(1) DOCTOROW ON FABLES TABLE-FLIP. Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic post “Bill Willingham puts his graphic novel series ‘Fables’ into the public domain (15 Sept 2023)” assesses many IP rights issues triggered by Willingham’s announcement.
…It’s been 21 years since Bill Willingham launched Fables, his 110-issue, wide-ranging, delightful and brilliantly crafted author-owned comic series that imagines that the folkloric figures of the world’s fairytales are real people, who live in a secret society whose internal struggles and intersections with the mundane world are the source of endless drama.
Fables is a DC Comics title; DC is division of the massive entertainment conglomerate Warners, which is, in turn, part of the Warner/Discovery empire, a rapacious corporate behemoth whose screenwriters have been on strike for 137 days (and counting). DC is part of a comics duopoly; its rival, Marvel, is a division of the Disney/Fox juggernaut, whose writers are also on strike.
The DC that Willingham bargained with at the turn of the century isn’t the DC that he bargains with now. Back then, DC was still subject to a modicum of discipline from competition; its corporate owner’s shareholders had not yet acquired today’s appetite for meteoric returns on investment of the sort that can only be achieved through wage-theft and price-gouging….
…Rather than fight Warner, Willingham has embarked on what JWZ calls an act of “absolute table-flip badassery” – he has announced that Fables will hereafter be in the public domain, available for anyone to adapt commercially, in works that compete with whatever DC might be offering.
Now, this is huge, and it’s also shrewd. It’s the kind of thing that will bring lots of attention on Warner’s fraudulent dealings with its creative workforce, at a moment where the company is losing a public relations battle to the workers picketing in front of its gates. It constitutes a poison pill that is eminently satisfying to contemplate. It’s delicious.
But it’s also muddy. Willingham has since clarified that his public domain dedication means that the public can’t reproduce the existing comics. That’s not surprising; while Willingham doesn’t say so, it’s vanishingly unlikely that he owns the copyrights to the artwork created by other artists (Willingham is also a talented illustrator, but collaborated with a who’s-who of comics greats for Fables). He may or may not have control over trademarks, from the Fables wordmark to any trademark interests in the character designs. He certainly doesn’t have control over the trademarked logos for Warner and DC that adorn the books….
It is also interesting to read that Bill Willingham, praised today by Cory Doctorow for striking a blow against corporate IP abuse, attended BasedCon last weekend.
(2) FANTASY REQUIRES A GOOD MAP. [Item by Bruce D. Arthurs.] Interesting piece at Mapping As Process about a 1917 map of Fairyland by artist Bernard Sleigh, with references to many stories in folklore and fable. There’s a link to a high-resolution image that can be zoomed in on: “An Anciente Mappe of Fairyland”.
…In December 1917, the British artist and wood engraver Bernard Sleigh (1872–1954) published a six-foot long, panoramic map of Fairyland in three sheets. Its style was that of the Arts and Crafts movement, an aesthetic championed by William Morris (1834–1896) in the second half of the nineteenth century, in reaction to the apparent destruction of individual skills and traditional designs by mass industrialization. Arts and Crafts generated intricately detailed designs and a retrogressive appeal to folk aesthetics. Sleigh, trained by one of Morris’s followers, cultivated a stylized mediaevalism in both the design and the subject matter of his drawings, prints, murals, and stained glass (Cooper 1997)….
(3) VOCAL COMPLAINT. Behind a paywall at Fortune: “Actor Stephen Fry says his voice was stolen from the Harry Potter audiobooks and replicated by AI—and warns this is just the beginning”. Wealth of Geeks has this report about what is in the article: “Actor Stephen Fry Claims AI Replicated His Voice from ‘Harry Potter’ Audiobooks”.
…Actor Stephen Fry claims that producers used AI to replicate his voice from the Harry Potter audiobooks without his permission. AI has become a central point of contention of both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.
As reported by Fortune, Fry told an audience at a London festival, “I’m a proud member of [SAG-AFTRA], as you know we’ve been on strike for three months now. And one of the burning issues is AI.”
At the festival, Fry played a clip of AI mimicking his voice as the narrator of a historical documentary. “I said not one word of that—it was a machine. Yes, it shocked me,” he said. “They used my reading of the seven volumes of the Harry Potter books, and from that dataset an AI of my voice was created and it made that new narration. What you heard was not the result of a mash-up, this is from a flexible artificial voice, where the words are modulated to fit the meaning of each sentence.”…
(4) DON’T BE A SUCKER. Victoria Strauss gives Writer Beware readers the “Anatomy of a Fake Film Company Scam: The Greendot Films / Better Bound House”.
…Here’s how it works. A film company–with a website and everything–calls or emails out of the blue with a tempting offer: your book has the potential to be made into a movie/TV series! And they want to represent you to studios/pitch you to producers/take you to a major conference where scores of film people will be present! Just one requirement: you need a screenplay/a pitch deck/a storyboard/some other product. Don’t have those things? No problem–they know a reputable and expert company that can create them for you…for a fee.
