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The Creator's Bill of Rights:
A Letter from Dave Sim 16





Below are two letters from Dave Sim where Dave addresses Rick Veitch and Steve Bissette's exchange on their comic, 1963 and Mike Kitchen's view on Dave's "Creative Manifesto 2". -Al Nickerson



17 June 06

Dear Al:

Thanks for keeping me posted and sorry about my long break from the festivities. I’ve been working on some personal projects as well as commissions and for the time being the mail has gotten severely bumped. I get to it when I get to it. To give you an example of the "mail lag" around here, the package with Steve and Rick’s exchange on 1963 is dated May 16 and I just read it today.

I have to admit that alarm bells were sounding when Steve posted his "Rick, no crying ‘victim’ here—I’ve taken full responsibility in the end by leaving…etc." that seemed to cut to the heart of my own reluctance to venture too far into the Creator’s Manifesto. I wasn’t going to say anything but I think Rick nailed it pretty good with his "But the reality of it, to my eyes anyway, had all the tragic-comic complexity of a Russian novel. Reductionism just doesn’t do it (or you) justice."

Well, yes, exactly. How do you take full responsibility by leaving? "The Buck Stops Here, But I’m Going Back to Independence, Missouri. Good bye, All". What is that? So much of what Steve says just doesn’t add up although obviously it does to him and that is definitely a quality that Dostoevsky and Tolstoy were noted for—both in their writings and in their lives—the level of monstrous self-deception at work in the human soul and how that quality reveals itself like the peeling of the layers of an onion. And I think that touches on self-publishing for obvious reasons. I often wondered if Steve naming his dinosaur comic Tyrant wasn’t an unconscious swipe at me from his innermost soul because I had backed him into a corner, in a lot of ways arguing him into self-publishing by swatting aside all of his "Yes, but…" rationalizations and defence mechanisms. "Yes DC are bastards, but…" "Yes, I want full creative control, but…" "Yes, my dream is to draw and write my own dinosaur comic without interference, but…" I think Steve consciously wanted that and by the time he was done counter-punching with Dave Sim, king of the intellectual club fighters (you can cut me up as bad as you want, I’m just going to come wading back in and if I get a shot at you it’s going to have the kick of a Missouri mule: in the intellectual boxing ring, you can run but you can’t hide) he had no "buts" left and only "yeses". And I quite agree that that’s tyrannical in its own way. What business did I have backing someone into self-publishing? And as Rick hints, I think the answer to that goes deeper into Steve Bissette than I think even Steve Bissette is capable of going. I was proven right. Bissette certainly had the sales for his dream comic (alas, if only Rick had had the sales for his literal dream comic).

And, yes, that assumes the parameters of a Russian novel. Dave Sim arguing Steve Bissette into self-publishing and Steve Bissette brings along his friend Rick. "Rick is a most astute fellow and will assist our discussions!" And unconsciously what I assume Steve’s innermost self was thinking was "Let’s bring Rick. All he’ll talk about is DC and the companies and how to fix them and maybe that will shut up this tyrant. Because I can feel that if someone doesn’t shut him up, he’ll convince me to self-publish and that will be a disaster." Which it was as I suspect only an innermost self would know. And if you’ll forgive me for pulling the camera back even further to include God, I think that was God’s overall point to me. "I’ll give you Bissette and Veitch as self-publishers and hope you learn the lesson that there are many reasons not to be successful at self-publishing and more of them than to not be successful as a freelancer. Bissette will always get in his own way and undermine his own best efforts. If you eliminate his excuses for not being successful you’ll leave him no recourse but to quit completely because that’s who he is." In that context—ignorant as I was of Steve’s innermost nature and thinking that everyone can be reasoned with and shown that self-publishing is the best route—yes, I was a tyrant. And in many ways even worse because without me, Steve would never have had the taste of what it was to do his dream comic without interference and to have that comic be a runaway success. From that point it was a straight line trajectory where all Steve had to do was to avoid outside entanglements, get his work done, stay on schedule, keep the story in print and make a living at the thing that he loved most of all. But I think he had—and no doubt still has—a desire for entanglement and complication and that was part of my tyranny: that I was taking away his other greatest love which is to be immersed in fifteen different things all pulling him in different directions and all requiring hour-long phone calls with like-minded people to address and which allowed him to stay away from the drawing board for extended periods. I had dismantled his argument and left him with a barren life that consisted only of what he, ostensibly, wanted to do.

