list of stores every store that I did a signing at on Tour 92 as well as every
store owner who gave me a business card at my warehouse and trade show
appearances. New stores are signing on at a rate of three or four per day in
the month since issue 167 shipped containing the details. I am making the list
available to other self-publishers who express an interest and they are adding
their own list of stores to it. Of course for most of you, all of this is a
good two or three years in the future, even as a possibility. Let's get back
to your three or four hours a week that you're able to set aside for your
self-published project.

While you are beginning to develop your idea, doing the groundwork for it, I
would suggest that you start with a print. Not a sixteen colour five by six
foot item on two hundred pound glossy stock. A black and white print on
inexpensive paper. Think movie poster, but smaller. A single illustration or
design with a slogan that expresses what it is that your self-published
project is about. Something that will grab everyone's attention and spark
everyone's interest. No one had ever heard of Kevin Eastman or Pete Laird, but
the very name Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles went through the direct market like
a forest fire out of control. Within a couple of weeks, everyone had heard the
name and everyone was grabbing a copy when they saw it. It is a creative
challenge. It is very easy to sit back and scoff at advertising. Virtually all
of it is deplorably bad, to be sure. But have you ever tried to come up with
something that works? A black and white print that you can get done at Kinko's
for twenty five or thirty cents each. Sign and number them. Take them with you
to conventions. When people ask you what they are, tell them that it's a self-
published project that you are developing and the print is step one. Sell them
for ten, fifteen, twenty dollars and make sure your fans know that the money
is going towards your first printing or your first issue. Keep that money
separate from your advance game money and start building a war chest. When you
find retailers who are big supporters of your work, sell them the prints at a
discount for quantity. Two hundred prints at twenty dollars each is four
thousand dollars and that's the cost of a printing bill.

As a means of starting this is not terribly difficult. A few hours a week,
starting a mailing list and producing a print that you sign and number. To
self-publish successfully, you have to realize what your assets are and make
use of them. A comics creators assets are the recognition factor attached to
his name, his reputation as the creator of quality work, his talent and his
autograph. That is what you own. That is yours and no one else's. Never
underestimate your autograph. It's no big deal to you and after three days of
signing comic books it is unrecognizable. With me the vowels are the first to
go. DvSm. DvSm. But make no mistake, in the context of the direct market it is
genuine currency and you are the mint. If you are attempting to raise enough
money to self-publish, always keep your autograph at the front of your
thoughts.

The next stage after a signed and numbered print can be your first issue or
first printing. But there is an intermediary phase that is gaining a great
deal of popularity and attracting a great deal of controversy; the ash-can. An
ash-can is a quick printed digest version of a creative work. It is printed on
8-1/2 X 11 sheets, four pages to a sheet, folded and stapled. Ash-cans are
then signed and numbered by the creator and sold, most often, to a single
retailer or group of retailers at a fixed price. Let's say four dollars. A
signed and numbered run of two thousand ash-cans will therefore produce eight
thousand dollars, which is around the cost of two printing bills, assuming you
do a black and white comic book on newsprint with colour covers and keep the
page count to twenty-four or thirty-two pages. The ash-can is popular because
it can provide a lump sum !o the interested self-publisher. It is
controversial because its distribution is controlled by a single retailer or
group of retailers. My personal view is that an ash-can is a good way to start
self-publishing and for that reason I approve of them. If a creator does an
ash-can just to line his own pockets, at that point I disapprove of them. Bear
in mind that your autograph is currency for you and stock for everyone else.
You might get four dollars per ash-can and the retailer might agree to sell
them for eight, but the person he sells them to is under no such constraint
and it is not unusual to find ashcans trading in a very short time for very
large amounts of money. You have to decide for yourself if the end justifies
the means.

At this point, I would like to discuss collaboration in self-publishing.
Obviously what I have outlined so far is tailored to a great extent to the
writer-artist as individual, not the writer-artist team. There are perils
involved in joint self-publishing and those perils must be addressed at the
outset if they are to be avoided. Let's say that a writer wants to self-
publish. He's going to need an artist or, if he does an anthology he's going
to need a number of artists. The easiest mistake to make is to drag contracts
into it. Remember, contracts are what you are trying to get away from for all
the reasons I just outlined. Let me give you a couple of examples.