It’s a classic bait-and-switch setup. The “film company” is a front for the service provider, which in turn is owned by a parent company overseas. And that initial service that was pitched to you as absolutely essential? It’s just the start. By paying, you’ve marked yourself as fair game for escalating sales pressure and fraudulent offers involving large upfront payments. And the sales reps who staff the scams–who earn a commission on every dollar you spend–will take every opening you give them, and won’t stop unless you stop them.
This post takes a look at a real-life example, thanks to an author who has given me permission to share their experience.
Dramatis Personae
The fake film company: The Greendot Films. Its website includes a slideshow of movies Greendot is hoping you’ll assume they were responsible for creating, along with a fake history claiming that they’re a successor to two defunct production companies. The Greendot name itself has been “borrowed” from yet another defunct film company, Green Dot Films….
(5) BARRIERS TO FANDOM. Pocket reposts a 2021 Teen Vogue article which asks, “Who Actually Gets to ‘Escape’ Into Fandom?” and discusses antiracism resources.
… Escapism isn’t actually possible for everyone because of the nature of both fandom and the world around us. The best-worst example of the limits of fandom escapism? Racism.
Racism is global, and it infiltrates everything that we do; it’s close to inescapable offline, and it’s just as common online. Fandom is no exception.
In 2019, Dr. Rukmini Pande did an interview with Henry Jenkins about her book Squee From The Margins: Fandom and Race. “I found that while it is certainly possible for fans of color to ‘pass’ within online fan spaces, their modes of escapism are mostly contingent – I can enjoy a source or fan text until it gets racist,” Pande said in the interview. “Other fans articulated the importance of finding networks of fellow non-white fans so that they could curate their experiences to be safer. In all cases, fandom certainly isn’t a space where these fans can escape from race/racism even if it is not something that is engaged with publicly or vocally.”
It makes sense that people would resort to fandom escapism following natural disasters, or to have something to do other than overthink their local government’s COVID-19 response. But what about the times we’ve seen people talk about fandom being their “safe space” from them dealing with or seeing viral video recordings of Black people being killed, as we saw in the summer of 2020? What about people in the U.S. delving into fandom so they don’t have to think about American politics?
No matter the fandom, fans of color can’t reliably escape into fandom, because people don’t stop being racist just because they like the same things that people of color do. There’s always a racist person in fandom. There are always racist fanworks. There are always racist creators. There’s always racism in the source material that people will defend in your mentions for days….
(6) NM-AZ STATE BOOK AWARD SHORTLIST. The finalists for the 2023 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards include these science fiction books:
- 3VE by Jason DeGrey
- Mountain Knight by Avery Christy
- Planet Quest by Kate Harrington
- The Yewberry Way by Jack Gist
(7) NO, THERE IS ANOTHER. “C.I.A. Discloses Identity of Second Spy Involved in ‘Argo’ Operation” reports the New York Times.
In the midst of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, the C.I.A. began what came to be noted as one of the spy agency’s most successful publicly known operations: the rescue of six American diplomats who had escaped the overrun U.S. Embassy — using a fake movie as the cover story.
“Argo,” the real-life 2012 movie about the C.I.A.’s fake movie, portrayed a single C.I.A. officer, Tony Mendez, played by Ben Affleck, sneaking into Tehran to rescue the American diplomats in a daring operation.
But in reality, the agency sent two officers into Tehran. For the first time on Thursday, the C.I.A. is releasing the identity of that second officer, Ed Johnson, in the season finale of its new podcast, “The Langley Files.”
Mr. Johnson, a linguist, accompanied Mr. Mendez, a master of disguise and forgery, on the flight to Tehran to cajole the diplomats into adopting the cover story, that they were Canadians who were part of a crew scouting locations for a science fiction movie called “Argo.” The two then helped the diplomats with forged documents and escorted them through Iranian airport security to fly them home.
Although Mr. Johnson’s name was classified, the C.I.A. had acknowledged a second officer had been involved. Mr. Mendez, who died in 2019, wrote about being accompanied by a second officer in his first book, but used a pseudonym, Julio. A painting that depicts a scene from the operation and hangs in the C.I.A.’s Langley, Va., headquarters, shows a second officer sitting across from Mr. Mendez in Tehran as they forge stamps in Canadian passports. But the second officer’s identity is obscured, his back turned to the viewer.
The agency began publicly talking about its role in rescuing the diplomats 26 years ago. On the agency’s 50th anniversary, in 1997, the C.I.A. declassified the operation, and allowed Mr. Mendez to tell his story, hoping to balance accounts of some of the agency’s ill-fated operations around the world with one that was a clear success.
But until recently, Mr. Johnson preferred that his identity remain secret….
(8) CINEMATIC HISTORY MADE HERE. “George Lucas’ former Marin Industrial Light and Magic studio closing, some employees vow to save it” reports ABC7 San Francisco.
In the North Bay, it’s the end of an era of movie-making magic.
The original soundstage and production facility in San Rafael for Industrial Light and Magic, founded by George Lucas, is going away. Lucas moved his campus to the Presidio in San Francisco almost 20 years ago.
The facility’s new owners are retiring, but one employee would like to save the studio’s history and legacy.
It may be a surprise to know hundreds of other films were created inside the nondescript building on Kerner Blvd. in San Rafael.