But, again, I think God’s overall point to me was "My way works better. Self-publishing is fine as an option, but given the nature of artists and writers you’re going to have more successful guys making a career at an established company than you are in self-publishing or small to medium-sized companies. If I can hook up the peculiarities of creative people and the peculiarities of editors and publishers there’s a nice yin-and-yang effect that kicks in. Both groups are nutty as fruitcakes but in complementary ways. If you had just left Bissette alone, to this day he could have been driving Karen Berger nuts and she could have been driving him nuts and he’d still be writing and drawing comics in these furious bursts of sleepless creativity over 18 months followed by complete collapse and then he’d be onto another project. None of those projects would have been as good or as pure as Tyrant, yes, but I think it’s better for Bissette to have produced ten more projects before he kicked off rather than leaving the comic-book field completely."

And this becomes a problem with the Creator Manifesto that I’ve been talking about. It ignores human nature in the same way that Marxism ignores human nature. Nothing could be more sensible than putting all of society’s resources in one big pile and posting a big "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" signs and taking it as a given that everyone will abide by the spirit of that. But people aren’t like that. Which is why capitalism is preferable, I think. There are still winners and losers but there is a yin-and-yang thing that kicks in. A billionaire is nutty as a fruitcake by definition. You don’t accidentally earn a billion dollars. You need to be such an obsessive-compulsive about currency that you link all of your abilities to that and if you have a lot of talents you will get to the billionaire "plateau". It’s completely self-centered but you end up doing any number of people a world of good because there’s no way to make a billion dollars without giving tens of thousands of people jobs (even though thousands of those jobs are probably going to be largely or completely pointless owing to imperfect human structural designs of corporations). Marxism, I can attest—living in the People’s Republic of Southern Ontario—only benefits the people nearest to the big pile of currency: the bureaucratic mandarins and the political bosses in the big cities. Everyone else’s living standard begins to erode rapidly.

Sorry for the slight tangent, but I think the comic-book field is analogous. I can start the Creator Manifesto with The Idea. "Strange Visitor from another planet with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men." There’s The Idea. But equally important to The Idea is what is the nature of the Idea Generator? Just to reduce it to basic conceptual shorthand, let’s pose the question as "What if Jerry Siegel was like Steve Bissette?" We have no way of knowing because we only know Jerry Siegel as the disenfranchised and aggrieved proprietor. Perhaps the only thing he was suited to was freelancing. Had he been sharp enough to engage a lawyer to give him, let’s say, a share of editorial control it’s very possible that Superman would never have survived World War II. Perhaps it took the purely mercenary viewpoints of the DC editors with their eyes on only those dimes in kids pockets to make Superman into an enduring icon. Well, weigh that in the balance. What would be better? A Superman that exactly reflected Jerry Siegel’s vision of the character that only lasted seven years or a Superman that was an accumulation of all the editorial hands that shaped —and shape!—him and his creative context? I begin to think that my talk of a Creative Manifesto and template agreements might actually do a disservice to creators. No one showed me how to self-publish and no one talked me into it. I made the money I made and I make the money I make because of a combination of personal initiative/decision-making and patterns and trends and configurations that I could never have dreamed of and of which I have only the most limited and cursory understanding. I’m sure there are probably three things I could do next week that would double our revenues overnight but I suspect they are all things I would never think of because of my own personality. Just as there were probably a half dozen ways to save 1963 and Tyrant that the principals involved didn’t think of because of their own personalities, but ways that might have saved both if editorial fruitcakes had been there to counterbalance the creative fruitcakes that didn’t have those aptitudes.

And I suspect that does come down to the ‘flake factor’. My thesis back in the 1980s and early 90s was that virtually all creators were sensible, rational, reasonable guys and that self-publishing was the most sensible, rational and reasonable thing to do. Had my thesis been correct, I think we would have seen the mass exodus from the companies into self-publishing that I anticipated and that I was pushing for. The fact that I can’t really think of any successful 21st century self-publishers (once Terry Moore stops doing Strangers in Paradise)—in my own frames of reference: productive, reliable, sensible business men, competent and popular creators, able to make a living at it—would suggest that the ‘flake factor’ was far more the rule than the exception. That is, I think the evidence suggests that cartoonists are ‘flakes’ as a rule. Some aren’t. We can argue about percentages. 3%? 12%? Those that aren’t should, I think, try self-publishing.