When Kevin Eastman approached me to do a cross-over with the Turtles, I agreed
providing that there was no contract involved. Kevin wrote and drew the story,
I put Cerebus in all the right places and re-wrote his dialogue and lettered
it. I got paid the agreed-upon fifty per cent of the profits which came out to
a little over twenty thousand dollars for three days' work. Mirage then signed
with First Comics to reprint the Turtles in colour. They wanted me to sign the
contract and I declined reminding Kevin that our original agreement called for
no written contract. I did insist that First Comics send me a letter laying no
claim to Cerebus, which they did. Because of my reluctance to accept royalties
from First, a work-made-for-hire company, Kevin suggested that we just let the
story go out of print at that point. I agreed, since much of the work being
done at Mirage was work-made-for-hire, which made me very uncomfortable. Just
before Christmas of last year I got a work-made-for-hire contract in the mail
which stated that I had done work on Turtles number eight as a Mirage employee
and that all contents were their sole property with the exception of Cerebus.
I declined to sign the contract and wrote back to the bureaucrat involved
outlining the terms under which the story had been produced and the standing
agreement that the story was to be out-of-print. I said that Kevin had my
number and if he had changed his mind, I would be happy to discuss it with
him. Naturally I have heard nothing since that time. Now let's compare that
with the situation at Aardvark Vanaheim. I am the sole owner of the company
and Cerebus is copy-righting and trademarked in my name. But, of course, I
have a collaborator in the form of Gerhard, whose contribution to the success
of the book is, to say the least, very substantial. Gerhard is not
contractually bound to me or to Aardvark Vanaheim. Our agreement is that half
of the company's assets are his. He is free to leave at any time and he is
free to take half of the bank account with him if he goes. He is free to
withdraw half of the money in the company bank accounts at any point without
explanation. And he is also entitled to reprint any issue of Cerebus that he
has worked on and is entitled to half of any of the revenues produced by the
reprinting of those issues he has worked on for as long as they are in print
from Aardvark-Vanaheim.

You should have seen the stir that caused at the Northampton Summit.

Since that time, I have extended this understanding even further. If Gerhard
decides to leave, he is fully entitled to publish his own Cerebus comic book
with collaborators or a collaborator of his choice who would be entitled to
draw the characters, write the stories and letter the dialogue. I don't think,
or at least I flatter myself, that the stories would be as good, and the
characters would certainly be handled a lot differently, but I can guarantee
that Gerhard's Cerebus comic would have a lot better backgrounds than mine.

It is the only practical basis for a collaboration. Each party must be free to
own and control his own work. If this understanding had existed at the time of
the Cerebus/Turtles cross-over, it would mean that I would be able to reprint
the story if I chose and compensate Kevin Eastman in the same proportion that
had governed the original printing. Of course Mirage is now just another
company, with many lawyers and deep pockets, so it is too late to deal with
the issue creator-to-creator. Which is a shame, I think.