Now home to 32TEN Studios, this is the former campus of Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic.
“Right after the success of ‘Star Wars,’ George Lucas wanted to remove himself from the Hollywood system, so he moved the ILM shop from Van Nuys up here,” said House.
House is a longtime model shop supervisor, and says many props and models from movies are still there. That includes the Millennium Falcon, an anchor from “Pirates of the Caribbean,” even a model of Chewbacca’s head.
Lucas relocated his campus to the Presidio in 2005 and he took the original door with him, which is now on display….
(9) BACK IN PORT. Having finished a series detailing her experiences aboard Disney’s Star Wars-themed Starcruiser, Cass Morris analyzes why it works in “The Stars Have Come Alive” at Scribendi.
As promised, this post is my attempt to analyze, for myself and for other interested parties, how the Starcruiser creates such an exceptional experience, and why it works so very well as it does.
I feel quite confident in the base assertion that it does, and has, because I’ve seen it in action on people who aren’t as deeply invested in the IP as I am. I’ve watched videos of influencers who are only surface-level conversant with Star Wars be moved to tears by Yoda’s holocron. I’ve seen parents who thought they were only their for their kids get wrapped up in the experience. I’ve seen people who arrived in civilian clothes buy garments on the ship or in Batuu so they could feel more a part of things.
And I’ve seen people who were already Star Wars fans go absolutely feral. In a good way! But the response that this experience has from people who fully give themselves over to it is astonishing.
So. It works. The Starcruiser is a phenomenal example of what immersive experiences can be. Now: Let’s unpack how and why…
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
- Born September 15, 1898 — Hans Augusto Rey. German-born American illustrator and author best remembered for the beloved Curious George children’s book series that he and his wife Margret Rey created from 1939 to 1966. (An Eighties series of five-minute short cartoons starring him was produced by Alan Shalleck, along with Rey. Ken Sobol, scriptwriter of Fantastic Voyage, was the scriptwriter here.) His interest in astronomy led to him drawing star maps which are still use in such publications as Donald H. Menzel’s A Field Guide to the Stars and Planets. A simpler version for children called Find the Constellations, is still in print as well. (Died 1977.)
- Born September 15, 1932 — Karen Anderson. She co-wrote two series with her husband, Poul Anderson, King of Ys and The Last Viking, and created the ever so delightful The Unicorn Trade collection with him. Fancyclopedia has her extensive fannish history thisaway, and Mike has her obituary here. (Died 2018.)
- Born September 15, 1952 — Lisa Tuttle, 71. Tuttle won the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, received a Nebula Award for Best Short Story for “The Bone Flute”, which she refused, and a BSFA Award for Short Fiction for “In Translation”. My favorite works by her include Catwitch, The Silver Bough and her Ghosts and Other Lovers collection. Her latest novel is The Curious Affair of the Witch at Wayside Cross.
- Born September 15, 1954 — Howard Weinstein, 69. At age 19, he was the youngest person to ever write a Trek script, selling “The Pirates of Orion” for use in the animated series. Though it would be his only script, he would go on to write quite a few Trek novels — thirteen are listed currently at the usual suspects — and comics. He gets a thanks credit in Star Trek: The Voyage Home. He wrote a script, “The Sky Above, the Mudd Below”, for the fanfic video affair Star Trek: New Voyages, but it never got made. And it won’t given that there’s a comic book series already made with its plot. Paramount wasn’t at all pleased. To quote Zevon, “Send lawyers, gun and money / the shit has hit the fan.”
- Born September 15, 1955 — Amanda Hemingway, 68. British author of fantasy novels who’s best known for the Fern Capel series written under the Jan Siegel name — it’s most excellent. I’d also recommend The Sangreal Trilogy penned under her own name. Alas her superb website has gone offline. She is available from the usual suspects — curiously her Hemingway novels are much more costly than her Seigel novels are. Oh and she invented this wonderful as noted on her Twitter site: “Schroedinger’s Cake: you don’t know it it’s been eaten until you open the tin.”
- Born September 15, 1960 — Kurt Busiek, 63. Writer whose work includes The Marvels limited series, Thuderbolts, Superman, his own outstanding Astro City series, and a very long run on The Avengers. He also worked at Dark Horse where he did Conan #1–28 and Young Indiana Jones Chronicles #1–8.
- Born September 15, 1960 — Mike Mignola, 63. The Hellboy stories, of course, are definitely worth reading, particularly the early ones. His Batman: Gotham by Gaslight is an amazing What If story which isn’t at all the same as the animated film of that name which is superb on its own footing, and the B.P.R.D. stories are quite excellent too. I’m very fond of the first Hellboy film, not so much of the second, and detest the reboot now that I’ve seen it, while the animated films are excellent.
(11) COMICS SECTION.
- Reality Check shows the results of a mixed message in Gotham.
- Bliss explains the source of this superhero’s bliss.
(12) FEAST YOUR EYES. The Bristol Board has a wild gallery of “Basil Wolverton artwork for ‘Weird-Ass Tales of The Future’”, splash panels from Basil Wolverton’s science-fiction tales.
