Alan Moore and the Pitfalls of Unforeseen Success

Folks who blog about superhero comics are apparently supposed to have a moral stand on DC Comics’s decision to commission prequels to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, despite the former’s vociferous opposition.

I don’t view that as a major ethical issue, but rather a business venture that will find its judgment in the marketplace. The American superhero comics industry has grown over the decades from writers and artists taking inspiration from and contributing to collective narratives. Moore knew that when he signed his contracts with DC in the 1980s, and in fact much of his work has grown from other writers’ creations.

Moore’s main beef with DC now is not that the company isn’t abiding by the contracts he signed, but that it is. He just didn’t expect those contracts would still apply to him.

That’s not because Moore thought his work was special. It’s because he didn’t think it would be as successful as it’s been. Moore assumed that Watchmen would go out of print after just a few years. He’s said as much in many interviews, but here’s a recent one from Kurt Amacker:

KA:  I thought we could discuss the initial ownership dispute you had with DC back in the 1980s, wherein you and Dave Gibbons expected to get the rights to Watchmen and its characters back a year after the trade paperback went out of print. But, it never went out of print--and one suspects DC probably knew it wouldn't.

AM:  We were told that. That was the understanding upon which we did Watchmen--that they understood that we wanted to actually own the work that we'd done, and that they were a "new DC Comics," who were going to be more responsive to creators. And, they'd got this new contract worked out which meant that when the work went out of print, then the rights to it would revert to us--which sounded like a really good deal. I'd got no reason not to trust these people.  They'd all been very, very friendly. They seemed to be delighted with the amount of extra comics they were selling. . . .

Now, I've since seen the Watchmen contract, which obviously we didn't read very closely at the time. It was the first contract that I'd ever seen--and I believe that it was a relatively rare event for a contract to actually exist in the comics business. Most of the time, people just signed away all their rights on the back of their invoice voucher. But, I was so pleased with the deal with Watchmen, that I suggested to David Lloyd that we do the same thing on V for Vendetta--which was, again, something that we owned and that we wanted to carry on owning.  The contracts actually are some of the most anti-creator contracts imaginable.  They've got clauses such as, if I refuse to sign for any reason any agreements in the future, DC can appoint an attorney to sign them instead of me. 

Actually, that last is a rather common clause, but not one that publishers try invoking often, if at all. No company wants to work with someone who can’t stand to work with it. I also don’t know if there are any strong precedents for that clause standing up in court.

As for the provision that most arouses Moore’s resentment—that a publisher keeps the copyright holders’ license to issue a literary work as long as it remains in print—that’s completely standard for the book industry.

I’m sure that Ernest Hemingway signed contracts with that clause, and Stephen King, and J. K. Rowling—even after they became bestselling authors. Most authors are happy when a publisher keeps selling a book. That’s a lot easier and more lucrative and less ego-deflating than when a publisher puts a book out of print and reverts the rights. Moore has never denied DC’s statements that the company’s paid him all the Watchmen royalties he’s due—a considerable sum, given the book’s sales in the millions.

It’s probably true that Moore, Gibbons, and DC didn’t expect Watchmen to still be selling strongly nearly thirty years later. No one had the superpower of being able to foresee that future. As Moore admits, he recognized that mid-1980s contract as far better than anything he’d seen before and didn’t consider its terms carefully. But a good contract is negotiated to anticipate all possible outcomes. The Watchmen contract spelled out what would happen if the book stayed in print, and that arrangement is simply industry standard.

By his own account, Moore took the same approach to his movie rights, including not only Watchmen but League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. This spring he spoke about that in a BBC interview, quoted here on semi-coherence:

Originally, I was under the illusion that the way that films worked was that you got a lot of option money, and then after a couple of years they decided that they weren't going to make the film. Which was the perfect result, the film didn’t get made, you got the money. Then they actually made a couple of my films, and at that point I decided, well, I'll just distance myself from them as much as is possible.

Again, Moore signed contracts anticipating the most common outcome but didn’t think through the possibility of success.

Perhaps that reflects Moore’s upbringing in the working class of northern England, where folks might not expect anything to work out well, much less phenomenally well. The American publishers and movie producers, in contrast, were ready for things to work out better than they expected. Maybe that’s characteristic of American businesspeople, or maybe it’s just why they were willing to put up the money.

