BY ALISON DELLIT

Asked in 2005 if his decision to ask DC to remove his name from the V for Vendetta comic he scripted in the 1980s constituted “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”, Alan Moore explained: “The baby is one I put a great deal of love into, a great deal of passion and then during a drunken night it turned out that I’d sold it to the gypsies and they had turned out my baby into a life of prostitution. Occasionally they would send me increasingly glossy and well-produced pictures of my child as she now was, and they would very, very kindly send me a cut of the earnings.”

Moore’s dilemma — that he does not own the copyright or the broader rights to the work he wrote, is common in comics, and in increasingly broader forms of media. Several of Moore’s creations have been made into films: From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Constantine were the almost unanimously bad results. After watching the League film (which bore no discernable resemblance to Moore’s tale at all), Moore decided to refuse any involvement in films from his work, and has refused all royalties from them, signing them over the artists he has worked with.

But his frustrations remain. One of Moore’s comics, Watchmen, is probably one of the most commercially successful comics in history, but Moore retains no control at all over its publication. The Time-Warner-owned DC, the company that Moore regards as having stolen his intellectual property, still owns the copyright.

Moore is reasonably fortunate in some respects. It is only after years of outcry that comic creators are mostly guaranteed any ongoing income from their work for the big companies. As Moore explained in the interview: “By asking DC to take my name off V for Vendetta and stop giving me the money for V for Vendetta, all I’m asking for is for them to treat me in the same way they’ve been completely happy to treat hundreds of much greater comics creators than I over the decades. I’m asking them to say to me the same thing they said to Gardner Fox and Jack Kirby and to all those other guys, just say to me you are not going to see a penny for any kind of future reproductions of your work and we’re not going to put your name on them.”

However, a recent deal signed by one of the biggest publishers of English-language manga, Tokyopop, that splits copyright for their original creations between creators and the company, has raised fears of a resurgence of corporate-owned original work.

From Green Left Weekly, April 12, 2006.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.

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