
"Negativland proposes some possible revisions in our copyright laws which would, very briefly, clear all restrictions from any practice of fragmentary appropriation. In general, we support the broad intent of copyright law. But we would have the protections and payments to artists and their administrators restricted to the straight-across usage of entire works by others, or for any form of usage at all by commercial advertisers. Beyond that, creators would be free to incorporate fragments from the creations of others into their own work. As for matters of degree, a 'fragment' might be defined as 'less than the whole', to give the broadest benefit of the doubt to unpredictability. However, a simple compilation of nearly whole works, if contested by the owner, would not pass a crucial test for valid free appropriation. Namely: whether or not the material used is superseded by the new nature of the usage, itself -- is the whole more than the sum of its parts? When faced with actual examples, this is usually not difficult to evaluate."
In short, is the fragment less than the whole of the work being sampled? And: is the fragment changed by its incorporation into a larger text? When juxtaposed against the surrounding material, does its content, meaning or resonance change in any way, as it merges with the new work?
Let's look back at the "fragment" under question. Jukko walks into a flower shop. There are five short word balloons which summarize the concepts involved in Anderson's spoken-word piece for the slow kids in the back of the room. Anderson's piece is then enacted, virtually complete, almost word-for-word (in her piece, Anderson repeats part of the lyrics, which does not occur here). There are two short word balloons of dialogue, neither of which place any substantially different spin on what has come so far. A final, meaningless balloon segues into the next page.
Is the fragment less than the whole work being sampled? Yes -- by seven words. Anderson's "White Lily" begins with the words, "What Fassbinder film is it?", and the man walking into the flower shop is described as being "one-armed". These seven words are not "sampled" by Wright. Please note that five of them are Anderson's own attribution of the source of her inspiration, fairly credited and in an artistic context suitable to the piece. (Incidentally, Micah, the film is Berlin Alexanderplatz, and no, the two instances aren't comparable -- she didn't sample virtually the whole film, now did she?)
Is the fragment changed by its incorporation into a larger text? No, it is not. Wright re-enacts Anderson's piece; no spin is placed upon it, no added significance given, nothing juxtaposed against the lyrics which would alter their meaning to any detectable degree. Laurie Anderson has essentially written the first page of Stormwatch: Team Achilles #8, albeit unintentionally.
I don't mean to make too much out of this. By Wright's own admission, he is in the habit of incorporating numerous topical and pop-culture references into his work, and so far as I know none of them involve the incorporation of whole or nearly-whole works, aside from the page under discussion. Lots of artists do this, and it's a reasonable creative strategem. We aren't talking about Keith Giffen swiping Jose Muñoz' art-style right down to individual panels, or the like. It seems just as likely that Wright stepped unthinkingly over the line in a single instance as anything else, and I am accusing him of nothing greater than this. That said, it seems pretty clear to me that he did step over the line.
You want a correction, Micah? Here are three:
- I didn't directly use the word "plagiarism" when referring to page one of Stormwatch: Team Achilles #8. I regret the error.
- Micah Wright essentially stole the first page of his comic from Laurie Anderson, but I'm sure he didn't mean it in a bad way.
- I have absolutely no evidence that Micah Wright has ever engaged in more than one indefensible case of artistic theft in his entire life.
Pick whichever one pleases you the most.
Oh, I almost forgot:
"The way you guys run your anoymous Blog Smear campaign game is for punk ass bitches."
"You guys?" "Anonymous Blog Smear campaign?" I'm told that I must take the opportunity here to mock Wright's weird-ass paranoia, as if I don't then my handlers in the Co-ordinated CIA Program to Get Micah Wright Digitally Under An Assumed Name will get very cross with me, and I certainly don't want that to happen. I just wish Wright wouldn't refer to it so publicly -- I think I've finally managed to convince my mother that she really did name me "Dirk Deppey" after giving birth. Does he have any idea how expensive mind-control drugs are these days? Granted, I get a Company discount, but still...
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