(13) LOOKS WEIRD. Gizmodo delivers a “Weird Tales 100 Years of Weird Illustrated Anthology First Look”. There’s a slideshow of art at the link.
Weird Tales—which delivers exactly the kind of freaky, spooky stories you’d expect—marks its 100th anniversary this year, and is celebrating with the release of illustrated anthology Weird Tales: 100 Years of Weird. It’ll include entries from authors like Ray Bradbury and H.P. Lovecraft, as well as contemporary writers….
(14) ALL ABOARD. GameRant calls these the “Best Sci-Fi Board Games Of All Time”.
…This shared love of science fiction has led to a plethora of sci-fi-themed board games that use the themes and aesthetic of sci-fi to create immersive, unique experiences on the tabletop. The following examples provide a broad and varied selection of games, both old and new, that use science fiction as their theme to great effect.
Ranked in first place:
1. Twilight Imperium
This sci-fi space opera from Fantasy Flight Games was originally produced back in 1997. Now in its fourth edition, Twilight Imperium is grand strategy on an epic scale, tasking players with controlling the burgeoning empires of various alien races.
Each race in Twilight Imperium encourages a different playstyle, making for a broad and replayable experience. The game is mainly focused on building and positioning fleets, as well as engaging in diplomacy with fellow players. Twilight Imperium is a huge game, and not necessarily accessible, not only because it takes roughly six hours to play depending on the player count, but because it requires a heavy amount of strategizing. However, Twilight Imperium is a dramatic and immersive experience that fans of sci-fi space operas are sure to love.
(15) BUDGET BREAKER? Science explains why “Mars Sample Return risks consuming NASA science”. “Forthcoming cost estimate for budget-busting mission could lead to strict caps from Congress.”
…The cost of the mission may become altogether too mighty, however. The most recent official figure now puts it at some $6 billion, up from some $4 billion, and a leaked report suggests that, in one scenario, it could exceed $8 billion. Cost overruns for MSR and a few other large missions have already forced NASA to squeeze or delay other science missions, and calls to rethink—or even kill—Mars Sample Return have grown. When an independent review of the project delivers a fresh cost estimate later this month, advocates are praying it stays well below $10 billion, which has emerged as a sort of red line for the mission. “It’s fair to say that the future of Mars Sample Return lives and dies with the recommendations of that panel,” says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society….
(16) WE’LL GO AT NIGHT. PBS Space-Time wonders “What NEW SCIENCE Would We Discover with a Moon Telescope?”
In order to see the faint light from objects in deepest space, astronomers go to the darkest places on the planet. In order to listen to their quite radio signals, they head as far from any radio-noisy humans as possible. But there’s nowhere on the earth, or even orbiting the Earth, that’s far enough to hear to the faint radio hum from the time before stars. In fact, we may need to build a giant radio telescope in the quietest place in the solar system—the far side of the Moon.
(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid, over at YouTube’s Media Death Cult, has a new 10-minute video filmed appropriately, in sand dunes, on “How DUNE Became The Biggest Science Fiction Book In The Universe”.
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Kathy Sullivan, Bruce D. Arthurs, Francis Hamit, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]
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First!
Twilight Imperium is way too fiddly and takes way too much setup in Practice. I’d have picked Terraforming Mars
Ooo. Nice.
(1) I’m not surprised to see that Doctorow has a take on this. Interesting times.
(1) The only thing Willingham owns of the Fables series is the scripts themselves that he wrote. Everything else is the work of someone else. As Warren Zevon so nicely said, “Send lawyers, guns and money, the shit has hit the fan”
2) Wow! Great map.
Yes, he is known to be quite rightwing but I don’t think he really traded off that until recently. I recall wondering why the 2015 SP slate didn’t pick up Fables for a graphic story pick (instead of the whatever awful-even-by-Brad’s-standard thing they did pick).
(1) I wish people would stop treating Willingham as anything other than an old guy ranting at clouds.
At the point he’s saying “it’s public domain, but that doesn’t mean anyone has the right to reprint it,” that should be a pretty clear sign that he has no clue what public domain actually means, since that’s literally the most fundamental right that something being in the public domain gives to everyone.
The context behind his announcement is that Telltale Games paid money to DC Comics to do a game based on a Fables storyline, DC somehow doesn’t think Willingham is entitled to any of that money, and he apparently doesn’t have the money to pay a lawyer to argue it.
I would guess that Willingham’s goal with his announcement is just to try to poison the well for anyone else considering a similar deal with DC for Fables-related stuff, and that’s about all he can do.
Which, fair enough, but it’s not like that makes him the champion of IP freedom or anything.
I really don’t see this ending well for anyone who takes him seriously and tries to put something out based on that. If someone says “My contract says I don’t have the right to give permission to someone to make Fables lunchboxes, so I’m going to give permission to everyone to make Fables lunchboxes,” it feels like that should be a sign that maybe they don’t actually know what they’re talking about, because it’s very unlikely that a contract would work that way.
I guess not everyone is aware that Willingham has transitioned to being the kind of guy who writes an essay for Breitbart whining about how Superman isn’t standing for the American Way anymore, and bragging about how he wrote Robin as a good patriotic American? That was in 2009, so god alone knows how deep into rightwing nutjobbery he is by now.