Dick Grayson’s Unresolvable Foundational Conflict

This weekly Robin is a follow-up to last week’s, ToB’s comment on it, and the thoughts that inspired about how open-ended series need main characters with unresolvable foundational conflicts.

Adventure comics, in both newspaper and magazine form, have for the most part been open-ended, and thus demanded such characters. As Robot 6’s Tom Bondurant wrote in a Grumpy Old Fan column on the Watchmen prequels:

Superman and Swamp Thing were created to be ongoing characters with no definite endpoint, but Watchmen, [James] Robinson’s Starman, [Garth] Ennis’ Hitman, and [Neil] Gaiman’s Sandman were all finite series.

(At least they became so—I don’t recall Gaiman describing such a plan at the outset of Sandman when he was still a starry-eyed British freelancer happy for his big break.)

That’s why DC has commissioned prequels to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s graphic novel. Those new stories won’t affect the characters’ ultimate fates as Watchmen portrayed them. They’ll play out the characters’ foundational conflicts, but everyone who’s read the novel will know how those conflicts resolve. (And how different is that from the usual superhero comics?)

From the 1940s to the 1960s, the unresolvable foundational conflict of Batman and Robin was the tension between their comfortable “real” lives and the challenges of fighting crime while dressed in garish costumes and masks.

Every story about secret identities played off that conflict. Every time Bruce Wayne’s life as a playboy millionaire or Dick Grayson’s as a high-school kid interfered with the Dynamic Duo, that plot grew out of the same foundation.

In most 1940s issues of Batman, one of the four stories focused on the Dynamic Duo’s relationship under pressure from their double lives. “Bruce Wayne Loses the Guardianship of Dick Grayson” (issue #20) was one example. Others include:

• “Batman Plays a Lone Hand” (#13): Bruce kicks Dick out of Wayne Manor with no explanation in order to protect him from criminals.
• “Robin Studies His Lessons” (#18): Dick can’t fight crime until he gets his grades back up.
• “Collector of Millionaires” (#19): Bruce is kidnapped and a double takes his place.

Most of those stories would be impossible if Bruce and Dick gave up their secret identities, their crime-fighting, or their millions. (Or if they just talked to each other more.)

Batman and Robin let some partners in on their secret identities, starting with Alfred and Superman. That didn’t change the foundational conflict, however, because most of the world still didn’t know.

The imaginary tale “The Marriage of Batman and Batwoman” (#122) shows Bruce marrying Kathy Kane. Later imaginary tales of that couple show that the stories could keep coming as long as there was some circle of secrecy. But in that tale, Kathy accidentally reveals Batman’s identity, and the saga screeches to an imaginary end.

Of course, most Batman stories from those decades were driven by that month’s villains, or aliens, or plan to travel back in time through hypnosis. They could have worked with other heroes. It wasn’t until the 1980s that writers began to focus on longer story arcs and more complex motivations for ongoing readers. And then the “we have to preserve our secret identities” conflict just wasn’t enough.

Since 1980 or so, the unresolvable foundational conflict for Bruce Wayne has been his drive to fight crime, avenging his parents and defending innocents, even though that impossible mission threatens his health, his sanity, and his relationships.

For Dick Grayson, the unresolvable foundational conflict has been his relationship with Bruce Wayne. As critic Douglas Wolk put it in Reading Comics, Robin’s “symbolic value is as a son trying to learn from his father’s experience and wisdom without making his father’s mistakes.”

As Nightwing, Dick took a step away from Batman and had his own adventures, but his larger story kept coming back to his relationship to Bruce Wayne. Could he measure up to his mentor? Is taking his own path disrespectful, or a cop-out? Is being the most liked, respected hero on the planet enough when your father figure is so emotionally distant?

When Grant Morrison led DC into making Dick Grayson into Batman for a couple of years, that resolved the hitherto unresolvable conflict. Yes, Dick could be Batman. In some ways, he was a better Batman. He mentored his own Robin, more damaged and dangerous than his predecessors. He defeated Batman villains, Titans villains, and some new villains. He helped to get Bruce Wayne back from time.

But the problem with resolving a character’s unresolvable foundational conflict is that there’s no place further to go. The central question has found its answer. The story has reached its end. DC could put that Dick Grayson back into the Nightwing costume, but why? Better to let that version of the Dick Grayson saga end successfully, and then go back a few steps and a few years to start another one with the same symbolic value but no resolution in sight.

