(Commentary) Once again, other projects interfered with last week's edition of the Mailbag, so the comments have been piling up. Let's dig in, shall we? Our first two correspondents wrote concerning Wildstorm writer Micah Wright's wholesale swipe of a Laurie Anderson song on the first page of Stormwatch: Team Achilles #8, as well as his response (and my reply). Our first email:
"Am I missing something here? Micah Wright said that he acknowledged in advance the quote he used on the page you mention. So, does that make it plagiarism, still? Of course, I know the usual practice is to put the cite directly above the quoted material, or below it, so that it's clear that the material is quoted and not your own, so you do have a point. And, as far as I know, this is the first time you've pointed out anything like that, so I don't think Mr. Wright is being persecuted. Just a little thin skinned, isn't he? In any case, just thought I'd email you so you know someone is paying attention. Oh yeah, do you consider his paintings, using old poster images from the forties, to be plagiarism? I like them."
I like them too, actually. I find some of them heavy-handed and didactic, but generally he does a pretty good job. No, I don't have any moral qualms about the posters; they're public domain art, but even if they weren't, I think that a successful act of detournment (which recontextualizes the work, thus creating an entirely new work of art) is by and of itself all the justification it needs. Mind you, your average court of law would disagree with me -- Hell my employers and many of the artists they publish probably would, too, but there you are. I think there are distinctions to be made between fragmentary sampling, radical alterations and outright plagiarism, but it takes a firm idea of what you're talking about in order to work said distinctions; otherwise you'll get lazy-ass bastards changing a few notes in a song and calling it their own.
Speak of the devil: this is a mild bending of the rules, but since the response makes no sense without it I'm going to go ahead and note that our next correspondent is in fact Micah Wright:
"You're a 'funny' guy.
"Now I understand why so many comics professionals hate The Comics Journal.
"Here's an idea: go listen to Paul's Boutique by The Beastie Boys. There are something like 600 samples on it from other songs. Go through the liner notes. Are they all listed?"
Once again, Micah, you've managed to miss the point. Paul's Boutique uses a densely layered collage of multiple fragmentary samples in each song, which results in art greater than the sum of its parts. Morally speaking, I have no problem with this, although after the court ruling against Biz Markie for his album I Need a Haircut (Grand Upright Music Ltd. v. Warner Brothers Records; read an argument against the ruling here and for it here), there are any number of lawyers earning a pretty penny disagreeing with me. I think it's a shame that an album like Paul's Boutique can't be released today without legal trouble. I personally disagree with the notion of a fragmentary sample needing clearance in the first place -- but at the end of the day, the only real answer to the question is "tell it to the judge". In any event, I don't see what this has to do with you swiping virtually an entire song, artlessly, uncredited and without compensation, in your comic book.
Enough of this topic. Our next writer provides more evidence against Paul O'Brien's article questioning whether bookstore sales could ever replace sales from the direct market, a notion I scoffed here:
"I was interested in your comments on the relative value of book sales. Related to this, and the comments by Paul O'Brien, (I didn't read the Observer thing) I thought you might be interested in some stats on books in general, which sort of blow away this idea that 'books aren't really that popular'. At a library conference earlier this year I saw this talk, which is about why librarians should remember that books are good (some
of us forget). The bits of relevance to you appear towards the middle --
"books are more popular than ever".
"Hope you find it of interest."
Indeed I do. I think the thing that throws most observers of the direct market off is the diffuse nature of the bookstore market. There are literally a thousand niche markets being served; subsequently, individual titles may get by with sales of 20-30,000 copies per year, even as the bookstore market as a whole does much greater collective business. Books are in fact much more popular than comics -- there are simply many more of them in play at a given time, is all. Observers of the Direct Market aren't used to this phenomenon.
Our next two emails came regarding the recent, sexed-up comic-book version of the Thundercats children's cartoon:
"Good point. Interestingly enough, last year's mini did not have this sort of sexual shenanigans -- and from what I've heard, the original mini by Gimore and McGuiness (and a host of other artists because McG can never keep his deadlines) was actually bought by kids -- I bought it for the 6-year-old son of a co-worker's boyfriend, and he loved it -- the reruns airing on the Cartoon Network have a huge kid following. I didn't know what to do with this new mini -- I gave a copy to the co-worker but told her this one was more adult in nature.
"I've heard the current mini, The Return, is what Gilmore wanted to do first with the Thundercats property. Draw from that what you will."