This exchange was the first that I heard of Bissette ditching on 1963. I do think that’s wrong. If you are collaborating on something and you’ve agreed to do it, you do it and you do it on time. As Rick says, you find a way to get it done no matter what’s happening in your personal life. Letting your brothers-in-arms down just doesn’t seem to me to be a viable option. However, for all I know that just makes me a quaint antique from another age and "letting the guys down" could be considered a minor "oopsie" by 98% of the cartooning community. There could be a list as long as your arm of nearly universally believed-to-be-valid reasons that it’s not only allowable but a good idea to "jump ship" in mid-project.

Even if that percentage was, say, 40% (and the list of "reasons" only half as long), I think that would make a Creator Manifesto and/or a template agreement a futile enterprise. The wrong people would use it for the wrong reasons.

I’ll write again when I get to the June 4 batch you sent, Al.

Best,

Dave




21 June 06

Hi Al,

Well, I’m back again and let me again apologize for my long absence from these discussions.

Mike Kitchen

Well, I think this is good. As Mike says even though the percentages aren’t carved in stone, they at least provide a guideline.

THE SOURCE I see as being the idea itself, not "getting ideas" or the person who came up with the idea. I see the distinction as being important because the core of the argument when these things fall into dispute is who came up with what? And as Steve and Rick can attest from their experiences back in Mirage and Tundra’s respective hey-days, it’s amazing how fast everyone forgets how an idea evolved from a "pre-idea" state to a full-fledged concept, particularly if people are just brain-storming ideas at dinner or at a party or something. I’m going to seem like a real party-pooper, but I’m going to advocate that all communication of intellectual ideas be "on paper" or via e-mail. That way there’s a paper trail that can be followed back when determining who contributed to what and to what degree. If Siegel and Shuster had insisted that all dealings on Superman be by correspondence—even with each other—then there would be a firm and inviolate record of how the whole thing came about, who came up with what, what they understood to be their situation, what they were putting on the table and what Liebowitz was putting on the table. If an editor or publisher looks at an idea and says they’d like to discuss it with you, in order to protect yourself and them, you are going to be better served by saying, "Please send me a letter a fax or an e-mail" and make sure you retain all records of all discussions. Again, this isn’t carved in stone but if it became standard practice there would be a lot fewer problems caused later on. I would suggest that this is all "Story" considerations and that therefore the participants would start with the arbitrary 32.5% for Story and using the paper trail of discussions of the Idea which is The Source, arrive at a fair percentage. If the essence of the concept or character consists of a dozen definable elements, mutually agreed by the parties as making up the essence of the concept or character and creator A came up with 8 of them and creator B came up with 4 of them, then that would be reflected in what share each would get of the Story money and then later on what share each would get of, say, an advance for a movie. How many of the twelve concepts are being used in the movie? If there are six of them, 2 of the 8 that creator A came up with and all 4 of the 4 creator B came up with, then the revenue split would be different on the movie than on the comic book. But you only have a basis for this if you have a paper trail and you only have a paper trail if you conduct all discussions on paper because otherwise it is practically a guarantee that one or both (or all three) collaborators are going to forget who came up with a key concept. If Steve Bissette can give us a few illustrations from the brainstorming sessions for the Turtles movies that he was privy to, you’ll see what I mean, I think. It is only when all communication is on paper that you have irrefutable evidence that, if necessary, a lawyer or a court of law can dissect and bisect and reduce to its component elements in determining who is entitled to what. Without it, the whole thing becomes "he said, she said".

Spawn

Spawn isn’t the best example, nor is Overtkill, in my view because the creation of both, so far as we know was individual in nature. So far as we know, no one sat down and brain-stormed ideas with Todd. THE SOURCE in Spawn’s case is Todd’s idea for Spawn and no one is disputing Todd as Auteur, sole proprietor.

