(Commentary) Our story so far: my essay, "The Trouble With Marvel", in which I discussed what I see as the difficulties and complexities of Marvel Comics' entry into the bookstore market, generated a fair amount of critical reaction. At the moment, I'm responding to criticisms from weblogger Jim Henley. This is part two; click here to read part one.
We turn now to work-for-hire, a practice long considered to be the norm in the comics industry. Back in my original essay, I claimed that this practice still holds sway over creators working for the bigger publishers largely because (A) they have the means to pay the largest page rates, and (B) they have enough of a collective monopoly on the material sold in the Direct Market that they can dictate the terms of business. I also stated that these conditions did not exist in the bookstore industry to remotely the same extent, though I did acknowledge that work-for-hire wasn't an unknown practice there, either.
Henley disagrees. As he observes, the closest genre model for Marvel's attempt to enter the "teen girl" genre, Trouble, corresponds to such series as Sweet Valley High and Goosebumps, both of which employ anonymous ghost-writers under work-for-hire contracts. After making his essential case, Henley writes:
"Upshot: despite how publishing industry people feel about work-for-hire, they engage in quite a lot of it in certain sectors of the business, including the one that most matches Marvel's placement of Trouble. Marvel's terms are even, appalling as they are, an improvement on the kids-romance-series norm -- writer Mark Millar, artist Terry Dodson, the inker, colorist and letterer will all get their own names listed in the credits. That's better than any Victor W. Appleton has gotten.
"Trouble may or may not succeed, and I have no reason to doubt Deppey's judgment that 'Millar's work reads like its job is to produce a hit comic which leads to bigger paychecks on better projects.' But has he read a Sweet Valley High or Mary Kate and Ashley story? If Trouble tanks, it won't be because Marvel's ownership practices or the series' literary merits are out of step with the part of the book business Marvel is trying to enter with it."
I must confess to being unfamiliar with the book series under discussion in the above quote; I learned my letters largely by reading Robert Heinlein sci-fi juveniles. That said, I think Henley is missing the bigger picture here by several degrees.
First, while I have no objection to his assertion that the Sweet Valley High series is largely based around the WFH concept, it's not anchored to it exclusively. Here's the copyright information found at the bottom of Random House's Sweet Valley High homepage:
"Sweet Valley High © is a registered trademark of Francine Pascal. Conceived by Francine Pascal. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2001 by Francine Pascal."
According to her author's page, Pascal had originally intended to sell the concept as a television series, until a friend suggested that a book series might instead be the best way to develop it. At a blind guess, I'd venture that Pascal wrote the first X number of books, until the franchise got big enough for her to need ghost-writers to flesh out and promote the line. I would assume that she has provided a "writer's bible" explaining the core concepts of the series and oversees the writing process, offering quality control to ensure that the end result stays harmoniously in line with what has come before. In short, as the ultimate owner of the work in question, I would hazard to guess that she has an obvious stake in maintaining the intergity of the line, and exercises it out of a desire to maintain the momentum generated by prior works. While there may be other fingers hired to write some (or many) of her stories for her, in the end, the buck surely stops with Francine Pascal.
I have no objection to this, from either a moral or practical standpoint. In the cartooning world, creative assistants are often used even in situations where an artist rather than a company owns the work -- manga in particular is built around this system, with journeyman artisans assisting the creator of a given work with background art, inking, et cetera. Oftentimes these artists are either learning the trade or simply earning a little extra while waiting for their own works to be developed and approved; the original creator, meanwhile, is able to crank out a work based in a technically complex and difficult craft at a far greater pace than would be possible if forced to do so themselves. (This is also true in America; for example, Howard Chaykin worked as an assistant to Gil Kane before moving on down the path that ultimately lead to works like American Flagg!.)
The fact remains, however, that even in the case of Francine Pascal, there is an original mind behind the project, one motivated by the self-interest of a creator who wishes to see her creation continue to bear fruit, and who understands that what her readers want is a continuation and fruition of the core concept. I would argue that this is not only a powerful motivation, but also a better mechanism for success than the pure work-for-hire system as demonstrated by Marvel. A company like Marvel, with its rotating editors and many-thumbs-in-the-pudding creative model, is simply less adept at maintaining such a creative engine than a single driving mind.
Examples abound, but let's pick an obvious one: Steve Gerber's Howard the Duck. Gerber originally created the character as a supporting player in Marvel's Man-Thing series, but it quickly grew to be the star of its own book, which Gerber turned into one of the most wildly original and sharply satirical titles the company had ever published. When Gerber left the series, Marvel attempted to pursue it with other writers, but the results never gelled, and the character languished until 2001, when Gerber returned to pick it up again as a mini-series.
Marvel was unable to properly utilize the character because a company is by and large not a creative entity -- true artistic expression can only occur in the hands of the original writers and artists, which is why the sales of Marvel's various titles have increasingly ebbed and flowed over the years according to who was writing and drawing them at a given moment. Just because Frank Miller's work on Daredevil brought in the readers did not mean that they would stay with the book after he left; despite what Marvel would prefer to believe, it is the creator, not the character, who draws in repeat business. Stripped of the mind that made it work, the engine simply cannot perform as it had previously -- Hollywood's attempt at a Howard the Duck film only throws this syndrome into sharper relief.
Holy crap, look at the time. I'm going to have to continue this 'un on Monday, I'm afraid, when we'll continue down the creator-ownership trail. In the meantime, Henley has already reacted to yesterday's installment. I should note that he misinterprets me as asserting that most comics companies had the same success last year that Marvel did, which isn't was I said. Actually, my point was that there essentially was no graphic-novel trade to speak of prior to roughly the end of 2000, and that the success of most companies publishing graphic novels from that point forward was comparable to Marvel's in 2002 -- manga publishers, for example, went from zero-ish to roughly half of a $50 million dollar market in this period. I'm referring to a two-year timespan, not one.
