Creators Wronged

I think I may have come up with a plot for a mystery novel. If you’re a freelance writer skimming Elance or Craigslist for work, you’ll come across ads from people who’ll pay you to write stories for them. For a flat fee, you produce anywhere from 1000 to 30,000 words, which your client can then do whatever they want with—run it on their blog, sell it, self-pub it under their byline. In some cases the client provides the plot and characters; in other ads, this much input from the buyer isn’t mentioned. You write a story, you get paid, which is how it’s supposed to work.

The trouble with this scenario is, you have no rights to your work. You agree to give those to the client in exchange for an agreed-upon sum. This is known as “work for hire.” Remember that term.

Here’s what I got to thinking: suppose you answered one of these ads and wrote a romance novel. You whip out 30,000 words of steamy passion, whipped cream and Brazil nuts and receive $1000 for your efforts. Actually, that’s not bad. I think it’s more than my last release through my publisher earned. Here’s another term to remember: “self-promotion.”

Then your client turns around and sells your work, now their work, to a publisher. And against all odds, it takes off. You didn’t know it at the time, but you wrote the next 50 Shades. Checks with lots of zeros on them are fired off to the “writer’s” bank account. Agents and publishers who’ve rejected your work for years are now falling all over each other, trying to sign the Next Big Bestselling Author. If the writer milks this puppy right, they’ll never have to write another thing.

You? You’ve got your thousand bucks, no rights to the story you wrote, and no legal leg to stand on, all of which you agreed to when you signed the contract. Sure, go ahead, make a stink. See what it gets you. You’ll be laughed out of court.

(Disclaimer: this isn’t the same as working with a book packager. Usually the packager provides the background, characters and general plot they want to see fleshed out. The flesh-out part is what they pay the writer for. Everybody knows this going in. Some writers even get royalties for writing licensed properties. It all depends on the kind of deal you or your agent negotiates.)

Back at my plotline, the “author” is found murdered. The writer who raised all the ruckus is suddenly the number-one suspect. The rest of the book would be the hapless writer trying to clear their name by rooting out the real killer. These are the stories my brain comes up with when I’m not keeping a closer eye on it.

Dunno if I’ll ever write this. I haven’t decided yet. Here’s a variation you can use if you want, ripped from Real Life: the plight of comic book writers and artists currently getting the shaft.

Comic books heroes are big business in movies and TV these days. Disney (owner of Marvel) and Time-Warner (owner of DC) are cashing in big time. Because that’s not all they own. They own those characters up on the screen, the ones that got their start in comic books. The characters created by writers and artists who don’t see a penny of the millions their brainchildren are raking in.

For an easy example, let’s take the Avengers. Almost all those characters were created or co-created by legendary artist Jack Kirby. Iron Man? Kirby. Thor and Loki? Kirby. The Hulk? Kirby. Captain America? Kirby, all the way back in the 1940s. Before he became a spy, Nick Fury starred in a war comic set in WWII, drawn by three guesses who. I’m not sure who created Hawkeye and the Black Widow, but they first appeared in the Iron Man strip.

I don’t recall seeing Kirby’s name in the credits of the Avengers movie, or in the credits of any of the films that led up to it. I didn’t see Chris Claremont or John Byrne’s names in the credits for any of the X-Men films either, and at least two of those drew their plots directly from the comics. (Also missing was Kirby’s name; he co-created the X-Men.) The billions earned by those characters and stories are going into the pockets of everyone except the writers who initially created them.

Why? Because up until around the 1960s and ‘70s, comic books were cheap, disposable entertainment for kids. The artists and writers who produced them did so as work-for-hire. In those days the paychecks came with a stamp on the back, a contract whereby the worker agreed to waive all rights to their work. If you wanted your money you signed on the dotted line and gave up your rights to whatever you created. Which they did. It was just a comic book. Who knew?

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster didn’t know. They sold the rights to Superman for $130 back in the 1940s. Their heirs have since won judgments from DC/Time-Warner, but it took decades of legal wrangling. Ditto for Kirby's estate, which recently settled with Marvel. Sometimes there’s a measure of justice.

And sometimes it just gets ridiculous. Check out this article on Alan Brennert, who accidentally created an important (and lucrative) character in one of his Batman stories. Go ahead and read it. I’ll be here when you get back.

(…)

Nuts, huh? We’re talking $45 here. Chump change to a behemoth like Time-Warner. I guess they don’t want to set a precedent. Imagine if they paid out royalties to everybody who deserved them. Why, someone in a corner office might have to forego a new Porsche. Or (shudder) send their kids to public school.