The Creative Manifesto

THE WORK I see as being the physical manifestation of the SOURCE, the idea. It can probably be broken down into PRE-WORK and WORK. "Pre-work" would consist of every physical act of creativity that goes into producing the original artwork from which the WORK is reproduced. PRE-WORK would consist of sketches, story outlines, plot synopses, rough drafts, finished drafts, model sheets, pencilled pages, etc.—anything that isn’t the finished pages which are going to be reproduced but which goes into the process of creating those finished pages. There is some crossover between THE SOURCE and THE WORK which is why I advocate that the paper trail be maintained. If the paper trail ends once the collaboration begins and one guy is going over to the other guy’s house with thumbnails and they’re going over them and just bouncing ideas around it is almost certain that someone’s contribution is going to get permanently misplaced or misappropriated through no fault except faulty memories. When the give and take is on paper, then you know who contributed what at each stage because you never know when a key idea is going to be introduced. "At that point either Kevin or I said, I forget which…". If all communication is on paper or e-mail you can backtrack and see right away. This is perhaps even more important when it comes to a CREATOR/EDITOR dialogue. The Creator presents his idea[s] they bat them around and the Editor makes three major changes in the nature of the property. If the Creator decides to take his property elsewhere, you have a paper trail saying that the Editor contributed these three ideas. If the ideas have become a core part of the character/concept the Creator has the option of doing an idea-ectomy and walking away clean with what he came in with or compensating the editor or the Company for his/its contribution on an on-going basis.

But Mike makes a good point that THE WORK is also the labour involved in producing the finished pages which will be reproduced (you could probably describe the individual comic books that are the reproduced work as POST-WORK). So you would have

1) PRE-WORK which is a combination of all of the physical incarnations of the SOURCE that are brought into being AND the actual labour involved in doing so in order to produce the WORK

2) THE WORK which is the finished product/pages which are ready to be reproduced which is made up of a) THE SOURCE combined with b) the Two aspects of PRE-WORK brought to finished incarnation AND whose raw material state is also the physical property of those who produced it divided in some agreed upon fashion (penciller gets so many pages and first pick, inker gets so many pages, writer gets so many pages if they agree on that ahead of time).

3) POST-WORK is the collective and individual reproductions of THE WORK which are the actual commercially transacted elements and element respectively. You sell the print run of comic books and you sell each individual comic book in that print run and that’s the primary source of revenue. The raw material state, the original pages, can arguably be described as part of THE WORK or part of THE POST WORK (or even the POST POST WORK). It is only part of THE WORK before it is reproduced, at the point where it is the sole physical incarnation of THE SOURCE in tandem with the two aspects of PRE-WORK brought to finished form. Once it has been photographed or scanned and negatives made of it, arguably it goes from being THE raw material to A by-product. The scan or the negative takes its place as THE raw material and it is no longer needed to bring about the POST WORK state of multiple reproductions and its state changes from MEANS to END. It is the physical property of the creators to own or sell completely apart from its previous role as THE WORK brought to finished form and apart from its function as the MEANS of producing the POST WORK.