He’s also just plain stupid. His most recent Twitter: “For the record I didn’t “throw Fables away.” I prefer to believe I’ve increased its value by a factor of seven to eight billion.”
(2) That is fabulous.
(3) So, isn’t that theft, and the studio is liable for that crime?
(4) The “stop right there” line is “and for a fee”.
(5) sigh They don’t define “fandom”. When lockdown hit, someone started ConCellation (“the con that’s always cancelled before it starts”) as a group on faceplant. It wasn’t a year before I dropped – it was overrun by what I came to understand were “franchise fans”, not fandom as we know it.
I had one person claim “yeah, I’ve read a few Hugo winners, but I prefer (I forget if it was Marvel, DC, SW, or what).
I am not making this up: not long before I quit it, I saw someone post “will everyone hate me if I jump fandoms?”
That ain’t us, who cover everything. And sure, there are racist idiots in fandom… but in general, I’ve not seen anyone just attending a con, or a club meeting, rejected for their origin.
(12 & 13) Great covers!
(14) Six hours? I’m reminded of the one time I played Diplomacy….
(16) Assuming they can get the funding past the pretend “austerity” of the Trump Crime Family (formerly known as the GOP).
10) I learned my constellations from Rey — he also wrote another, more advanced, book called The Stars: A New Way to See Them. Rey’s constellation figures are more complicated but more “realistic”, i.e. meant to look more like the people/animals/objects that constellations depict. For some of them (e.g. Ursa Major) he essentially completely redrew the figure from the traditional representation. I still see Rey’s figures when I go look at the stars.
(1) Oooh, so brave and daring and edgy… to do something completely illegal that would screw over all the artists he worked with. Delusional old man yelling at clouds. For once I’m on the side of the giant company with the phalanx of lawyers. Also, FascistCon is still going?
(10) Busiek! (I just wanted to give Kurt a shout-out)
(11) Both amusing.
(14) I played several interesting SF board games before 1985. Quite liked Cosmic Encounter.
In a mashup of 3 and 14: After Stronghold Games has announced that the upcoming Terraforming Mars expansions will use AI-art (among “real” art) there has been some heated discussions in Boardgame circles. Here is an interview where you dont have to read hard between the lines: https://www.polygon.com/tabletop-games/23873453/kickstarters-ai-disclosure-terraforming-mars-release-date-price?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_content=polygon&utm_campaign=polygon.socialflow
My own position: I generelly dont like the use of AI art instead of real artists. But even more soe were talking about a product that will sell at least 30k copies so it would be quite easy to pay a proper illustrator making it much more customer friendly. I guess the Fryx siblings (publishers of TM) dont like to give anything to outsiders, but the partners could have nudged them more instead of defending the use of Midjourney.
2) I really enjoyed looking at that map. Thanks, Bruce.
You don’t need a pixelman to know which way the file scrolls.
@Lurkertype: Regarding DC / Warner Brothers you do not, under any circumstances, “have to hand it to them”.
(1) Bill Willingham has major issues — but I can’t side with DC, either. Doctorow uses the term “chaos of scale” — and in that context, he also brings up Lucas/Disney refusing to pay Alan Dean Foster and other writers of novelizations and other media fiction. These mergers create chaos.
But like Doctorow says, Willingham’s response creates issues that are “muddy” and “murky.” So the “chaos of scale” meets the chaos of Bill Willingham. Does that mean the chaos of scale is now even scalier?
(3) They should not be able to do that — at least I hope they can’t do that! Maybe this is another sign of the “chaos of scale.”
That’s a lot of chaos. Don’t tell me we’re going to have to call in the Space Marines (TM).
(12) Cool!
(13) No Brundage covers in the slideshow? 🙁
If you push people to nominate something of great quality, you’ll never know if it was your efforts that got it on the ballot, or the work’s actual quality. Only by slating absolute trash can you be sure that it was your efforts – your control over slavish minions – that succeeded.
Bill Willingham didn’t screw over anyone who has worked on Fables. DC Comics and Willingham still share the copyright on the issues that have been produced. Those freelancers would still earn royalties on future sales, assuming they are entitled to royalties and DC actually pays them.
This is false. It is a creator-owned comic. Every issue published by DC has included this text: “All characters, their distinctive likenesses and related indicia featured in this publication are trademarks of Bill Willingham.”
Willingham owns the characters and setting. Releasing that IP into the public domain is significant even if he can’t give anyone permission to reprint the existing stories, because the copyright to those is shared between him and DC. The public domain isn’t just about reprints. It’s also about creating new works.
There have been creator-owned comics at the big publishers since the 1990s. Willingham has demonstrated that DC has no commitment to this concept, and will happily run roughshod over creators to take far more than it is entitled to take (just like Disney refusing to pay Alan Dean Foster and other Star Wars authors royalties).
Willingham has given every creator mistreated by a publisher the ability to say “if you don’t start honoring the terms of our contract I will release the IP into the public domain.” That’s a good thing and a historic milestone in creator-owned comics.