The moral of the story is, if you’re a writer, artist, singer, or anyone else in the arts, read your contracts carefully. If you see the words “work for hire” run, do not walk, to the exit. Nobody knows what’s going to become huge somewhere down the line. Wouldn’t you rather be the one who owns the rights to it?

Now I have to decide if I want to write that murder mystery. What the hell, NaNoWriMo’s coming up.

Grab Bag

Who’s scarier than the Incredible Hulk? The answer lies below!

It’s another one of those weeks where I have to write a blog but I don’t have a topic, so I jot down whatever pops into my head. None of this has anything to do with anything, so sit back, switch off the brain, and enjoy.

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This just in: Dave Hester of A&E's hit Storage Wars has been fired from the show and is now suing them. He claims the auctions are staged and the producers often “salt” storage lockers with antiques to up the suspense. In short, he says it’s fake. Wait a ding-dong minute here. Are you telling me reality shows aren’t real? That they’re just as scripted and rehearsed as any other show? I knew reality shows had writers, but … no. That would mean nothing we see on television is real. Dear God. The Mayans were right. My entire concept of the world just ended. Next you’ll try to tell me pro wrestling is fake. Go ahead, I dare you.

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Wait, I’ve got one. Wipeout. Those falls are real. And painful. And humiliating. And funny as hell. I feel better now.

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Oftentimes it takes me a while to jump on a particular bandwagon, but I catch up eventually. That’s how I finally ended up reading Twilight, and why I’m now reading The Hunger Games. The difference is, The Hunger Games is an exciting, well-written story and deserves every bit of its hype. There’s just one teensy problem, but it’s not the fault of writer Suzanne Collins. It’s the fault of me, the writer reading the book. I’m trying to read as a reader, and for the most part I succeed, but I can’t help noticing the little plot twists, how she sets up characterization, the expert use of chapter-ending cliffhangers, and other writerly techniques. You’re not supposed to see the seams; you’re just supposed to wear the dress.

I guess that’s why I’m no good at picking winners on Project Runway. To me, the outfit looks fantastic. The judges see the uneven stitching and ragged, unfinished hems and the poor fabric choices. The kids, who unlike me are the intended target audience, aren’t going to see the tricks Collins used to make the book as good as it turned out, but I can. If I paid more attention, I might just learn something here and maybe write a book that’s just as good.

I wonder if Collins is a plotter? No book comes out this clean unless all potential problems have been ironed out beforehand. Being a pantser, I tend to author haphazard stories. You can always spot the pantsers. We’re the ones with the ragged hems.

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Get two or more comic book fans in a room and sooner or later one of them is bound to ask the inevitable question: who’s stronger, Superman or the Hulk? That’s a toughie. I’m going to have to go with Superman, but it would be close. Superman is more than mortal, but the Hulk’s just too stupid to quit. Same with Hulk vs. Thor. Thor would win, unless the Hulk got his hammer away from him. Then it’s a toss-up. A Hulk/Batman fight-fest actually happened, thanks to a join Marvel/DC venture back in the ‘80s. Batman won, using knockout gas. Even the Hulk can’t hold his breath forever. Hulk vs. Wonder Woman? Definitely Wonder Woman. He’d be so distracted by her cleavage he’d forget to throw a punch.

We’ve already seen the results of a Hulk and Loki fight: “Puny god.”

My choice to take on the Hulk? Chef Gordon Ramsey. That man is flippin’ scary. “You

call that a fist? It's fucking raw! Bloody piece of shit! Piss off! Get the fuck out of my kitchen!” Hulk would run away blubbering. What could defeat Gordon Ramsey? High blood pressure. The man’s going to bellow himself into a stress-induced heart attack one of these days. On camera, if the producers can fix it.

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This being the holiday season, nobody’s watching TV, so most weekly shows have either wrapped up or gone on hiatus until January. For the next couple of weeks we get reruns, endless Christmas specials, 24 hours of “A Christmas Story” and “It’s a Wonderful Life.” We might even get “Oops, We Goofed” from the Mayans on December 22. Assuming the planet’s still here, the weekly shows will dribble back onto a regular schedule after the first of the year.

My award for the politest of these goes to Grimm, which wrapped up the first half of its season with a tense cliffhanger, then faded to black with the words, “To be continued … Sorry.” It’s nice to know they care about their viewers, even while torturing them. This will give me ample time to finish my study of The Hunger Games trilogy so I can write better books in the new year. Happy holidays and happy reading, everybody!

Super Inspiration

Dah-dah-dah-DAHHHH! What’s that? That’s me tooting my own horn. Last week Siren accepted my seventh book, Temptation and Tights. It’s the story of a supervillain falling for the superhero who’s been trying to bring him to justice. One guy has mechanical wings. The other guy turns into a human velociraptor. Think of it as X-Men done as M/M romantic comedy. (Actually, that’s pretty accurate. Back in high school I wrote X-men fanfic; in my version Angel was gay. I always thought he and Sauron should have been together. Well, they finally made it, though I changed Sauron’s species. Pteranodon, velociraptor, what’s the difference when you’re in love?)

