The Creator's Bill of Rights

The Creator's Bill of Rights was written in November 1988 for a two day "Summit" of comic book artists held in Northampton, Massachusetts. The meeting had been suggested by Cerebus creator Dave Sim and hosted by local heroes Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, creators of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The Summit was a follow-up to an earlier meeting in July of that year which Sim had assembled in Toronto to grapple with various burning issues of the day (I'm being deliberately vague here because I can't remember which issues they were!). The Toronto meeting produced a "Creative Manifesto" in which a number of labor issues and ethical principles were discussed. I had found the Manifesto kind of muddled (I wasn't alone) so when I was invited to Northampton, I prepared a rough draft of a proposed replacement. That replacement, which I named "A Bill of Rights for Comics Creators" was accepted quickly on the first day of the Summit at Sim's suggestion. The rest of that day was a non-stop argument about the document's wording.

The Bill never generated much noise in the industry – and I wouldn't want to exaggerate its influence – but in looking over its articles more than a decade later, they provide an interesting snapshot of our attitudes at the time, and of the climate that was fueling self-publishers, progressive business people, and artists trying to reinvent the comics industry. A few years later, several top-selling Marvel artists would break from the pack and form a new company called Image. In doing so, they would shift the debate from rights and principles to clout and competition, but both developments would share a common premise, one worth considering even today; that creators already have the right to control their art if they want it; all they have to do is not sign it away.

I was invited to the Summit in large part because I knew Peter Laird and others through an A.P.A. I'd created called The Frying Pan (another invention I'll get around to explaining eventually). I suggested that Larry Marder be invited too and he was. Larry is now known primarily as Image's Executive Director and "The Nexus of all Comic Book Realities" but at the time he was just "the guy that draws Beanworld." He flew out from Chicago to our place in Arlington, Massachesetts shortly before the meeting. I had the rough draft of the Bill ready but not typed yet. I vividly remember hammering it out on my old manual typerwriter as Larry read my notes back to me, right before we rushed out the door to catch a bus to Harvard Square, a Subway to South Station, a train to Springfield and another Bus to Northampton. It was while waiting for the bus in Springfield that we found a copy shop and photocopied my hastily typed hand-out. It was also on that trip that I showed Larry my notes for a comic book about comics that I had been working on for a few years.

After the first day of debates, everyone stumbled out of the Hotel Northhampton into the cold New England air to walk the five or so blocks to dinner. I remember Larry and I lagged behind a little. I had argued with Dave Sim about every imaginable issue that day as if my life depended on it, but walking to dinner, it all seemed pretty distant already. Larry and I talked more about my notes for the comic book about comics. I asked him if he thought those ideas would mean a lot more in the long run than anything I could accomplish in Northampton. He said yeah, they probably would.

When those notes became Understanding Comics it was Kevin Eastman's money that paid me to finish it – money he and Peter had earned because they refused to give away their creation the way so many artists had before them.

--Scott

The Summit participants were Dave Sim, Gerhard, Kevin Eastman, Peter Laird, Steve Bissette, Rick Veitch, Myself, Larry Marder, Mark Martin, Steve Murphy, Michael Zulli, Eric Talbot, Ken Mitchroney and (with Mirage Studios) Michael Dooney, Steve Lavigne, Craig Farley, Jim Lawson and Ryan Brown. If any of you who were there read this and want to post your own reminiscences of the Summit, please do so. I'll be happy to link to them.

Finally, an amusing postscript arrives from Jonathan Fine at Yale:

"You might be pleased to learn that you were a part of the law school curriculum in intellectual property. I mentioned your comics to a friend who was a visiting scholar here and she said your name sounded familiar. A bell went off (metaphorically) when I said that you'd done a bill of rights for comic artists. She let me know that this year's class in intellectual property had had your bill of rights assigned, and that they spent some time discussing it."

What a long strange trip it's been...