Comic Book Creator #6: Swampmen
Edited by Jon Cooke & George Khoury
Cover art by Frank Cho
STEPHEN R. BISSETTE:
(from an interview conducted in 2003, printed in Comic Book Creator #6 in 2014)
...But that was what had me ultimately
walk away from the [Swamp Thing] series. I just couldn’t stomach working
with the company [DC Comics] any longer. Part of it was the awakening
to what "work-for-hire" really meant, what the real impact
of that was… that all of the work the three of us had done
meant, in legal terms, that Alan [Moore] was not the writer, I was not
the penciler, John [Totleben] was not the inker, but pairs of hands slaving
for this corporate entity of DC and that they, DC Comics,
was the creator of the property. That’s the legal conceit of
work-for-hire.
At the time -- and it took a while to get my head around
that -- there were a number of factors and one of them
was John and I were really getting to know Dave Sim over
this period. Dave knew what the life of a freelancer was
because of his friendship with
Gene Day, and Gene was one
of the great tragedies of comics. Gene wanted to work for
Marvel with every fiber of his being, got to work for Marvel,
and ended up dying as a result of just allowing himself to
be siphoned away. You know, made all of his deadlines, got
everything done, but lived on coffee and cigarettes until
physically, he was incapable of living any more. One time in
particular, when Rick Veitch and myself spent a number of
hours with Dave at some convention we were at, Dave just
spilled the whole story of Gene Day. What his friendship was
with Gene, how important their friendship was, what Gene
meant to Dave, and how, in Dave's view, Marvel killed Gene
Day; and that he, Dave, was living for the day that he could
dance on the grave of Marvel. Dave really radicalized me
over time. What DC did during this period, the event that I
won’t discuss, definitely pushed me into the wake-up call of
realizing that Dave Sim was right.
Dave has given some very eloquent testimonials,
spoken at various gatherings, a lot of that material has been
transcribed and written down and published in Cerebus, and
that is a body of work that should be collected and studied,
because he is right. By and large, the relationship between
the creative people and the publishers can be a very dangerous
one. Things changed a lot in the wake of what happened
to us, and the fights that my generation fought at places like
DC. The people who really scored were the bigger names,
people like Frank Miller. Frank really broke ground with his
Ronin and Dark Knight contracts. The fact is that when Alan
walked away from DC, they lost him forever. I mean he really
walked. He wasn’t coming back. (It's very telling to me about
what Machiavellian maneuvers had to go on for the ABC line
to end up at DC, but I won't even get into that, because that’s
a separate conversation for a separate venue.)
Creators like Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison and Garth
Ennis benefited from the real hard-fought battles that were
fought. And, in my small way, I was involved in a number of
those battles. Around the time of Swamp Thing #35, as we’re
getting up to #40, my personal conflicts with DC over a legal
matter came to a head, and my political reorientation to the
whole nature of making a living as a freelancer was affected
a great deal by my friendship with Dave Sim. It wasn’t like
was Dave was ranting at me. It was that DC would prove
Dave’s points almost every time.
John Totleben went every year to Mid-Ohio Con, a fundraiser
for the American Cancer Society. We would donate
art to the auction, do sketches, and it was a great communal
event. It was a lot of fun. Dave was at Mid-Ohio where we
first met him, and Dave showed up one day at our hotel with
a limo and said, "Boys, get in." And I didn’t know what to
do. I didn't even know that you weren't supposed to open
the door yourself when you got to where you were going,
that you’re supposed to wait until the guy comes around.
You know, Dave's whole thing was, "Guys, this is how the
executives at the company you work for travel. [Jon laughs]
Get a taste of it."
There's something wrong when the pyramid is reversed.
There’s something wrong when you're the guys shelling out
for taxicab fare or hitchhiking to conventions and staying
three and four in a room, all the while the publishers are
coming here in the limos and getting Presidential suites.
Dave's whole orientation was to open our eyes to what the
power dynamic was, what the reverse pyramid was, as he
put it, where the whole power structure was built on the
back of the freelancers, and we got a real taste of that with
the success of Swamp Thing, you know? We got a glimpse
that suddenly made sense to us.
We all went to New York City to meet Alan and Phyllis for the first time.
There's Dave Gibbons, delivering the first pages of Watchmen, Alan and
Phyllis are put up in one of the best hotels in New York City, and Dave ends
up in a dive on 42nd Street where his room is broken into because he's the
artist [laughs] and Watchmen is just in the early stages. It was hard to ignore
the favoritism going on, and it was getting harder to ignore it any longer.
If I was called in to the Marvel office, Marvel footed the bill. If I brought
in receipts for the train ticket and cab fare, I was reimbursed. But when DC
called John and I in, we had to pay for travel. It took me longer to wake up to
it because of the fun I was experiencing doing the work, the fun of doing the
comics. So had it not been for people like Dave saying, "Listen, open up your
eyes to what's going on here!" I would have remained blissfully ignorant.
I bring all that up, Jon, because that’s part of what also soured my
passion of staying with the book. By the time we got to
American Gothic,
where it was all schematically laid out for the next 10 issues where we were
going and what was going to be in what issue, the ride was over. It was that
I knew 12 months down the road where we were going so there was no fun
to it any longer. I remember the metaphor John used, and John’s great with
this stuff. He says, "You know, we put the car on the road and now they want
us to ride in the backseat." [laughs] And it was true. It wasn't a power thing.
That wasn't what it was about. It was that everything the book had become
was through our energy and drive and concepts; and suddenly, there was
this road map and we were part of the machine. It just wasn't as fun any
more, but the personal side cannot be downplayed and I take full responsibility,
and always have, for my issues of deadlines, and so on, but it’s still tough
to hear some of the stuff said at DC. It's pretty easy to ignore their culpability
in a lot of events that went on, but that's what they did...
Stephen R. Bissette is best known for his collaboration with Alan Moore on Saga of the Swamp Thing from 1983-87, and for his self-published Tyrant comic, the portrait of a Tyrannosaurus Rex in the late Cretaceous period. He also edited the ground-breaking horror comics anthology Taboo, which launched From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. He co-authored the books Comic Book Rebels and The Monster Book: Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and his novella Aliens: Tribes, illustrated by Dave Dorman, won a Bram Stoker Award in 1993.
More recently his articles on horror films have been collected in the Blur series published by Black Coat Press and Steve currently serves on the faculty of The Center For Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont.
STOLEN ART ALERT!
With
SWAMPMEN out this week (from Jon B. Cooke, George Khoury, TwoMorrows, 2014), it
's time to remind everyone in the community that the painted cover art to SAGA OF THE SWAMP THING #34 and the final page of that issue (Rites of Spring) are STILL STOLEN PROPERTY.
These belong to John Totleben and yours truly, Stephen Bissette -- only they don't, because they were stolen right out of the DC Comics offices in 1984-85.
These are STILL STOLEN PROPERTY. Anyone owning, trafficking, trading, or harboring this original art -- SOTST #34 cover painting and the final story page -- is involved (knowingly or unknowingly) in criminal activity.
John and I also have children; mine are now adults. They are looking, too. Even after we're dead and gone, this will be sought-after STOLEN PROPERTY.
This is not going to "go away."
Stephen R. Bissette, 2014
