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[Mongrel]

Uh, what is the source on that?

[Thad]

Next week's issue of 2000AD.

Seeing as it's not actually out yet, it's not clear what happens after that.  Which I guess is kind of the point of releasing it as a tease.

[Mongrel]

Hum... smells like marketing gimmick for now.

'Course if he's NOT gay and it IS a deliberate marketing gimmick, cue the outrage.

[Zaratustra]

Been spoiled. [spoiler]It's a cosplayer.[/spoiler]

[Mongrel]

Thought it'd be something like that.

On one hand, that would have been the ballsiest comic retcon in years, which woulc have been interesting. Though mostly it'd be funny to watch the internet explode.

On the other hand, even if Dredd was gay there's no way he could ever be anything other than the ferociously self-suppressing/denying kind.

[TA]

My understanding of Dredd is that any sexual attraction he's capable of feeling is 110% sublimated and redirected towards his raging law boner.  And that physical relationships are forbidden to Judges anyway.  So his sexuality really doesn't matter all that much, because he's barred by training and nature and job from ever expressing it.

[Mongrel]

Exactly.

[TA]

On the other hand, those pauldrons... 

[Thad]

Simone's next book revealed: The Movement, with Freddie Williams II.  It will be complemented by The Green Team, by Baltazar and Franco.  Movement is about the 99%, Green Team is about the 1%.  Should be interesting.

I would totally read a book where Superman and Batman bicker about politics, but as usual I'd rather see lesser-known characters here.  (No, not Green Arrow and Green Lantern.  Been there, done that.)

[Büge]

I am dubious. We're talking about social issues (and not Social Issues: Tumblr Edition) that have implications both grand and subtle. This is a book that will have to avoid being didactic, simplistic or absurd, make sure not to miss the point, and still be a good story.

I know it's Gail Simone, but I still don't envy her the tightrope she's walking.

[Zaratustra]

So the Authority is now about weird crossovers as they all fight amongst themselves.

and Animal Man is now about weird crossovers as they all fight amongst themselves.

and Swamp Thing is now about weird crossovers as they all fight amongst themselves.

I can only imagine Constantine will be some sort of pointless all-out fight between supporting cast for a whole year while he tries to stop THE BIG BAD's PLAN

[Zach]

Welcome to The Edge! (It will make you say, "What the F?")

[Büge]

Suggestions written anonymously to DC from its creative staff

[Thad]

I'm with pretty much all of them except

Script should dictate artwork, not the other way around.

That's as huge a dick of a thing to say as the reverse is, and whoever wrote that should maybe try drawing his own book for awhile and see how far that gets him (since it's clearly someone who's never drawn a book before).

Comics is a collaborative medium.  Neither writer nor artist is any more inherently entitled to lead than the other.  There certainly ARE projects that are writer-led -- most anything written by Alan Moore comes to mind -- but there are projects that are artist-led, too, including, oh, say, every single fucking comic ever created using the Marvel Method, you IDIOT.

Some books should be writer-led.  Others should be artist-led.  And I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that in many cases, it's probably a good idea to have the writer and artist fucking collaborate because it is a goddamn collaborative medium.

[Thad]

and Animal Man is now about weird crossovers as they all fight amongst themselves.

Yeah.  It was kind of interesting how they went with the switching-off writer and artist for the Swamp Thing scenes, but I'm sick to death of Rotworld.  The whole "Hey if you want to read the resolution of the plot we've been building since the very beginning then you're going to have to buy another comic" thing is vexing but hardly unexpected at this point, but I'm way past the point of falling for that little marketing gimmick.  They can sit and spin and I'll read about what happens to Maxine on the Internet.

I love Lemire so I'm giving him one more issue to turn things back around (since at least the crossover will be done), but this book's next on my cut list.  Which is a pity, because it really WAS the best of the New 52 when it started.

Might give JL Dark another shot, just because I love how Lemire writes Frankenstein.  But I quit reading it an issue or two into Milligan's second arc.

[Thad]

Simone on The Movement:

the book really is NOT about Occupy, and I do feel that message has been very much invented.

I kinda suspected that; the "1%/99%" rhetoric in the original piece smacks of Marketing Department Trying to Make the Comic Seem Hip and Relevant By Referring to Something That Got a Lot of News Coverage in 2011.  (Whether it's DC's fault or the Huffington Post's I don't know; I'm inclined to believe the former but wouldn't be surprised by the latter.)

Still and all, regardless of the language they're couching it in, it's a Gail Simone book so I'm sure there will be Social Issues.

(BTW, Green Team was actually a Joe Simon comic in the 1970's.  I was not aware of this, presumably because only one issue was ever published.)

[Thad]

So this could be interesting: online course on gender roles in comic books.  (Nominally it's free but there's a note on the side that says "Requires the purchase of a textbook or other course materials" -- don't know if that just means comics?)  The course will include interviews with Mark Waid, Gail Simone, Steve Wacker, Terry Moore, Brian K Vaughan, Scott Snyder, Bendis, Fraction, Aaron, Hickman, and Slott.