“We’re rubbish, even though we are as gods.”

Super scripter Alan Moore had stuff to say about superheroes in a recent Quietus interview published in The Stool Pigeon:

In the past I’ve tried to say, ‘Look, we are all crappy superheroes,’ because personal computers and mobile phone devices are things that only Batman and Mr Fantastic would have owned back in the sixties. We've all got this immense power and we’re still sat at home watching pornography and buying scratch cards. We’re rubbish, even though we are as gods. . . .

I’ve come to the conclusion that what superheroes might be — in their current incarnation, at least — is a symbol of American reluctance to involve themselves in any kind of conflict without massive tactical superiority. I think this is the same whether you have the advantage of carpet bombing from altitude or if you come from the planet Krypton as a baby and have increased powers in Earth’s lower gravity.

That’s not what superheroes meant to me when I was a kid. To me, they represented a wellspring of the imagination. Superman had a dog in a cape! He had a city in a bottle! It was wonderful stuff for a seven-year-old boy to think about. But I suspect that a lot of superheroes now are basically about the unfair fight. You know: people wouldn’t bully me if I could turn into the Hulk. . . .

Initially Watchmen gained a lot of its readership because it was taking an unusual look at superheroes, but actually it was more about redefining comics than it was about redefining one particular genre. I think both me and Dave Gibbons had a lot of knowledge about that scene and we were able to take it and change it around to our advantage.

And, as you say, there hasn’t been a more sophisticated comic released in the 25 years since, which I find profoundly depressing, because it was intended to be something that expanded the possibilities of comics rather than what it has apparently become — a massive psychological stumbling block that the rest of the industry has yet to find a way round.

Of course, many nations have superheroes. But perhaps they’re all simply imitations of a fundamentally American innovation.

And perhaps Moore’s disenchantment with the genre has more to do with his stage of life than with the roots of the genre, geopolitics, or the state of the industry.

“America Was Like This Fabled Foreign Land”

I've quoted Neil Gaiman on trying to decipher American culture through American comic books. Here's Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons on the same topic, from an interview with Time:

When you and Alan [Moore] were making Watchmen, how important was it that you guys were English, and working in the UK, far away from the watchful eye of the mother ship in New York?

Actually it was a big deal. I think the whole thing of Brits working for American comics was a big deal. Because America was like this fabled foreign land. When I first came to New York City, what I was thrilled about was not the Empire State Building, or the Statue of Liberty, it was the fireplugs in the street. These things that Jack Kirby had drawn. Or these cylindrical water towers on top of buildings that Steve Ditko's Spider-Man fights used to happen in and around.

So it's always been this kind of exotic babylon. And that's so for Alan as well. We used to get the American comics imported, and it wasn't just the stories, it was the whole thing of Tootsie Rolls and Schwinn bicycles. This is the kind of thing we'd talk about for hours on the phone. All this stuff that to you Americans is everyday stuff, as boring to you as our everyday stuff is to us.

So I think that we were able to stand back from American culture, stand back from comic books, although we'd read them all our lives. I can't imagine that we could have done Watchmen if we hadn't had that detachment. You know? Love for the subject matter, love for the culture, but a detachment. And perhaps a slight British cynicism? Impressed, but not impressed.

Gaiman also mentioned the mystery of fire hydrants. Why did the New York water supply hold such fascination for London youngsters? Perhaps because they grew up in a climate where they didn't need to worry about water--it was more often than not falling on their heads.

TOMORROW: What inspired that previous generation of American comic artists the same way?

Wisest Thing I’ve Watched This Week

I rarely link to videos, so this is exceptional: Harry Partridge's re-imagination of Watchmen as a 1970s-style Saturday morning television cartoon show. If you don't know Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's graphic novel, or The Super Friends and its imitators, then this will just be curious. If you do know those two art forms, it's the most brilliant thing you'll watch for a long time.

Thanks to the Absorbascon for the link.

Strangest Comic of the Month

Blotchmen, by Kevin Cannon, is a parodic mash-up of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen, William Carlos Williams's "This Is Just to Say," Crockett Johnson's Harold and the Purple Crayon, and Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are.

Seriously.


As a bonus, this page throws in unnecessary action labels from Japanese comics.

Thanks to Matthew Holm for the pointer. I think.