Jake say to Lurkertype: Regarding DC / Warner Brothers you do not, under any circumstances, “have to hand it to them”.
I don’t think anyone”s handing it to them.
There’s two issues involved here. The first is very clear in that that most of the Fables product as copyright clearly does not belong to Willingham but the myriad artists and writers who were involved in it.
Second, I very obviously don’t Willingham’s deal with DC/Warner so I’m speculating here when I say I don’t know that he actually owns his scripts. Some writers have a deal where their scripts belong to publishing house for a very long time, some don’t. I depends largely on the deal that was cut ahead of time.
Certainly in the book trade, authors can’t take their books and decide to shop them elsewhere once they sign a contract. And getting say ePub rights back is, as I know from a writer friend, like descending into Tartarus and battling Hades.
Where are you getting this idea? The only writers and artists who own any part of what they create for DC Comics are the ones working under creator-owned contracts. Like Willingham. He created Fables and it was launched in 1991 by DC’s Vertigo imprint when Vertigo was publishing a lot of creator-owned comics. Others were Preacher and Y the Last Man.
rcade says Where are you getting this idea? The only writers and artists who own what they create for DC Comics are the ones working under creator-owned contracts. Like Willingham. He created Fables and it was launched in 1991 by DC’s Vertigo imprint when Vertigo was publishing a lot of creator-owned comics. Others were Preacher and Y the Last Man.
Either way, Willingham doesn’t own the copyright on them, does he?so any likeness et all can’t be used.
Even a creator owned title doesn’t imply that you didn’t grant exclusiveness to a publisher in terms of printing a given work or works. I suspect DC/Warner will argue that the books are still in print (which they are as volume sixteen is forthcoming in hardcover; I collected the first eight) and therefore the contents are still theirs despite him having a copyright to the text specifically.
Let’s put this way, I would not want to be any fan who tries to make a major show of developing something off of this that attracts their Hell Hounds.
Bad news for Willingham. I was curious what the copyright page said, so I checked the digital version of Fable: Legends in Exile. There is only one copyright for that volume, “Copyright 2002, Bill Willingham and DC Comics”. So the entire contents, text and all, is jointly copyrighted.
DC sharing the copyright with Willingham on the existing comics does not prevent a contract from being reached that gave Willingham the characters and setting and the right to create derivative works from them. A creator-owned contract would be a complete sham if the creator owned nothing he controlled or could transfer to others.
The smart play for DC here is to ensure that it publishes quality reprint editions of Fables and keeps them in print forever. They will continue to sell as new public domain works draw more readers to the universe.
Going after small fry is less likely than going after publishers like Dynamite and Tor if they solicit new comics or novels set in the Fables universe.
The company has to fight everybody forever to stop Fables from being public domain. What’s the gain when it can’t publish new Fables comics without Willingham anyway?
All Fables comics and trade paperbacks have that joint copyright and the trademark text I reprinted upthread, unless there are some where the publisher made a mistake.
DC is sloppy in digital editions about always including the copyright and trademark statement. I checked several digital editions this week and some of them had no copyright or trademark text at all.
(5) I have a lot to say on this subject, though I’ll skip discrimination against short people (I’m in this demographic), gender identity, children, religions, and other ancillary targets of discrimination for now (though they’re all related, as discrimination is discrimination, whatever the target or rationale, and there’s always a rationale, but rarely a rational one).
I have always treated people as individuals, as worthy, and as human beings, regardless of their lineage, financial circumstances, gender/sex, or other “demographics.” I’m not virtue signaling here, it’s the way I was raised, reinforced with things I’ve witnessed and experienced. I have worked all my life in positions where I dealt with the public, and this approach has served me well.
The people who attend science fiction and fantasy conventions are generally more well read, and more open to other cultures and ideas.
When I went to science fiction conventions in the ‘70’s , ‘80’s, and ‘’90’s, I never saw any overt discrimination.
George Takei showed off a Japanese ceremonial robe at the Equicon 1973 masquerade (he was a judge). I later read his autobiography, where he set down his experiences as in an internment camp during World War II, and the discrimination he and his family experienced after the war, as well as that which he witnessed against Hispanic farm workers by one of the farms that was trying to cheat them out of wages.
That same year, I met Nichelle Nichols, who was THE most genuine and personable actress (or actor, for that matter) in Hollywood that I have ever met. Being in her presence was a genuinely welcoming experience. Her autobiography told of her struggles in getting parts, and the struggle for equal rights. She had flown in from New York to attend the day of the convention.
DC (Dorothy) Fontana was on several panels, talking about how difficult it was to get writing jobs or screen credit as a woman. She was the ONLY woman who had a script produced by Quinn Martin Productions. She had gone by “DC Fontana,“ instead of “Dorothy Fontana.” She’d started out doing secretarial work and script reading, eventually met and worked with Gene Roddenberry, and ended up writing some pivotal scripts for “Star Trek.”