So that returns us to a writer who wishes to self-publish. Since he is
starting with nothing and intends to build something one step at a time, what
he is going to have to find is an artist who is like-minded; who wants out of
the advance game and is willing to devote a portion of his work week to
developing a project which both will own and control. It is not difficult to
envisage creative differences arising, so I think it must be decided at the
outset what the conditions of separation are going to be; a kind of verbal
pre-nuptial agreement, if you will. Two courses are the most obvious. One,
that both parties agree that the creative work ceases to exist if they don't
want to work together any more. Two, that both parties agree to having control
and ownership of the work after a split. In this, I am reminded of Freff and
Foglio's D'arc Tangent where severe creative differences arose after the first
issue and an acrimonious split was the result. Had they decided in advance
that they both had control and ownership of the joint work, it might be
possible that they could then have each continued the title, interpreting it
their own way and working with new collaborators. Provisions would have to be
made for the ugly world outside of self-publishing. What if one creator was
offered a movie option for his version or a merchandising agreement? I think
it is better to keep self-publishing within self-publishing. Any outside
agreement is a contract and I've outlined all of my reservations about that.
It could be decided that after a split, control and ownership be limited on
both parts to self-publishing in the direct market, or it could specify equal
compensation on any outside agreement no matter how far off in the future. In
an artist writer collaboration, that would mean the writer could continue to
use the character designs and visual style and the artist could continue to
use the place names, character names and story-line. In this circumstance it
is not likely that one or the other will get ripped off or feel that he has
been. To a lesser extent, the same thing would apply to an anthology format. I
think a writer would be more apt to attract better artists to help him in
starting up a self-published anthology if they were given ownership of the
stories that they worked on and were able to publish those stores themselves
in their own self-published titles when the time came. Since cell division is
the very basis of life, I don't think creators should be as frightened of it
as they are. Even assuming Freff and Foglio couldn't get along with anyone and
that each new collaboration split up after the first issue, the very worst you
end up with is forty different versions of D'arc Tangent, all going off in
wildly different directions. You could limit that in advance, saying that only
the original creators have control and ownership, but essentially that is
going to make each successive collaboration a work-made-for-hire situation
with the original creator now serving as a company and his new collaborators
as outside piece workers.

These are large issues in the direct market, in self-publishing and in creator
control. They are seldom discussed but no less important for that. If
anything, the lack of comprehensive discussion makes them more important. The
original structure of Image is a good one; Seven creators with full ownership
and control of their characters. If four of them vote in favour, another
creator is added to the Image roster with full ownership and control of his
character and title and the authority to put a little 'i' logo on the cover.
Within that structure it is not a company, it is a collective, a union of
comics creators in a way but with a major difference. Instead of negotiating
with management, they have changed the role of business from management to
administration. Instead of seeking more favourable terms from the business
side of comics, they employ the business side as salaried workers under their
control. The pyramid is still there, but now the creator is at the apex and
the business entities are under his jurisdiction. Problems are beginning to
arise now. Some of the creators are succumbing to the temptation to become
companies in their own right, releasing books which are copyrighted and
trademarked in their name which they pay other people to write and draw. Even
if it is an enormous page rate, it is still work-made-for-hire. Even if it is
an enormous advance and enormous royalties, it is still the advance game. I
wrote issue 10 of Spawn in the same spirit and under the same conditions that
I worked on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles number 8; as a gesture of solidarity
with creators who had chosen to take control and ownership of the characters
into their own hands. I would assume that if I asked Todd to send me films of
Spawn 10 because I wanted to release it as a Cerebus one-shot in a year or two
years' time, that Todd would be amenable to the idea. I used the Spawn logo on
the cover of Cerebus Number Zero and I didn't phone Todd to ask his
permission. If, in time, as Mirage Publishing has done, I were to get a work-
made-for-hire contract in the mail or a legal notice ordering me to remove the
Spawn logo from the cover of Cerebus Zero, I would have no regret whatsoever
about my original decision. When a creator takes his career unto his own hands
and is able to achieve autonomy in the business decisions governing his
creative work, I will lend whatever support I can. If that creator moves from
a position of autonomy over his own creative work and begins employing other
creators under the terms of work-made-for-hire or the advance game, I withdraw
my support. They are not breaking any laws in doing so, and their actions are
in the best traditions of free-market capitalism, but in my view, they are
wrong. No ifs ands or buts about it. Ownership and control of creative work by
the creator who created it, or who assisted in its creation are, to me,
absolutes. You can't hedge on it, modify it, chip away at it or rationalise it
by the fact that there are a thousand people willing to go along with it.

Work-made-for-hire and the advance game are exploitation, pure and simple.