THE MEANS

THE MEANS includes everything that is needed to bring about the POST WORK state of multiple reproductions. It includes PUBLISHING and PRINTING and DISTRIBUTION, that is, all necessary MEANS to transform the single physical incarnation of THE SOURCE into a POST WORK state of multiple copies transacted collectively and individually. It can be anything from a photocopier to a laser jet printer to a 12 colour offset press. It can also be a website. If you post your strip to your website, taking it from the single incarnation state it had on the drawing board or on your computer screen, you facilitate PUBLISHING it in the sense that everyone who downloads your strip is engaged in producing their own copy of it on their own computer screen. The Internet is the only environment I know of where PUBLISHING and PRINTING are accomplished at least partly by the audience. THE MEANS can but does not necessarily include participation in THE SOURCE and THE WORK. Work-made-for-hire is an example where THE MEANS of dissemination (say DC or Marvel) is deemed to be THE SOURCE by virtue of THE SOURCE having conveyed all legal claims to be THE SOURCE to THE MEANS. Image’s deal where they are entitled to a fixed percentage of revenues in perpetuity would be one step removed from that: a PARTICIPATORY MEANS rather than a SUPPLANTING MEANS. They don’t take your place as THE SOURCE but they do become a CO-SOURCE in perpetuity. It’s important to understand where the overlap occurs at the outset and to keep the elements separate. That is, if you are moving from SOURCE STATE to PRE-WORK at the same time that you are negotiating what MEANS you intend to enter into legal agreement with, it is important I think to have separate and complete paper trails for both. If all of your communications are on paper and documented then you can establish LEGAL INTENT if it becomes necessary and this needs to be established at the outset i.e. "I am entering into negotiation with MEANS X both in moving from the SOURCE STATE to the PRE-WORK state in terms of THE WORK and from THE SOLE SOURCE STATE to the PARTICIPATORY MEANS or SUPPLANTING MEANS state in terms of THE MEANS but both are in the discusson phase. My sole intent is to explore possibilities and on-going negotiations should not be deemed to constitute LEGAL INTENT to consummate a deal. Intent to consummate a deal will be declared in writing if I get to that point." This means that you can explore all of the avenues and potentials and limitations of a proposed deal and be moving the creative work forward without making yourself legally culpable either for any time or money or creative consultation MEANS X expends in proposing terms. THE WORK might be changing in the PRE-WORK phase from a SOLE SOURCE to a SOURCE/PARTICIPATORY MEANS partnership or from a SOLE SOURCE to a SOURCE/SUPPLANTING MEANS partnership (that is, you and your Marvel editor or DC editor are discussing legal business terms and also discussing how to turn your property into their property) but because the paper trail is there with your LEGAL INTENT established at the outset, it is still possible for you to disengage at any point in the discussions and eliminate any contributions made by the other side and return to a SOLE SOURCE state without any legal prejudice. I think this is necessary if the DC clauses governing intent are common, which I’m sure they are. Negotiation is not agreement if you specifically declare at the outset that you are doing one and not the other. If negotiations drag on over months and sometimes years as they have been known to do at the big companies, that can pose a legal hurdle if a court deems that you had already entered into agreement by "collaborating" with an editor in moving from SOURCE STATE to PRE-WORK state or, even worse, from a SOURCE STATE to a WORK state. That is, the comic book is almost done, press time has been scheduled and you have changed your concept in accordance with the dictates of an editor but you haven’t gotten a contract yet and when the contract comes in it doesn’t reflect what you thought had been agreed to. Without a paper trail there’s no way to establish what you had thought had been agreed to and with high-powered corporate legal muscle on the other side of the courtroom, the fact that you had moved so far along in the process could be deemed LEGAL INTENT. With a paper trail you not only have your LEGAL INTENT in writing that you are only negotiating and not agreeing but you also have all of your understandings of what the agreement is going to contain in writing and therefore legal basis for disengaging from the process: bad faith negotiations on the part of the company. In fact at that point the legal balance would tilt in your favour and you could threaten the company with legal action for malfeasance, misrepresentation, attempted fraudulent misappropriation of your property. Don’t be surprised if the only thing the companies commit to paper is their own contract while they want to discuss all of your concerns on the phone where there is no paper trail. "Promise him anything verbally, nothing in writing and get him to sign the contract without any changes." It’s the bait-and-switch.

I’m not sure where Mike Kitchen’s ideas of the demarcation between IDEAS and LABOUR come in, but I think they are good ones and I suspect they might be subsets of THE SOURCE and THE WORK respectively. In a situation where there was an absolute division between the two—one person is the IDEAS guy who does nothing creatively after helping create or co-create the character and coming up with the backstory, concepts, bible, logo, etc. [PRE-WORK] and the other person is LABOUR, writer, scripter, penciller, inker, letterer, colorist of the actual WORK then I can see a 10%/90% split as being a reasonable base starting from that one extreme polarized example and then shifting percentages from the latter to the former in a case where IDEAS guy is also the writer (additional 5%) or the writer/scripter (additional 10%) or writer/scripter layout artist (additional 15 to 20%). Whether the editor gets a creative cut/percentage would depend on the extent of their participation, I would think. If they’re just proof-reading or looking for content inconsistencies (the spelling of the name of the character changes from page 5 to page 6), then no. But if they are performing PRE-WORK functions, actively participating in moving from SOURCE STATE to PRE-WORK to WORK, then yes. A good example would be Karen Berger’s participation in changing the content of "A Midsummer Night’s Dream" in that it was her criticism of Neil’s approach that led him to rethink a critical part of the story and to improve it dramatically. I’m not sure that that would entitle her to a cut of Neil’s SOURCE royalty of Sandman overall, but I think it would entitle her to a cut of royalties on the number of pages that "Midsummer’s" takes up in the Dream Country volume. I mean, I could be a real stickler and say she should only get a cut of the page that Neil actually changed with Shakespeare’s son but I think you have to agree that that single page boosted the content of the entire story…and you could probably argue that it kicked the entirety of Dream Country up a notch. I think you just play fair in that case and admit, as Neil has, where editing made an exponential improvement and that the onus is on THE SOURCE to keep track of it scrupulously and to make sure that genuine contributions are compensated adequately. As in the case with Bissette and From Hell (or, for that matter ME and From Hell: as far as I know I paid an advance for the first instalment when we were publishing Taboo), it’s up to Alan and Eddie. If they don’t think Steve was a critical part of getting From Hell rolling and that he isn’t entitled to even a token cheque (and if they think that then I think they’re wrong) from the movie deal then that’s their call. It really requires paying attention in the same way that I TRY to pay attention to sending Bob Burden a cheque whenever we reprint Church & State II but I freely admit that I’ve had to have Gerhard backtrack through the printing history a couple of times to find out if we paid Bob. No malfeasance intended—and I certainly wouldn’t expect Bob to press charges or even to publicize the fact that he didn’t get paid for the latest printing (I’m 99% certain he has no idea when the volume is reprinted)—but an unforgivable breach of ethics in The Buck Stops Here sense for the exact reason that if I don’t keep track of it and actively work to stay current with our cheques to Bob and Rick no one else is going to.

