After pursuing a career working for the big publishers in comics I had managed to get my toe in the door. So I had figured that with the door opened a bit I could force my foot in there and argue my case through that slim crack of opportunity. And that door had not only NOT opened a sliver more, it had been slammed in the old face and a barricade apparently erected on the other side to keep me out.
Alas.
I figured things couldn't possibly get any worse.
Soon, there was injury to be added to insult.
One thing the folk at Marvel had learned long ago was that you could reprint previously published
material in collected formats and sell them all over again. But it wasn't quite like the old days when they did that without paying the original creators. By the 1980s they paid for reprints, albeit at a lower rate. Also, they paid royalties if the sales of a particular book went over a certain number. I had received royalty payments for my HELLRAISER story that had appeared in issue #2 of the book. By the time my later stories appeared, in #5 and #6, the sales figures had apparently fallen below that threshold. I never did receive royalty payments on those.
Well, Marvel/Epic did begin to produce reprint editions of the HELLRAISER stories. My yarn, "Divers Hands" from issue #2 made it into the first volume of collected stories. Featuring my creation, the cenobite called Hunger. And I got a check for that story--at a reduced rate since it was a reprint. But I did get paid.
After banging the old noggin against the reinforced doors at Marvel and DC I continued to hold out hope that I could make some money by writing for the industry. Hardly a week went by when I wasn't working on some kind of pitch or script to try to break in once again. In the meantime I was continuing to make the bulk of my living as a dealer in new and collectible comics, heading off to conventions all over the US to do so. And one day I walked into the dealer's room at a comic convention and one of my colleagues was setting up shop. As I was looking at his offerings of new books I saw a stack of HELLRAISER titles I had never seen. These were hardback, apparently leatherbound limited editions. They were also sealed so that I couldn't see the contents, but I quickly discovered that at least one of the volumes (there were two different ones that day) had at least one story that I had written.
However, I had not received a dime in compensation. And I had not received even one contributor's copy. I was pissed, and I was also puzzled. So, when I got home I made calls to
Marvel until I got in touch with the fellow who was filling the shoes of the editor to whom I had originally sold.
"Hey," says I. "There's a hardcover HELLRAISER book out with my work and I haven't received any notice or any compensation. What's going on?"
"Oh. Those," said the editor. "Those aren't books."
"What? What do you mean 'they're not books'?"
"Those are merchandise. As merchandise, the only ones who receive payment would be Mr. Barker and New Line Cinema."
Silence from me.
"So, I'm busy," says the new editor. "Anything else I can help you with?"
Click.
Well, I reckon this is what I should have expected. As I said, it wasn't as if I wasn't warned. And it wasn't as if I didn't know the history of Marvel and DC. If they can rip off guys like Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, then why would they hesitate for one second to rip off a bunch of minor authors writing Hellraiser stories for a title they knew would run its course in quick order and soon be defunct?
You see, I was blind to all that. Basically, what I wanted to do was write superhero stories based on characters created by men who had largely been raped and robbed by Marvel Comics. What the Hell was I thinking? In fact, though, I hadn't been thinking, at all. The only thing that I wanted was to write for a living, working for the very company that ripped off its creators and celebrated the men who did the thieving. I hadn't paused one goddamned second to think of the victimization of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.
Not long after this, brooding on the whole, sorry situation, I walked away from comics. Although I had only very briefly and very peripherally worked in comics as a writer, I had experienced mainly nothing but the negative side of things. In the small presses, (except for Steve Bissette's TABOO), I had encountered publishers who paid late, or failed to pay at all, or lied to keep from paying me for work I had done for them. Among the larger publishers I had encountered the Big Professional Circle Jerk that blocked almost everyone not working in the publisher's offices. When I had happened upon those very few editors who were willing to look at outside work (Dan Chichester, Stuart Moore, etc.), those fellows were removed or chose to go on to other things, leaving me without an objective contact.
