 This week Gregg and I mull over the recently proposed Sequential Art and Entertainment Guild, but things get really interesting next week. At that time we'll see what happens when Gregg moves on in my absence and takes his comic talk straight to the top, Jermaine! Will our heroes soldier on without me? Will Jermaine figure out how to attach a word document to an e-mail!? Find out next week, same blog place, same blog time!
Stephen Mayer: Tony Harris made quite a stir on his Twitter feed last week announcing the formation of the Sequential Arts and Entertainment Guild, or S.A.E.G. (pronounced "sage"). Among other things he called for rights for colorists, basically "scale" page rates for artists and writers, and health insurance guarantees.
Gregg Schigiel: Apparently. This was something I heard about from you as I'm not generally a Twitter feed follower. Did it make a stir? Was there much talk, say, at Heroes Con?
Stephen: Tony did say that he was gonna be setting aside time to talk to folks face to face at the show, but I didn't talk to anyone that talked to him and I didn't hear about any organized meetings of any type. That's not to say that there wasn't interest and face-to-faces didn't happen. I just didn't hear anything going on.
Gregg: I have a bunch of different reactions to all this stuff, and it's interesting because there's a lot of opportunity/risk in getting...political.
Stephen: Politically political, or comic industry political?
Gregg: politically political...like politics of "organized labor", free markets...I suppose economically political more than anything else...but these days everyone and everything gets parsed to one side or the other, nuance notwithstanding, which is likely one of the reasons they're calling SAEG a "guild" rather than a "union". So on the one hand I get it; I see the sense and purpose of something like this. On the other, I see a lot of hole and logistical issues. And I see a lot of resistance by more folks than compliance. All very general statements, I know, but I'm giving my initial reactions as someone who, as I read the links you sent me, read them considering the POV of freelancers, publishers, and consumers.
Stephen: I'll get into my reactions later on, but as a freelancer for the last 10 years, and a consistently working one at that, this is supposed to protect your rights, right? So how do you feel from that angle?
Gregg: From that angle I'm not entirely sure which rights are being protected. The right to a fair wage? Fact of the matter is comics don't pay very well, for the time and energy involved, unless you're a "top tier talent". But comics don't pay well across the board in that respect; from the creators to production and editorial (again, barring the upper levels) to I'm guessing the retail side of things. It'd be great if comics paid more, for sure, but I'm not sure its feasibility.
The health insurance thing...that's a whole other mess that goes beyond the comics business, clearly. But inherent to the freelance lifestyle is the need to get insurance on your own. But there is something to having numbers on your side and using that to get better rates, etc. I think that idea, a "Sequential Artists and Cartoonists Insurance Collective", actually makes a good deal of sense. There already are organizations like The Freelancers' Union which do something like that, provide a place for freelance sorts to get their insurance. The trick here though becomes one of intra-state laws and insurance bargaining, etc.
But insurance, as everyone knows, is expensive and part of what makes hiring freelancers so appealing to companies, comic book or otherwise, is that they avoid the "gotta provide insurance" aspect. (why companies have to provide insurance is a whole other thing, again, political, but health care and insurance, as mentioned above and by many, many people for the past many, many years, is a mess)Â
As a freelancer for the past 10 years I've been quite conscious of things like saving money for retirement, having insurance, taking jobs that I feel pay appropriately. So as a selfish person, I take the attitude of "why doesn't everyone do that?". But I also know plenty of freelancers who don't do those things...for all kinds of reasons, one of which is they can't afford to because again, not a lot of money being made to afford insurance, savings, etc.
Stephen: So obviously incredibly political.
Gregg: Political for sure. A lot of it is economics, but with regard to health care/insurance, that stuff seems to fly in the face of economics.
Stephen: I think what happens a lot is people are so eager to break in to the industry that they'll take any work they can get, where maybe they're being taken advantage of to some degree because of their naiveté or they won't be paid until a book sees print or until it makes the publisher a profit.
And I'm saying that as a situation separate from a freelancing artist and writer working separately from a publisher and working on a page-rate or profit sharing agreement or a situation like Image where creators are retaining the rights to their own work.
Gregg: Absolutely, no question about it. But that's not going to STOP if there's a guild in place. The movie/TV business has SAG and all kinds of collectives set up...and lo and behold, Smallville is filmed in Canada. You'll still have publishers hiring "non-Guild" talent as that talent works towards getting into the theoretical guild (unless the guild takes any and all paying members at which point I ask, "who's making money here?").
Stephen: That was gonna be my next point. In Tony's first tweet, he said "I am sending out an open invitation to ANY working pro (writer, artist, colorist, letterer, etc...) get in touch with me at HeroesCon this year." What qualifies a professional? Can you be aspiring? Do you need to make your whole living doing comics? Do you have to have something published?
Gregg: That point, about profit-sharing and rights gets to the heart of something else entirely, which is working on established, COMPANY-OWNED characters or doing something independently. That...I'm not sure there's any incentive on the part of Marvel or DC to share in the Batman, Spider-Man, X-Men or Titans pies.
Technically, I've always understood "professional" to imply payment for work done. For example, with the aforementioned Freelancers' Union, you need to show proof that you're a working freelancer. But then again, if you do work for small publisher X, who might be your neighbor who's self-publishing a book, and they pay you...provide you with a 1099 for tax purposes and everything...does that qualify you as a professional freelancer?
