Alan Moore: Waking In A Boiling Rage

...Clearly Paul Levitz can't do enough in a corporate-obligation-to-the-Time-Warner-shareholders sense than to try and make Alan Moore happy and clearly no one has had a greater failure rate in his attempts to do so as can be seen by Heidi [MacDonald]'s interview with Alan. I really can't emphasize strongly enough that creators take a hard look at what Alan is saying and actually try to absorb it rather than just going ballistic and heading for the metaphorical hills. As he wrote in the dedication in my copy of the Graphitti Designs hardcover of Watchmen:

Note Alan didn't write anything along the lines of "Just imagine how much money this book brings into my bank account every year, double it and you're not even close. Much loov, Alan Moore". Although I'm reasonably sure that that would have been accurate as well. I mean, linking this to Colleen Doran's comments -- which are very succinct and very closely reasoned on the subject of work-made-for-hire, its pluses and minuses versus creator ownership and control -- I think she misses the point that she owns A Distant Soil and that that makes a lot of difference in areas where neither she nor I have the experience that Alan does where, as he says to Heidi: "it's whether I'm waking up at four in the morning in a boiling rage or not, and there is no amount of money that can compensate for that." I mean this is a nutcracker for Alan Moore wannabe's. Do you seriously believe that the writer of Watchmen and V for Vendetta is just, you know, being needlessly cranky and belligerent about his relationship with DC? That he needs to take a hard look at his bank account and realize that DC's Moolah is the best thing that ever happened to him and to take a downer or smoke a spliff and, you know, chill? I don't wake up at four in the morning in a boiling rage and I don't think Colleen Doran wakes up at four in the morning in a boiling rage either and I suspect that it's for the exact reason that we own a vast amount of our own work. Alan feels as if some of his fingers are missing and I wish more creators would pay attention to that. I have no idea where the balance point is -- I have virtually all of my own metaphorical fingers -- the work-made-for-hire stuff that I've done wouldn't fill a large business envelope and the Cerebus originals that we own, Gerhard informs me, would reach three storeys in height if they were in one pile -- and Colleen has most of her metaphorical fingers and (pretty clearly) all the ones that really matter to her -- but clearly there's a balance that's not just wanted, but needed. Neither man nor woman lives by work-made-for-hire alone. There came a memorable point in the 1980s where Frank Miller suddenly realized he had been working in comics for (however many) years and all that he owned was one story that he had done in Bizarre Adventures or some such. One five or seven-page story out of the hundreds of pages he had drawn that were largely financing the comic-book field (and which have since founded a Hollywood blockbuster or two). The result, for Frank, was the need to create his own comic book: Sin City...

...It was Alan who sold ABC to Jim Lee. ABC could have been Alan's Sin City but not after he sold it to somebody. As soon as you sell it somebody it's behind bars and all you can do is go and visit it wherever it's imprisoned and work on it with your hands thrust through the bars or leave it to someone else to do so. But, I think I'm safe in saying that that is a leading cause of waking up at four in the morning in a boiling rage. Presumably Frank Miller has those sorts of experiences with Dark Knight Returns and DK2 and presumably he doesn’t with Sin City and 300 and the other things he owns. If you have to go ballistic over my saying that, at least please take it with you when you run for the metaphorical hills and think about it!...