In the years since, I have worked from time to time in the small press. The experiences there have not been good, either. One publisher made quite a profit on one book I wrote (and which was penciled and inked by friends of mine), but never paid any of us for the work, claiming that the issue lost money (an obvious lie considering the book's sales). Eventually I even stopped submitting to the independent presses, finding them to be nothing more than smaller versions of the liars and thieves at the big publishing houses.
It was a hard lesson. But in a way I had asked for it. All during this time Jack Kirby was struggling to get his hands on the thousands of pages of original artwork that was in the possession of the company that had stolen so much of his intellectual property. These monsters were holding that art as ransom unless he would further sign away all rights that he had to his creations. This company who did these things to the likes of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko--the men who had created the freaking company in the first place--and I was trying to work for them?! To create for them? To pour my time and sweat and ingenuity into their bank accounts?
I got what I bloody well deserved, I reckon. In the years since the HELLRAISER franchise was cancelled at Marvel, at least some of my work for that title has since been reprinted by an outfit called Checker Books, for which I received no payment at all. In addition, I suspect that I have had my work reprinted by the new publisher of the HELLRAISER business, BOOM! Studios, and apparently they aren't legally obligated to pay me, either.
One thing, though. When I compared notes with others who had created stuff for HELLRAISER--those guys had signed contracts. Somewhere along the line, corporate Marvel must have gotten their wires crossed. I never received any contracts. Not once. They paid me, sure. But I never got a contract.
If that someday came up to bite them like a gnat, I wouldn't be disappointed.
When I was a young man--in my 20s--and establishing my professional and semi-professional credentials as a writer of short stories, I decided to try to break into the comic book business.
This seemed almost too easy for me. First of all, I had grown up reading comic books. My parents owned used bookstores and soon after opening his first one, my dad found that he had accumulated around a quarter of a million old comics. So in short order I had at my disposal just about every comic book published between 1955 and 1967. And I loved comics. I genuinely adored the format and it appealed to me on just about every level. So in just purely terms of immersion, I was already about as learned as a youth could be about comics.
Fast forward a couple of decades and I was becoming enough of a professional writer that I could call myself that according to the bylaws of the Horror Writers Association. I'd sold enough short fiction at the level of five cents per word (or higher) to become a full, voting member of that then-new organization.
So...comics. Why not? I'd been surrounded by them as a kid, and I was still surrounded by them because I owned several comic book shops at that time. All I had to do was learn how to write a comic book script and research the markets and I was pretty sure that I could break in as a pro.
At that time the comic book market was changing, but had not undergone the throes of death and re-birth that the industry would later suffer. It seemed a solid bedrock kind of market and I was ready to try my hand at it. What I initially wanted to see was an actual comic book script so that I could know how to proceed.
And I finally got my hands on one. But not just any one. It was a partial script for a SWAMP THING issue by Alan Moore. Holy crap! That thing was dense! Moore used hundreds of words of script to describe a single panel! It was as if he was leaving almost nothing to the artists! Was this the way they were all done? Not only didn't I think I could produce a script like that, I didn't want to create that kind of script!
Over the course of the next few weeks I got my hands on other scripts by other professional comic book writers. And every one was different. No two of them was the same. One script that was given to me was written by J.M. DeMatteis (but Mr. DeMatteis says he never wrote in that style...so the artist must have mentioned the wrong name!). In that one (and I don't know how some of his other scripts looked) he used two words to describe five pages of action. The words? 'Everybody fights'. In that one, he was leaving almost everything up to the artist! (The artist on that script explained to me that the writer was using something called the Marvel Method, and he would go in and dialog everything once the story was basically told by the artist.) Man! I could do that!
While I was trying to figure out how to write a script, I sold my first story to a comic book anthology! That's right. I didn't yet know how to write a script--that is, I knew how some people did it, but I hadn't done one yet. And here I'd submitted several short stories to Steve Bissette's TABOO project, and Mr. Bissette had picked one for publication! I approached a comic artist I knew who was looking for work and asked if he wanted to do it. He did it and ended up doing the adaptation based on my story. I had decided to take a smaller cut of the pay rather than risk producing a lousy script. I wasn't ready to commit at that point and just let the artist cut the story down into panels.
