The Creators Bill Of Rights 25th Anniversary

A Bill Of Rights For Comics Creators
As drafted at the Northampton Summit, 17 November, 1988, with contributions from: 
Steve Bissette, Ryan Brown, Michael Dooney, Kevin Eastman, Gerhard, Peter Laird,
Steve Lavigne, Jim Lawson, Larry Marder, Mark Martin, Scott McCloud, Ken Mitchroney,
Stephen Murphy, Richard Pini, Dave Sim, Eric Talbot, Rick Veitch and Michael Zulli.
(taken from Cerebus #116, November 1988)

DAVE SIM:
(from The Creator Bill Of Rights, April 2005)

...There was a lot of debate about what rights Gerhard had which sort of blew up in their faces when I said that as far as I was concerned Gerhard had the right to reproduce his own work. If he wanted to do his own Cerebus trade paperbacks he had the right to do that without asking my permission because his work was on the printed pages and -- because the book was still in progress -- he also had the right to get someone to write and draw his Cerebus comic that he would do the backgrounds on. There was no way that Kevin and Peter -- or Richard Pini who was also at the Northampton summit -- were going to agree with that, but to me it was a basic ethical question. Gerhard started out getting a page rate, then he became a salaried employee (like me) and then he became a 40% partner in the company. Again, there would have been nothing illegal about just paying him $80 a page and getting him to sign a contract saying that I own everything he did, but to me it would have been unethical and it would have been progressively more unethical the more work that he did. When you have tied your fortunes to one book, as Gerhard had, and that situation goes on for more than two decades, you are -- again ethically, not legally -- entitled to share in the success of that book. I think it would be worth framing that in more specific terms -- how long you have to work on an established book before you get a share in the revenues, how large that share should be after how long a period of time and at what point you should get join ownership, and so on. But there was no interest in even discussing it. In fact I was just laughed at for bringing it up and Gerhard was treated as a joke by everyone else whenever I cited our business relationship as the most ethical way to do business in a creative partnership. Which I thought was very short-sighted. A successful comic book intellectual property is a long-term proposition, stretching over the course of decades. It doesn’t make sense to me to treat a decades-long creative participation in the same way you do a freelance assignment that someone knocks out over a weekend which, it seemed to me was what Kevin and Peter and Richard Pini chose to do with Mirage Studios and Warp Graphics. In that sense, yes, definitely there was a schism and there’s no doubt in my mind that it was seen as my fault because I wasn't flexible enough or I was too much of a purist. But, again, if I had caved in on the point and said that "Ethically it doesn't matter how you treat someone working on your intellectual property. That's up to you because it's your intellectual property," which was the consensus view, that would've meant that there was no one representing what I considered to be the more ethical position. It would certainly have been more lucrative on my part to just 'go along with the consensus': I could've kept my own salary and most of Gerhard's as well. But, I suspect that in that case Gerhard wouldn't have stuck around until issue 300. How many people in 2004 were still working on Elfquest and the Turtles who were working on them in 1988? This happened a lot. Steve Bissette used to say that I just went around forming these coalitions and then blowing them up. I think the record shows that I would stick to what I considered the more ethical position and when people saw that I couldn’t be persuaded to see things their way, they abandoned all discussions with me. And the reason, most times, that they abandoned all discussions with me was because they didn't want to think of themselves as people who made unethical or less ethical choices. The point to me was always the overriding ethic that was under discussion, not how unhappy it made someone else feel when I disagreed with them or how happy it would make them feel if I would abandon my position and agree with them. It didn't matter to me who was happy with me or unhappy with me. I had a larger obligation to make sure that I was setting what I saw as good ethical precedents for future creator-publishers to follow or to ignore as they chose.