The timing couldn’t be better. The Avengers movie is closing out the month with a box office take of over a billion—yes, that’s billion with a B—dollars. Still to come this summer: a new version of Spider-Man and the finale of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises. Over in the comic books, Marvel’s gay superhero Northstar is tying the knot with his boyfriend, and DC, which relaunched its line last year, has announced one of its iconic characters will be revealed as gay. (No, it’s not Batman. He’s dating Catwoman. A man need three Y chromosomes just to keep up with her.)

In other words, superheroes are big this summer, and gay superheroes are coming out of their four-color closet. Maybe I’ll actually be ahead of a trend for once.

The reason I preferred Marvel heroes to DC’s in the ‘60s was Marvel’s more realistic characterizations. The personalities of DC’s heroes were bland and interchangeable. Marvel’s were way more fun. They argued with each other. They talked like real people. They had problems kids could relate to. Spider-Man might save New York City on a regular basis, but Peter Parker couldn’t get a date. The Thing looked like a pile of orange rocks. Worst case of acne ever. Tony Stark needed his Iron Man armor to keep his damaged heart beating. At Marvel, great power brought with it great responsibility and a ton of personal drama.

And let’s not forget the big draw to a young and impressionable girl reading comics, the heavy soap opera elements. DC’s heroes had girlfriends (and Wonder Woman had a boyfriend), but they never did anything. Marvel’s heroes had heart-rending, passionate, angsty relationships interrupted by kidnappings, attacks by supervillains, alien invasions and threats to all humanity. The relationships as much as the stories kept me coming back month after month.

Though X-Men was my favorite, for a while The Avengers was top of my must-read list, because of the romance that developed between the Vision and the Scarlet Witch. You think gay marriage is a hot-button topic? The Vision wasn’t human. He was synthetic, an android programmed with the brain patterns of a dead man. Still, he was human enough to have manly urges for Wanda, who was a mutant. They pined for each other and bemoaned a love that could never be for over a dozen issues before a new writer took over and finally brought them together. I’m assuming Vision was anatomically correct and, as Data once put it, “fully functional.” At any rate, Wanda never complained.

With a background like this, is it any wonder that once I started reading and writing romance, I headed straight for paranormal? I’m not quite sure why I veered off into M/M. Maybe it was all those buff guys in tights. Superheroing was still primarily a boys’ club during my formative years, so you had all these guys hanging out together acting all comradely. Maybe that’s what skewed me in that direction.

Though I’ll bet if DC had given Wonder Woman a girlfriend, sales would’ve shot through the roof.

Comics have changed since those simpler days. They’re far more expensive, for one thing. Time was, a dollar would buy you half a dozen comics, a candy bar and a soda, and you’d be good for the afternoon. These days the average monthy comic runs between $2-$4 and can be read in ten minutes. They also went grim and gritty and ultra-realistic during the ‘80s and ‘90s. They lost a lot of their fun and I lost interest. If you want to look into modern comics, I recommend you stop by your local library and check out the “graphic novel” section. These paperbacks collect 4-6 issues of a monthly comic, so you get a complete story. And DC took a page from Marvel’s playbook and gave their heroes personalities, so they’re more fun to read about now. For the record, Batman’s still psychotic. It’s part of his appeal.

On the film front, I recommend Superman: The Movie. It’s a classic combo of action, humor, romance and superheroics, starring the most recognizable hero on the planet. Spider-Man 2 has all the Marvel hallmarks: a problem-laden hero, a tragic villain, one-liners tossed around during fight scenes and a romance with a happy ending. If you want to write a superhero ménage, you can use X-Men 2 as a springboard. Heroine Jean Grey finds herself torn between tragic hero Cyclops and lethal but fascinating bad boy Wolverine. Why not go for both? Because Cyclops shoots force beams out of his eyes, Wolverine shoots claws out of his hands, and they can’t stand each other. Conflict you want, conflict you got.

For examples of superhero movies done right, try Iron Man, The Avengers and The Dark Knight. No romance, but plenty of humor (in the first two) and character development and examples of how to handle characters with paranormal abilities. When it comes to presenting their characters, for some reason DC is better in animation, while Marvel rules live action. No idea why that is.

And, in my opinion, the only actor ever to look totally realistic in a colorful skintight costume was Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman. DC needs to put out a Wonder Woman movie. Give Princess Diana a girlfriend and watch the box office soar …