Honestly, I'd rather not think about it too hard; my faith in humanity is weak enough as it is. Our next correspondent, by contrast, brings up something I'd missed the first time around:
"Aww, Dirk -- it ain't no porno -- they don't even have nipples!
"I found that even more disturbing than the clothes, honestly. But
would cat-people have six nipples or what? I've thought about this
too much already."
I just know I'm going to have nightmares about teenage Thundercats looking for their nipples for weeks now. Ugh.
Our next two correspondents wrote in to provide a little more background on Italy's mysterious copyright legislation:
"Interesting question on Italian copyright law... but that Google translation is wack, and makes the ¡Journalista! item look needlessly goofy. Even with my lousy Italian, I believe I can make those quoted paragraphs a little more comprehensible:
" 'Honorable Colleagues! -- The bill currently before Parliament will finally introduce into the law of April 22, 1941, number 633 -- 'Protection of copyright, and other rights connected to the exercise of copyright' -- a specific protection of authors' rights for 'comic strip' works (fumetti): a right which the legislators clearly did not address within the law, since this unique artistic and literary activity, though it was born in the 19th century, did not effectively develop in Italy until the post-war years.
" 'The cited copyright law, number 633 of 1941, though it provides in Title I for the protection of 'works of talent of a creative character' -- including sculpture, painting, drawing, et cetera -- does not provide any protection of authors' rights in the specific expressive form known in Italy as 'fumetti.' '
[The speaker then goes on to summarize some highlights in comics history, which are interesting but not particularly relevant as far as I can tell.]
I don't know the details of the current law and I don't understand Italian legal terms, but from a casual reading of the proposed amendments, it looks to me like they're trying to define (a) the respective rights of co-creators of collaborative works, and (b) character designs as a distinct copyrightable element. Hope that helps."
It does indeed; our next correspondent offers a little further help, this time with the state of Italian copyright law:
"I'm assuming someone out there can either read Italian or knows more about this than I do. But I'll tell you what little I know.
"The article is dealing specifically with the Italian effort to implement the EU Copyright directive, Directive 2001/29/EC. You can read it in its
entirety here at the EU website.
"Background on directives (and I apologize if you know this already):
directives are tools in harmonizing laws of members (the countries making up the EU). They are binding in effect but not in specifics. It is up to the national governments of member states to decide the 'ways and means' of
implementation and each state has a given time period to implement the
directive; if the desired result is met, the EU will be satisfied, no matter how the member state decides to do it. (Implementation is an issue of national law, something the EU stays out of, for the most part.)
"Italy missed the implementation deadline of December 2002 (this is not a
surprise; many in Europe consider Italy as an entity unto themselves) but
seems to have caught up since.
"To me, the directive reads as the US copyright (more or less) guaranteeing
the typical rights to the copyright holders. There also is probably a lot
relevant to RIAA/Hollywood types, but I did not read closely enough."
The same writer wrote back a short time later, offering a clarification:
"Quoth the first email:
" 'To me, the directive reads as the US copyright (more or less) guaranteeing the typical rights to the copyright holders. There also is probably a lot relevant to RIAA/Hollywood types, but I did not read closely enough.'
"The relevance of this paragraph on comics is that comics would have to be
protected anyway, as they fall within copyright. Maybe Italy made an
itemized list of specific types of works of art and did not include comics?
Even without mentioning comics in particular, they'd have to be protected by law."
Thank you kindly (both of you) for taking the time to make the story a little more comprehensible. Our next correspondent writes regarding an Australian newspaper article quoted in this entry:
"Greetings. My name is Daniel Zachariou and I am the person the Sydney Morning Herald quoted, that was subsequently posted by you, regarding the international reception of Free Comic Book Day.
"Although the article was incredibly faithful to the comments I made, it
did get the context of one thing that I said wrong. The article 'goes on to set the number of comics sold in Australia each week at a few hundred' when I instead related to the author of the item, that certain comic titles still sell in their hundreds at specialty comic book stores.
"My main point was the fact that unless the distribution of comic books
improved at the newsagency level, that many children might find it
difficult to encounter comic books at all.
"The direct sales market though continues to be strong, and if anything,
has seen a slight upturn of late."
You're right; I completely missed any distinction being made between Australia's comic-book shops and newsstand distribution (American newsstand distribution of comics is also pretty bad, though I'm not sure it's quite down to the level of a few hundred copies per week). Thanks for the clarification, Daniel.