[Büge]

Ball State University

:3c

[François]

Catching up on this thread, something caught my eye...

And you know, as bad as things are today, they're not as bad as they used to be.  Scott Kurtz is completely full of shit when he says all that stuff that happened to Kirby has been fixed now (look at the sad case of Robert L Washington III, co-creator of Static, who died last year and whose family had to turn to charity to get him a grave), but at least today there are royalties and equity deals.

I'm not usually the type to leap to Scott Kurtz's defense, lord knows that's a futile endeavor, but I do follow the guy and this sounds like the opposite of what he says. Like, for example, in this blog post about creator rights, his message is "the publishers are there to make more money off your work than you will, not to make your dreams come true, so educate yourself and don't just give away your rights to the first asshole who'll take them", which is a far cry from "don't worry about it, nobody gets treated like Kirby anymore". There are bits in that post that are more questionable, he's way too soft on the publishers and I personally think it's not unreasonable to assign them a duty to not be complete dicks, but in the end I find it hard to disagree with his advice.

That said, for all I know maybe he went "all that stuff that happened to Kirby has been fixed now" some other time. Wouldn't be his first 180, in any case.

[Thad]

I am referring specifically to this one about how it's totally cool that Marvel didn't give any royalties to anybody for the Avengers movie:

I don’t like that Jack Kirby got screwed over by Marvel back in the day. I don’t like it at all. It’s a sad story. It’s as tragic as the story of the men who created Superman. These guys got screwed over. But that was over 40 years go,guys. The men involved are dead and buried. The policies that screwed them over were changed decades ago. Things have changed for the better, even when it comes to doing work-for-hire with the big two. I’m not saying we shouldn’t learn from this. I’m saying we’ve ALREADY learned from it. I have no doubt that we learned from it. The black and white creator-owned books of the 80s. The exodus of Marvel creators to form Image in the 90s. The indy comics movement now. Webcomics. Kickstarter. We’ve learned this lesson, folks. You’re getting angry over nothing. You’re suiting up for a battle we’ve already won.

This, not to put too fine a point on it, is total fucking horseshit.

Ask Marv Wolfman.  Ask Ken Penders.  Ask Robert Washington, except you can't because he died in the gutter.

Coming back to the post you linked, though:

Creators don’t lose their rights unless they sign them away

Kinda needs an asterisk.

For starters, prior to the 1976 Copyright Act, creators lost all kinds of fucking rights without ever signing a damn thing.  Kirby didn't sign shit (at least, not prior to 1973), and everyone who posts in a thread about Kirby getting screwed with "Well he should have gotten a lawyer to look over the contract before he signed it" deserves a swift kick in the nuts.

Even allowing for the point that, starting in 1978, work-for-hire has to be agreed upon in advance, creation's not always so clearly-cut.  While it's true that Neil Gaiman won out, and deserved to, in his litigation against McFarlane, there are plenty of cases where the creator still gets screwed.

Going with the examples I chose:

Wolfman created Blade independently.  (Yes, this was prior to 1978, but that's not really relevant in this case; unlike the Kirby case, Wolfman produced clear and unambiguous evidence that he created Blade on his own and then pitched him to Marvel.)  But a judge ruled that the Blade who Marvel ultimately published was sufficiently different from Wolfman's original pitch to constitute a discrete, work-for-hire creation.

Ken Penders, Scott Shaw, Elliot S Maggin, and others allege that Archie never made them sign a contract in the 1990's -- which means that they still own every word they wrote and every line they drew, and that Archie has spent the last couple of decades reprinting their copyrighted work (and using their original characters) without their permission and without compensating them.

And Robert Washington was never legally acknowledged alongside McDuffie and Leon as co-creator of Static.  They got royalties (and, unless I'm mistaken, Leon continues to get them and so does McDuffie's widow); he didn't.  Now, I don't mean to speak ill of McDuffie; by all accounts he was a great guy, and he's not around anymore to defend himself -- I'm sure he felt he was justified in declaring only himself and Leon as the creators of Static.  But I think he was wrong; I think co-writing a character's first appearance qualifies as co-creation (because copyright is based on the expression, not the conception, of an idea), and I think it's a legitimate tragedy that Washington did not receive his share in credit, ownership, or profit.

Hell, look at Kurtz's own reasoning in that Avengers post: he points out that the Avengers movie bears a closer resemblance to Millar and Hitch's Ultimates than Lee, Kirby, and Heck's Avengers -- ergo for some reason none of those people deserve any money for the movie.  I'm not gonna lie, I have a lot of trouble following his logic there.  (Maybe it's because if Disney were to give a million dollars to each of the dozen or so people who wrote and drew the comics it was based on then it would be forced into bankruptcy?  Maybe Scott Kurtz is just terrible at math.)  I don't see that as implying that it's okay to deny profits to Kirby's heirs.  I see it as an indictment of Marvel for continuing to shaft current writers and artists like Millar and Hitch.