At the 1980 Westercon, I first saw a young actress, artist, and puppeteer (then college student), Terri Hardin. She did a very good costume and skit for the masquerade, and went on to do others at future conventions. Her skit for Westercon ‘80 involved a Yoda puppet she created. It was certainly a hit with the fans. Shortly thereafter, while still in college, she began working in films, behind the scenes, and ended up working for the Walt Disney company as an artist, as well as for The Jim Henson Company. It wasn’t until I read the Disney Wiki biography https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Terri_Hardin, about her that it was even mentioned that she was of mixed race. It was her personality and talent that mattered, not her race. As a creative person, I appreciate creativity wherever I find it.
Fast forward to Costume College 2017. I attended, and taught several classes. Of all the costuming classes held there, there were 2 classes for men’s costuming, 112 for women’s costuming, and 69 classes (including mine) for general costuming and related subjects.
I got several side-long glances and nervous stares from female attendees, as if to indicate, “What are you doing here? This is a women’s event.” When I had signed up initially to teach classes, I’d get emails to “Carol,” not “Carl.” I’d correct them, but they’d do it again. I addressed that issue with the convention chairs. Bias? Probably. However, one of my classes was so highly praised that I was asked to present it at the next year’s Costume Con. All my classes were well attended, even though the “Bargain Basement” opened at the same time I was teaching one class! I do advocate for the inclusion of more men’s costuming classes!
At Costume Cons, I’ve seen quite a few male costumers, and some wonderful work from people like prop and sword master Dragon Dronet, Ben Comacho, Kevin Roche, David Joiner, and many others. All different, and all talented.
Conventions of all kinds should be above politics and prejudice. The ones I’ve been to, by in large, have been. That being said, I’ve not attended conventions in states that promote racism, sexism, anti-any-demographic politics, or fear mongering. To those who have been to conventions in the Midwest or the Deep South, I’d like to hear your take on this.
He wasn’t talking monetary value. He was referring to the world population of 7.88 billion.
rcade says He wasn’t talking monetary value. He was referring to the world population of 7.88 billion.
Oh come on now. Either way, he just being dumb. The human race in totality doesn’t give a damn about Fables anymore than it cares about Lapsing tea though a lot more care about that.
He’s being an extremely self-centered egotist. He thinks it cares about his product being out there when it really, really doesn’t.
@Bentley Brooks:
Or the other two explanations.
1. Willingham was not a personal friend of BT.
2. BT did not know of Fables existance. They didn’t care much about Comics 2015.
Everythink is posible with the puppies.
As AnnMarble said, where are the Brundage covers?
I think that’s actually the explanation. Because it wasn’t til later that JDA and Vox stumbled upon the idea of making money from comics.
@rcade:
The copyright notice. You know, the one that if you open Preacher, it says (c) Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, but if you open a Fables TPB, it says (c) Bill Willingham and DC Comics?
You can have creator-owned works. Fables isn’t that; not everything that was published under the Vertigo imprint was. Fables is jointly owned by Willingham and DC Comics under some sort of hybrid, with Willingham owning the story and DC Comics owning the art.
Okay… I feel like I shouldn’t need to explain that trademark rights and copyright ownership are two completely different things, and that one doesn’t necessarily imply the other. (It would be weird, but you could 100% have a company’s logo that they have trademark rights in, but also the copyright was owned by someone completely different.)
It’s probably more reasonable for me to have to explain that this statement is… largely meaningless, because that might not automatically be apparent to someone not in this field. It does have some value in some circumstances, but the important things to understand is that, (a) unlike copyright, trademarks have a bunch of restrictions, one of which is being limited to the specific field of goods and services in which you’ve used the trademark, and the extent to which you have rights in other fields is complicated, and (b) being the owner of a trademark doesn’t have to mean much–you can have a situation in which two parties agree that Person A is completely the owner of the trademark rights, but Person A permanently and irrevocably transfers to Person B the exclusive right to use the trademark and decide who else can use the trademark.
Also, “related indicia” is vague enough to drive a truck through. Who owns the name FABLES as a trademark for comic books? That normally wouldn’t be considered indicia, and would normally be important enough to specify, but it isn’t, so who knows?
If someone says (as Willingham did) “I still can’t publish Fables comics through anyone but them. I still can’t authorize a Fables movie through anyone but them. Nor can I license Fables toys nor lunchboxes, nor anything else”, then it’s incredibly unlikely that he actually owns the trademarks in any way that matters.
On a pretty basic level, if he doesn’t have the power to grant someone permission to put out Fables toys or lunchboxes, it is incredibly unlikely that the contract is worded in such a way that he has the power to grant everyone permission to put out Fables toys and lunchboxes.
I mean, it’s possible that the contract in written in such a way that some legal genius could find a loophole that DC Comics didn’t intend, but I feel on firm ground saying that a guy who announces that he’s making Fables public domain but that this doesn’t include the right to reprint Fables has zero clue as to what he’s doing or what ‘public domain’ actually means.
He was being figurative.
Fables has been described as creator-owned by DC Comics for its entire existence. Here’s a 2021 blog post from DC with the headline DC Announces Continuation of Bill Willingham’s Creator-Owned Hit with Fables 151 and Batman vs. Bigby: A Wolf in Gotham.