Guest Writing Spawn

I follow Mike’s argument here up to a point but I think there are problems with deeming that as soon as your character appears in another comic book that character becomes part of that book’s Mythos (ie. Cerebus is part of the Spawn Mythos). It seems to me that this where the AUDIENCE comes in: in the same way that it’s now widely accepted in science that an observer affects the nature of an experiment merely by observing it. Todd has chosen not to reprint Spawn 10 for whatever reason. In effect what he is saying is that Cerebus was a one-off event in 1993 in Spawn but his presence in the Spawn Universe has been rescinded. The canonical story jumps from Alan’s issue to Frank’s issue and Dave’s and Neil’s issues don’t exist anymore. It’s not an insensible choice, in my view. Todd pitched the crossover as I could do whatever I wanted, I had complete creative freedom. "If you want to write Spawn sitting on the toilet for 20 pages, that’s up to you." Well, I took him at his word and basically did a story that stretched Spawn continuity to the breaking point and beyond by choosing to ignore 99.9% of continuity (with the one tenuous Levels of Hell connection) and change Todd’s comic book from a Vertigo style super-hero book into a political cartoon for twenty pages . You would really have to stretch a point to see the story as a part of Spawn continuity if Spawn continuity—issue one to the present as a single storyline—is what you’re focusing on. The story makes a lot more sense if you eliminate issue 10 than if you leave issue 10 in. And I would assume that was the reaction of Spawndom Assembled. "Uhhh…let’s just forget that Spawn 10 even existed." Of course, on the other side of the equation I hear frequently that Spawn 10 was the best issue of the title but the people I hear that from are not regular Spawn audience members. So Todd essentially chooses to go with what I assume is the majority view and to just ignore Spawn 10 and the fact that there’s no outcry or protest means that he made the right call in the DMZ between THE SOURCE and THE AUDIENCE. Todd and his readers agree. "Uhhh…let’s just forget that Spawn 10 even existed." All in favour? And the motion passes by a staggering majority vote.

The same is true with the relentless process of bringing characters back from the dead at DC and Marvel. Is Supergirl dead or did she never exist or has she been brought back to life? Is she the Supergirl of the animated cartoons or Peter David’s Supergirl or Jim Mooney’s Supergirl? The answer, it seems to me, is whatever you can get away with, whatever THE AUDIENCE will put up with. If you can convince the vast majority of DC readers that all nine or twelve or fifteen Supergirls existed/no longer exist/never did exist/are alive/are dead/were dead and are now alive/have a new name/have the old name but a new look/have a new origin/had a new origin but now have a newer origin and THE AUDIENCE doesn’t feel bamboozled by that, doesn’t feel that DC is snickering at them and going "What an ultra-maroon" then more power to DC. Like Todd they are succeeding in the DMZ between THE SOURCE and THE AUDIENCE. Of course success is a relative term if you compare what Jim Mooney’s Supergirl sold in the back of Action Comics in the 1960s and what the Bruce Timm version or Peter David version is selling today. You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time—and eventually it is going to cost you a big chunk of THE AUDIENCE.

Okay, I have quite a bit more mail to answer here, but I think this covers my reaction to Mike’s primary points and maybe helps to move the CREATIVE MANIFESTO along a couple of baby steps.

Best,

Dave






Next: A Letter from Dave Sim 17 Dave Sim addresses Mike Kitchen's view on Dave's "Creative Manifesto 2".


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