Just Spinning Around

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. This is a letter from a jobbing writer from Essex who is currently spinning around within his own schedule and a whirlpool of new ideas that need fishing out from the skid. How are you doing? Did the sun come out there yet?

OPERATIONS

PUMA BLUES AND THE BILL OF RIGHTS

I was told on Thursday by a mutual that the artist Michael Zulli had died. To me, he was a giant. I discovered his work in the Eighties, with the book he created with writer Stephen Murphy, THE PUMA BLUES. It was both of its time and greatly ahead of it.

There’s a thing about PUMA BLUES you may not be aware of. It was published by Dave Sim, through the same operation he used to self-publish his CEREBUS series. In the mid-Eighties, Sim began republishing huge chunks of CEREBUS in giant collections referred to as “phone books.” Each one was several hundred pages. This was, at the time, an outlier. He sold them direct to readers via mail order - they were premium volumes, expensive to produce, and very much a fringe item. He needed to recoup every dollar he could. Diamond Comic Distributors got shitty about this, and in 1987 wrote to him to tell him that if he dared to decide to sell those books direct to readers instead of letting Diamond distribute them and take some of that money, then Diamond would in turn decide that they weren’t going to distribute PUMA BLUES any more.

Basically, let me wet my beak or one of your people is going to have a terrible accident.

Imagine that today, in these days of Kickstarter and Zoop. Things changed. (You might also try to imagine that in days where there were, you know, laws, but it is what it is)

It was a crunchy time in American comics. People were fighting to get Jack Kirby his original art back. People were fighting for creators’ rights. Activist retailers were trying to get publishers to enforce ratings and personal moral standards on the books they were printing and dropping DC books across entire retail chains for being “tasteless.”

(Side note 1: the practice at Marvel, into the 1980s, was to divide original art equally between the penciller, the inker and the writer. There were writers who would ask to work with certain artists just because they wanted to end up owning some of their pages.)

(Side note 2: this was also during the time creepy fuckers were forcing a ratings system onto albums in America. When people talk about “culture wars” today I just laugh.)

That, and: wait, the distributors can blackmail us for selling experimental projects direct to readers now?

All of this led to a lot of changes started, and to a bunch of North American comics creators writing down a document called The Creators Bill Of Rights. The final 1990 version looked like this:

###

For the survival and health of comics, we recognize that no single system of commerce and no single type of agreement between creator and publisher can or should be instituted. However, the rights and dignity of creators everywhere are equally vital. Our rights, as we perceive them to be and intend to preserve them, are:

1. The right to full ownership of what we fully create.

2. The right to full control over the creative execution of that which we fully own.

3. The right of approval over the reproduction and format of our creative property.

4. The right of approval over the methods by which our creative property is distributed.

5. The right to free movement of ourselves and our creative property to and from publishers.

6. The right to employ legal counsel in any and all business transactions.

7. The right to offer a proposal to more than one publisher at a time.

8. The right to prompt payment of a fair and equitable share of profits derived from all of our creative work.

9. The right to full and accurate accounting of any and all income and disbursements relative to our work.

10. The right to prompt and complete return of our artwork in its original condition.

11. The right to full control over the licensing of our creative property.

12. The right to promote and the right of approval over any and all promotion of ourselves and our creative property.

###

How much of that seems blatantly obvious and normal now?

People downplay the Bill and its effects these days. But for me, in 1989/1990? This was fire. And you know what else? They say “little or no impact on the comics industry,” but that right there is pretty much the Image Comics deal. And that’s just one reason why I will defend Image Comics to the death.

Elements of all of this are common currency at most publishers now, in lesser or greater ways. For people like me, the Bill was the yardstick by which all deals were measured.

And it all happened in part because of PUMA BLUES, and PUMA BLUES happened because of Michael Zulli. Rest in peace, and thank you.

Scott McCloud has some further reading on the Bill if you’re curious.

ORBITAL

ENFLATTENING

These two things feel related to me. Perhaps alongside:

Algorithmic flattening, AI language flattening, cultural flattening. Jay should have called it The Enflattening so he had a Cory Doctorow-like buzzword of his own.