It is bizarre to see so many people develop amnesia about the fact that Fables is creator-owned. Every story about Fables in the comics press has noted that it is creator-owned. DC has touted this fact in all promotional efforts. It is one of the best known creator-owned comics ever published by Marvel or DC — a genuine success story for a comics publisher and a creator accomplishing something outside of work-for-hire serfdom.
If we had talked about Fables a week ago and the fact it was creator-owned was mentioned, no one would have disputed that.
What’s more likely, that Fables is not creator-owned and DC has been lying about it for 21 years, or Fables is creator-owned and DC is lying now?
@Brian with printed copyright notices saying that Willinghsm does own the trademarks it is very likely that he does. The issue he refers to are likely contractual terms – which apply only to him.
@rcade
If Willingham has truly placed the characters, etc., into the public domain, why would DC need him to publish anything new? They could hire someone else to write scripts.
@rcade:
It’s even more bizarre to see some people refuse to read plain English.
The copyright notice on Fables books says “(c) Bill Willingham and DC Comics.”
If you search the Copyright Office to see how this was registered, you’ll find entries like their first copyright registration, TX0005587599, which states “Copyright Claimant: Bill Willingham & DC Comics.
Authorship on Application: text: Bill Willingham; art: DC Comics.”
What’s more likely, that DC is using a definition of “creator-owned” in their press releases that makes them sound good while the actual legal situation is more of a “well, partially creator-owned and partially work-for-hire” one, or that they’ve been lying to the Copyright Office for the last 20+ years and Willingham hasn’t noticed?
Are you entirely unfamiliar with the concept of someone claiming that a business is ____-owned (where the ____ is some particular group, protected class, family, whatever) and it turns out that that just means they own a small part of the thing, and aren’t actually the sole owners, but it’s just better for PR reasons to make it sound like they are?
I honestly don’t understand why you’re arguing. Every single Fable comic contains a copyright notice saying that Willingham isn’t the sole owner, and the public copyright records are explicit that the art is work-for-hire owned by DC. This isn’t something that’s hidden and confusing; it’s there in plain and unambiguous text.
@Paul King
Imagine a scenario where you are the owner of a piece of property, and have signed an agreement where you grant the sole and exclusive right to use that property for the next 100 years to some company. Can you then turn around and declare that the property is now a public park, free for everyone to use?
(I mean, I guess you can in a literal sense, but the law isn’t going to give that any legal effect, because you’re trying to give away something you already gave to someone else.)
Just because you own something doesn’t mean you have the full right to do whatever you want with it, and Willingham’s statement about being unable to license anything makes it pretty explicit that he doesn’t actually have any actual rights to do anything with the trademarks other than in specific ways allowed by DC, even if he’s technically the owner.
But, arguments about whether Willingham owns the trademark rights are entirely irrelevant, because he’s never made any statement about the trademarks.
Copyrights and trademarks are two completely separate things. You can have rights in one without the other. He theoretically could do the trademark equivalent of putting a copyright in the public domain by abandoning his trademark rights, but he hasn’t.
So, to the extent people are making arguments based on Willingham owning the trademarks, that’s not a good argument, because under that argument, he still owns those trademarks, and that’s unaffected by anything in his declaration.
(And, if you want to argue that his statement is about him owning the trademark and giving a license to everyone to use them… that’s not a good argument either, because he’s explicitly saying that he doesn’t have the power to grant licenses to anyone, so that can’t be what he’s doing.)
@bill:
Per WIllingham’s words, DC still has a contract with him that covers publishing new Fables stuff. So while the Fables IP might be public domain, DC the company has a contract that says they can’t do anything with Fables without involving Willingham (or something along those lines).
It’s like if a company had a contract with you involving Red Riding Hood work. Any other company/person can absolutely do their own Red Riding Hood stuff without any legal retribution from you or the company that you have the contract with, but if the company you are contracted with did any RRH stuff without you, they would be breaching the contract they have with you.
Exactly. The creator-owned contracts between Bill Willingham and DC Comics spell out what each party can do with Fables. That binds them in ways that the rest of us are not bound. Willingham talks about this in depth on his Substack.
Willingham says he was always planning to release the IP to the public domain upon his death as an act of copyright activism. He just did it sooner because DC has mistreated him for years by not paying him what he’s owed, trying to sneak through new contract terms and other stunts. He says that he is owed 50 percent of the money from The Wolf Among Us game created by Telltale Games that is based on Fables and has received none of that.
If you are finally conceding that Fables is at least “partially creator-owned,” then Willingham owns something. The trademark statement in every issue shows that he owns something. He is giving what he owns to the public domain.
Willingham says he owned the characters and setting. Nothing in copyright documents proves this to be untrue.
Here’s a question: If you created the new super-hero Vexatious Man and I was the publisher of Creator Owned Comics, could we reach a contract where I publish your comic and we share the copyright on the issues I publish, but you still own the characters, setting and trademarks in Vexatious Man, leaving me with no rights to them?
@Brian The material covered by the Trademarks is more easily covered by Trademarks than copyright. If Willingham does not intend people to use those Trademarks then he is basically lying, A Fables lunchbox with original art would be a clear-cut Trademark issue, but a stretch as a copyright issue.
He doesn’t have to give a license – all he has to do is to let people use them.