Moving on -- my recent comments concerning the American Family Association's ludicrous assault on the Make-A-Wish Foundation over its relationship with the Pittsburgh Comicon drew the following response, which begins by quoting me:
"'On a personal note, I grew up attending the kind of Southern Baptist and Seventh Day Adventist churches who tend to fall for this sort of obnoxious bullshit.'
"Ouch, Dirk! Did you grow up SDA, too? If so, and you went to church school, are you old enough to remember the dipshit who went around claiming that if you were involved in any form of the entertainment industry you had to be a 'registered member of the church of Satan'? I always got a ha-ha out of that. My mother’s uncle had been a country singer and a member of the Grand Ole Opry for years and was about as conservative an SDA as you could hope to meet.
"On a related note to the whole AFA shitstorm; as a Christian these assholes inflame me even more, I think, than individuals who are not affiliated with Christianity get pissed at them. They give everything I believe in a horrifyingly ugly image to the world and I can’t help but believe that there is a special little spot in Hell reserved for them. It gives me an evil little giggle when I picture the 'Reverend' Donald Wildmon dying and waking up in Hell, utterly bewildered:
"Wildmon: 'But, but, I thought…!'
"Satan: 'Don’t worry about it, dude. I’ve always got a place on the team for someone like you!' "
I don't specifically remember the anti-Hollywood guy of which you speak -- maybe he never got around to Arizona -- but I do remember singing anti-Darwin hymns in Vacation Bible School as a kid. I certainly do agree that asshats like Wildmon give mainstream Christianity a black eye it doesn't deserve.
(Incidentally, the term "asshats" has become my new favorite insult, ever since I first saw Oliver Willis use it in his weblog. It has an almost non-sequitur feel to it, doesn't it? As if it would lose any insulting content if you just changed the context a bit -- "The proud old veterans marched in the parade, resplendent in their asshats." You think? No? Maybe it's too early in the morning for me to be writing things like this...)
Our final email gets off this weblog's stated subject a bit, but I wanted to address it anyway. It concerned the X-Men "gay/mutant" metaphor, which I discussed at the end of yesterday's Sunday Scraps:
"I think you're being unfair to the Daughters of Bilitis. I don't know who told you that their goal was to teach lesbian women to pass as straight, but it sounds like a bit of revisionist history from a someone who doesn't feel the Daughters were 'queer' enough. It certainly doesn't sound like the former members I've met.
"DoB was founded to offer a social alternative to underground bars, which were all there was to 'gay culture' at the time. Rejecting that culture doesn't mean they were trying to act straight; they were trying to broaden the definition of 'lesbian'. Kind of like offering mutants who aren't blue or furry, or whose 'powers' lack any combat value, a chance to accept their mutancy as well. I'm not saying that's 'morally superior' to a queer visibility agenda (which is where I tend to land myself), but neither is it morally inferior.
"Also, in America 50 years ago, lesbian self-acceptance and survival were a radical agenda. Holding meetings in suburban living rooms instead of obscure downtown bars was dangerous. And as the civil rights movement rose above ground in the 1960's, members of DoB moved along with it and 'actually stood their ground and fought back' (to use your phrase). (They did so mostly in the feminist movement, where they wouldn't be relegated to making coffee and taking minutes, as often happened in gay male organisations.) The society depicted in the X-Men movies (I haven't read the books any time recently) seems about as tolerant of mutants as America was of dykes and faggots 50 years ago; in that context, teaching mutant kids not 'act out' is a very good idea.
"Maybe I'm reading too much into your comments, but you make Barbara Gittings, Phyllis Lyon, Del Martin, etc. sound like assimilationist cowards, and nothing could be further from the truth."
I certainly didn't mean to imply that the Daughters of Bilitis were in any way cowards for their views; if I gave that impression I apologize. I'm quite grateful for the groundwork they laid in building the gay-rights movement, which in turn created the circumstances that allow me to live a relatively normal life today. That said, while the metaphor I used was perhaps open to misinterpretation, I should note that I was talking about the choice between hiding and fighting from the context provided by the X-Men film and Grant Morrison's comic-book series New X-Men, which I think play off of gay history in fascinating ways.
Explaining this requires a bit of history. In his weird-ass exercise in warped logic, Tangents, Dave Sim makes the assertation that before "Don't ask, don't tell", the American military had always looked the other way where homosexuals were concerned, so long as they maintained discretion. This is utter bullshit. There have been anti-gay military witchhunts as far back as the early 1900s; in fact, you could say that the modern gay-rights movement was the result of such a witchhunt, and that the U.S. military was in some ways the unknowing architect of said movement.