I had a brief half-formed thought on the latter last week, but I kind of… not resigned? Lost the energy for it, maybe. There are some fights that just aren’t worth having. The streamers have turned into basic cable, “the internet” for most people is half a dozen portals, you know the list of grievances about the algorithmic flattening of the culture, and who fucking cares. You’ve got a brain in your head. You can go looking for stuff you like better instead. You’ll see “AI” writing more and more, and you’ll know how to spot it.

I mean, are you too dumb and stunned to invent your own creative environment? Course you’re bloody not. If any of the above feels like it affects you, all you need to do is do something about it. Get off the streams, and surround yourself with the stuff you love.

(And ways to find more. This is what blogs, magazines, newsletters and podcasts are for.)

Even if I wanted to read a lot of internet stuff or watch or listen to whatever mainstream stuff the algos push, I wouldn’t have the bloody time.

Wojciech Bąkowski

OTHER

THE ENDLESS ENDLESS

Professor Bernard Quatermass, protagonist of Nigel Kneale’s germinal QUATERMASS sequence of televisual novels, fought the consequences of his own pursuit of the future in THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT. Kneale himself saw the progression of the original trilogy as the alien invasion arriving, in EXPERIMENT, the invasion having arrived a year earlier in QUATERMASS II, and the invasion having happened five million years ago in QUATERMASS AND THE PIT. Quatermass wasn’t fighting aliens so much as he was fighting time. (And other things, because, like all good science fiction, QUATERMASS was social fiction.)

And then there was the final work, simply entitled QUATERMASS.

Quatermass old, tired, alone and at bay. Produced in 1979 but set at some vague millennial point – the only QUATERMASS expressly set in “the future” – the story revolves around attacks from space that have probably occurred across geologic timescales. It also resonates with a contempt for youth and a determination that the future is in the hands of the old and wise.

And yet. We see him here as a guest on a tv special depicting the last in an obviously long line of “hands in space” US-Soviet orbital link-ups, the sort of thing that was (made out to be) a big deal in the 1970s. This is a future in which nothing’s moved on. The menacing youth-cult “Planet People” were, in Kneale’s conception, “angry punks,” but the producers and director made them insane hippies instead – in 1979, a production choice that was somewhat dated, but in (the 21st Century) puts the show right into library-music weird-70s-tv atemporality.

There is no invasion, in QUATERMASS. The troubled, dogged professor has simply lived too long, and entered the modern condition: a world where there is no forward motion, everything seems to be an iteration of something else, and the lives of hundreds and thousands can be snuffed out at random by something unseen and awful that nobody quite understands.

(originally written May 2011. Just felt like dusting it off and looking at it again)

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

Podcast List, July 2024

ELECTRIC EDEN: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music, Rob Young

QUANTUM, Manjit Kumar

DAY OF THE OPRICHNIK, Vladimir Sorokin

Polar Nuclear Lighthouses

It’s been busier on LTD this week - lots of stuff I need to note down, catching up from last month - so if you want to have a wander through my notebook, start at the top.

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OUTBOARD

YOU’RE OLD AND YOU WORK IN A HOVEL

After posting that bit on work design last week, I came across Workspaces: a newsletter and website all about people’s home offices. Look at this insane glowing shit with the extra vertical monitor:

This showed up in my Bandcamp feed and I feel called out:

When even Bandcamp is in your email telling you you’re an old fart, it’s probably time to accept it and go down to the end of the garden and stay there.

OUTHOUSE

LUNCH

It’s samphire and sea purslane season. Salty, delicious shoots and leaves that grow in coastal or marshland areas. I get mine from flooded organic farmland in Devon. (I only just found that out - I get it in a weekly organic fruit/veg box from a local service, but doesn’t it sound like an insane flex?)

Samphire and sea purslane will be over soon, so 'I’m making the most of it. You can sometimes pick up samphire out of season, via import or farms - it’s pea-green and crunchy and full of anti-oxidants and anti-inflammatories.

This isn’t GOOP, but maybe you don’t know about samphire and sea purslane, discoveries I only made in the last ten years.

And rest. Take a breath. Every week feels like a big week these days, doesn’t it? Breathe and relax. Stop worrying about what you’ve got to do this week and think about what you get to do. And, you know, if you got through last week, you can get through this week. So take it easy. You’ve got this. See you next week.

W