But soon after that I sold another one and had written enough experimental script pages that I felt ready to tackle the job. I was pleased with the result and felt more confident about the format of scripting. Like every other writer out there, I was pretty much making up my own rules for scripting and making a go of it. It worked, and that's what mattered most. It certainly didn't look like one of Alan Moore's epic scripts, but it did the job.
After a few sales to TABOO and other smaller press publications (Fantaco and New Comics were two of
the publishers I'd sold to), Steve dropped my name to editor Dan Chichester at Marvel.
Chichester was editing the new CLIVE BARKER'S HELLRAISER book there and was actively looking for storytellers to team with artists. At Marvel you were expected to submit very brief pitches as stories and if the editor was interested he either agreed to let you have a go at a full script, or accepted the pitch as it was. However, I had two unsold short stories that I thought could be reworked into the Hellraiser mythos and asked Dan if it would be okay if I submitted those whole-cloth. He agreed, liked them, and soon I found myself having sold those, plus another pitch.
Feeling confident in my script-writing ability at that point, I got to to work and turned in the three scripts. Dan liked them, Marvel cut the checks, and I soon had the biggest payday of my fledgling career. I was making $50 a page for scripts. That was acceptable to me and I felt that, with my toe in the door, I could produce some pitches for some superhero books. Because that's where I really wanted to be. Writing Hellraiser yarns was cool...
But what I really wanted to do was write comics about Ben Grimm.
More, tomorrow.
Years and years ago I was knocking at the doors of various comic book publishers, trying to find employment selling comic book scripts. It was a tough job trying to get in the door, as most of the larger publishers were being run in a kind of professional nepotism between the editors who worked there. It was difficult to find an editor who didn't play by those sick incestuous rules.
But I did manage to place a script here and there. Most notable of these was a brief tenure at the Marvel Comics sub-imprint Epic Comics on the title CLIVE BARKER'S HELLRAISER. The editor had heard about me through, I think, Steve Bissette's TABOO anthology. I was asked if I'd be interested in writing short scripts based on the ideas presented in the movie HELLRAISER. I'd never seen it, so I had to go out and rent the two films that had appeared by that time. I found them to be silly, nihilistic, and...well, I didn't care for them.
However, the money for writing the scripts was quite good and I felt that I could find purchase in the original concept to create some stories. So I did that, presented them to the editor (Dan Chichester), and sold three scripts. Unfortunately, Chichester left his position as editor, was replaced by a member of the editorial circle-jerk, and the door closed.
But, as promised, the money was good. I even earned some nice royalty checks, as sales on the early issues were hefty. At the time, the comic book business was going great guns and Barker's name propelled some import among the geek community. But, the fad waned and the title eventually was canceled. I heard no more of it until someone told me that Marvel/Epic had come out with reprints of the books in limited hardcover editions. "Swell," I figured. "I'll be getting reprint checks." Alas, no. When I inquired as to why I would get no money for the reprinting of stories dreamed by me and written by me, I was told that the hardback reprints were "merchandise" and as such, only Marvel/Epic and New Line Cinema and perhaps Clive Barker himself were due any additional payments. I never received a dime, nor even a contributor's copy. Those went for about $50 each, as I recall.
I laugh. Painfully, but I laugh.
Fast-forward more years. The Hellraiser trope is dusty and tattered and only low-budget movie producers and twisted fanboys bother to recall it. One day I'm surfing the Internet and happen upon an outfit called Checker Books who are reprinting the HELLRAISER comics in trade paperback format. I search the site and discover an email address and write asking if there are plans to reprint any of my own stories and, if so, will I receive payment for such. An editor actually wrote back to me and hinted that, yes, they were thinking of reprinting at least one of my stories and, yes, they would "try" to pay reprint funds.
Fast-forward more years. They did indeed reprint at least one of my Hellraiser tales. No, I did not receive any money for that. When I search their website now, there is no listing for any way to get in touch with these folk.
Again, I laugh. Painfully, but I do manage a chuckle.