Which brings me to another, I think pretty relevant observation...and this clearly speaks to a bias on my part, but I raise an eyebrow to anything I'm supposed to take "seriously" if it comes in the form of tweets. No offense meant to this particular instance, but if something has gravity to it it seems...it seems tweeting might not be the BEST means of making that case.
Stephen: I would tend to agree. Doesn't seem like the place for an announcement. A tease, sure. And to get further into the disorganization of the announcement, in Tony's second tweet he says, "We NEED to talk about a Union!" and then later says "SAEG is NOT a UNION! I did use that word initially in my early rants, but this is diff. SAEG is an ADVOCACY GUILD."
Gregg: To another point, and now we're bouncing around quite a bit...suppose you write a comic for DC...maybe an 8-page thing for a holiday special or something. Okay, so now you're writing a Flash story, say, and getting paid for your work and you're a "professional". On the other hand, suppose you're doing a mini-series over at Image. You own the property you're working on, yes, but ALL the work you do on that project, until it sees print and sells, if it sells well enough, pays zero dollars. So is Image now in violation of "guild rules" because they don't have page rates? Or is DC in violation because now you don't get a share in Flash appearances in the future?
I say all this not to tear down the idea of an "advocacy guild", but to merely ask the questions and point out the rocky terrain involved...all the more reason to gather information and figure things out before yes, tweeting.
I'm trying to imagine twitter existing in the early '90s and how that might've looked prior to the announcement of the big Image defection.
Stephen: To your first scenario: I doubt it would lead to owning a "share" in a property. The return on those would be constantly diminishing unless the property exploded down the line (which I suppose could happen in the case of something like Green Lantern).
Gregg: But then again, maybe if there's enough chatter and folks start talking, publishers might preemptively make changes...which under the old adage "the squeaky wheel gets the grease" is not impossible.
Stephen: To the second, I always thought of Image as more of a publisher, where they're providing the means of getting the book to print, almost investors rather than employeers.Â
I think if the Image founders had been on Twitter when they created the company there would have been less sympathy behind their projects because more ego would probably have come through. But there was also a lot of speculation in the industry at the time, so many that detachment from the material would have gone for the behind-the-scenes stuff like creator Tweets as well and folks would have continued buying four copies of every book anyway.
Gregg: But that's just it, Marvel and DC are also publishers. So are Boom! and IDW and Cartoon Books. The problem/trick is when the publisher owns the properties they're publishing. And that's something that goes beyond page rates and insurance. It speaks to what Robert Kirkman brought up last year in his "mission statement" that a lot of folks, sadly, misunderstood and tossed to the side. If you want to write or draw Batman, you play by DCs rules. If the idea is to change those rules...I'm not saying it's impossible - it's not - but it ain't gonna be easy.
Which begs the question: what incentive is there for Marvel or DC to change anything? If it's true, as folks theorize, that most of the money's made by licensing and such, than the publication of comics as we traditionally know it could stop completely. This is an obvious "doomsday scenario" I'm using here, but if the value of the comics themselves, NOT the characters, the comics, is what it's rumored to be...then what?
Stephen: I agree. And perhaps that's why we're jumping the gun as we knew we would be. We don't even know what rules they really want changed because perhaps they're jumping the gun too.
Gregg: Lots of guns being jumped. In hindsight perhaps we should change this column's title from "RE: COMICS" to "Jumpin' the Gun".
Stephen: My doomsday scenario hearkens back to my childhood. Driving down to Atlanta to watch the Braves play a couple of games for a family vacation. We were listening to the radio on the way down and during a station break they reported that the Major League Baseball Player's Association had gone on strike and the games we were heading down to watch wouldn't be played.
From this side of the counter and as a fan of the medium, that doomsday scenario you laid out is pretty damn scary, and the 12 year old me walking out on Turner Field in an empty stadium because the groundskeeper felt bad that we drove 6 hours for nothing knows that feeling a little too well.
And as someone that's become personal friends with a lot of people in the business, I want the best for all of them whichever way this goes.
Gregg: Here's the silver-lining, if you're willing to play along: in the baseball scenario you could, theoretically, if you loved BASEBALL more than the teams playing, go see minor league ball...or college ball, etc.
To that end, on the comics side, if you love comics and the people creating comics, in theory they/we could still make comics...maybe not with the characters everyone's immediately familiar with and have ages and ages of history...but you'll still be able to read comics.
And again, I think that's pretty much what Kirkman was playing at with his comments...drawing the line between the two ideas of work-for-hire/corporate properties and going solo.
If comics creators have one REAL power at our disposal, with respect to ownership and control, it's the internet, digital distribution, etc.
Stephen: And again, like we kind of realized last week, maybe there in lies the revolution.
Gregg: Absolutely. And I'm not even sure revolution's the right word. But there's a great potential for change right there. None of that gets any of us paid more up front...or provides us insurance or 401k plans or unemployment benefits, true...but on some level we also don't have to wear pants to work if we don't want to. Not sure if that's enough to balance the scales.
Stephen: I think that needs to be the capper, the line about no pants
Gregg: Ha ha...Â
Gregg Schigiel is a cartoonist, illustrator, and writer. He's worked as a penciller, writer and editor for Marvel Comics and an illustrator and cartoonist at Nickelodeon. In addition, he’s in various stages of cooking up new comics-related works…unless he’s too preoccupied actually cooking. Check out his website at Hatter Entertainment.com.Â
Stephen Mayer makes his mama proud by finding open source alternatives and making it a point not to curse quite so much around Carly's little sister.