Ownership and control which do not constitute true ownership and control are
just words. Empty rhetoric You can forgive, or at least understand a company
which takes control and ownership away; without exploitation, the companies do
not exist. For a creator to impose an exploitive system on another creator is
to prove ourselves no better, and in actual fact, much much worse than the
companies themselves, particularly in light of the fact that a creator who
imposes the exploitive system of work-made-for-hire or the advance game on a
fellow creator is doing so from a position of economic strength, security and
well-being. I feel the only sensible reaction to this condition is to isolate
those creators from our community. Not attack them. Isolate them. As I said
before, the issue is not a legal one, it is an issue of morality. The best you
can do is attempt to educate young writers and artists to the implications of
work-made-for-hire and the advance game. It is difficult, to be sure. Someone
who is working behind the counter at Macdonald's who is suddenly offered
seventy-five or a hundred dollars a page to pencil stories which are
trademarked and copyrighted in another creator's name is going to jump at the
chance, virtually without exception. Many years ago, it made as much sense for
Len Wein to write X-men 94 as it did to do anything else. It would take a
genius to be able to see anything wrong with Steve Gerber and Val Mayerik
putting a wise-cracking, cigar-chomping duck into a few panels of a Man-Thing
story. And that's the tragedy of the creator's situation over the last six
decades in the comic field. Fair market value at the time is wildly different
from fair market value ten, twenty or thirty years down the road. This cannot
be changed, since the principal governing it has its basis in English Common
Law which is almost a thousand years old. A fair price agreed on by two
consenting parties.

As I said before you can understand companies playing the game, for without
the game they don't exist. And you can understand creators playing the game
when alternatives do not exist. In an age when you could work for Marvel or
DC, but not both, all you could do was to sit out in the suburbs, stuffing
your envelopes and hope the company was making enough money off of your
efforts to stay in business and to keep sending you your paycheque. But in an
age when it is not only possible to create comic books, to publish and
distribute them yourself with the assistance of a rock-solid and flourishing
network of distributors and retailers, in an age like that it boggles my mind
that creators continue to compound the injustices of the past; either by
working on characters whose creators have been victims of the system, or by
working for creators who impose those same exploitive terms. Understand that I
am not saying they are bad people. Kevin Eastman is a friend of mine, I have
friends at each of the comic book companies in existence. Many of my friends
earn their daily bread off of characters created by Jack Kirby and Steve
Ditko. But that's personal. I like them as people, but I know that
professionally, they are the enemies of everything I stand for and everything
that I believe in and most of my time that is not spent writing and drawing
and promoting Cerebus is spent in fighting them and the system that they keep
alive and reinforce by their participation in it; because their participation
and their rationalisation of that participation whatever that rationalisation
is just compounds the injustices that have been done to Jack Kirby, Steve
Ditko, Jerry Seigel, Joe Shuster, Steve Gerber, Len Wein, Chris Claremont . .
. I mean, the list goes on and on doesn't it? I can certainly tell you that
the happiest days of my life are the days when someone goes 'over the wall'.
The day that Image left Malibu the day Steve Bissette decided that his
royalties from 1963 were going to finance his long-delayed start in self-
publishing, the day Colleen Doran decided that her goal was to do A Distant
Soil exclusively and that any work she did for any company was just a means to
that end. And most particularly the day when Alan Moore said to me, after
leaving DC for the last time:

'When you find out you've been standing in shit, you don't jump up and down on
it to punish it, you walk away.'

As I said at the outset of this section, I don't think you're ready to self-
publish and for that reason I had decided not to come here. Now that I am
here, I would like to conclude this talk with a few suggestions about Pro Con.
If you are able to make a go of it and assuming there is another one next year
and the year after that, I think it would be very wise and in your collective
best interests to bar publishers and their representatives from attending; or
at the very least that a substantial portion of the time available be given
over to a creator-only gathering. In the event that there is a joint
occupation question as in the case of Dick Giordano, Paul Levitz or myself, I
feel that the sanction should be maintained. So long as possible future
employers are in the room, no meaningful discussion is likely, or, I think,
possible. A panel of publishers with microphones addressing a room full of
creators and fielding questions is a good microcosm of how the field itself is
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