The story goes like this: early on in World War Two, the War Department started getting reports that American soldiers, segregated by gender for extended periods of time, were starting to engage in homosexual acts. Not wanting to see this continue, the department began hunting out homosexuals and dishonorably discharging them, going so far as to send letters home to parents and even employers explaining just why the soldiers were being sent back from the front lines. People so exposed and discharged were then promptly dumped off from military bases near two cities: San Francisco and New York City.
Understand that before this, gays and lesbians for the most part lived lives of isolation and despair. Unless they pulled up roots and moved to a large city where they could join the Gay Underground, most probably didn't know any others of their kind, save perhaps for a token few. Now imagine the effect of literally hundreds, perhaps thousands of such people all dropped off together at the same time and place, exposed to one another and unable to return from whence they came. In most gay-history books, you can find quotes from people who remember the experience with something approaching Earth-shattering revelation: "I had no idea there were so many of us," is the quote you read, over and over.
It was from this environment that the first two successful gay support groups -- the lesbian Daughters of Bilitis in San Francisco, the men's Mattachine Society in New York -- began their operations. Our correspondent is quite right to point out the bravery involved in running such outfits. That said, I don't think I mischaracterized the DoB's early outlook in my previous statement. In my mid-20s, I spent a fair amount of time in Arizona State University's library, reading from their hardbound collections of the newsletters these two groups produced for their members. The people writing in DoB's newsletter, The Ladder, did indeed see their ultimate goal as helping the rest of the membership secure their privacy through subterfuge -- the "ladder" of the newsletter's title represented the steps necessary to do this, with the top rung ultimately depicting a healthy and secure lesbian couple, cohabitating peacefully in the knowledge that the neighbors suspected them of being nothing more than spinsters sharing the rent.
Newsletters like The Ladder were early examples of the force that, more than anything else, ultimately paved the way for later gains in the fight for queer equality before the law: mass communications. Remember the isolation I spoke of earlier -- with a growing awareness of those around them in the same boat, gays and lesbians began at last speaking to one another, conversing from inside the closet door. A Supreme Court ruling in the 1950s that said that the Post Office couldn't withhold such publications from the U.S. Mail merely because they contained an obscene word -- "homosexual" -- allowed this new intercity/interstate network to grow at an increased pace, while new inquisitiveness of Beat culture provided a group of (marginally) fellow travelers with which the embryonic queer culture could interact. It took twenty years for the notion that the injustice inflicted upon us wasn't our fault to circulate and sink in, but when it did, the groundwork was laid for the pressure to explode into the Stonewall Riots and the resulting surge of queer militancy.
Dragging all this back to the comics: Grant Morrison's New X-Men works for me precisely because, by accident or intention, it mimics the environment of the early gay-rights struggle, but in a modern setting. Take the recent Riot storyline, for example. Quentin Quire's militancy doesn't grow in a vaccum; references to a proliferation of "Magneto Was Right" T-shirts are made early on in the series, and soon Quire is seen wearing one. Anti-mutant newspaper articles share space on his walls with posters for mutant rock bands. The incident that serves as the last straw for Quentin (the seemingly-fatal bashing of a mutant fashion designer) occurs in New York City's mutant ghetto. The design for the helmet Quire uses to hinder Proffessor Xavier's telepathic powers was pulled from a website, presumably from the mutant -- webring? Blogosphere? As the mutant-rights meme spreads, environment and communications provide more and more of the glue that holds mutant society together. I'm fascinated by the depth and recognisability of the world Grant Morrison has created over Chris Claremont's primitive foundation. Prior to his run on the series, you couldn't find anywhere near this level of versimillitude; I think I can safely say that three years ago I certainly would have been surprised to find myself a fan of a fucking X-Men comic.
Shortly after the Stonewall Riots, members of the Mattachine Society took it upon themselves to act as the "heads of reason", trying to cool the fire they were witnessing on the street; it got them nowhere. Meanwhile, Mattachine founder Harry Hay, booted from the group in the late 1950s for being a Communist, joined the new militancy of the times with gusto, eventually going on to found the organization Radical Faeries. Over in the X-verse so wonderfully realized by the only creative genius currently in Marvel's employ, things seem to be headed towards a similar juncture. It's fascinating stuff. In any case, I still think Magneto had a point.
And there you have it. Like the sidebar says, send email to weblog@tcj.com -- all email is considered anonymous unless you volunteer otherwise, and assumed printable unless you say otherwise.
(The Comics Press) On the other hand, there's this, a snippet taken from 