Before Watchmen’s Straczynski addresses Babylon 5 comparisons

Addressing one of the more frequent reactions to his involvement in DC Comics’ newly announced Before Watchmen project, J. Michael Straczynski has tackled the question, “How would you feel if Babylon 5 was being done without your permission?” His answer is, well, a little complicated.

The writer, who’s penning Dr. Manhattan and Nite Owl for the sprawling prequel to the acclaimed 1986 miniseries by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, drew some criticism yesterday when he told Comic Book Resources, “A lot of folks feel that these characters shouldn’t be touched by anyone other than Alan, and while that’s absolutely understandable on an emotional level, it’s deeply flawed on a logical level. Based on durability and recognition, one could make the argument that Superman is the greatest comics character ever created. But neither Alan nor anyone else has ever suggested that no one other than Shuster and Siegel should ever be allowed to write Superman. Alan didn’t pass on being brought on to write Swamp Thing, a seminal comics character created by Len Wein, and he did a terrific job. He didn’t say ‘No, no, I can’t, that’s Len’s character.’ Nor should he have.”

That of course led more than a few people to ask how Straczynski, who created the 1990s space opera Babylon 5, would feel if someone else were to develop a sequel, or prequel — “Babylon 4″? — to the television series (a revival has been long hoped for by fans, but the writer denied rumors as recently as August that he’s in negotiations with Warner Bros.). To answer the question, which he characterizes as “How would you feel if Babylon 5 was being done without your permission?,” Straczynski took to his Facebook page last night, writing, “It’s a fair question, and it needs to be fairly answered … but it has to be an honest comparison, apples to apples, not apples to pomegranates.”

“First, we have to take the word ‘permission’ off the table. Warner Bros. owns Babylon 5 lock, stock and phased-plasma guns, just as DC owns the Watchmen characters. [...] But I get that we’re talking about the emotional aspect of all this, not the legal stuff, which is pretty cut and dry,” he wrote. “So again: apples to apples. How would I feel if Babylon 5 were being made and I were shut out of anything to do with it, despite my desire to be involved? I’d feel pretty crummy about it. But as it happens, that has absolutely nothing to do with this situation in any way, manner, shape or form.”

Referring to repeated unsuccessful attempts by DC to convince Moore to revisit Watchmen — the most recent was in 2010, when the publisher offered to relinquish the rights to the comic if the writer “would agree to some dopey prequels and sequels” — Straczynski said, “He declined at every point. Fair enough. It’s his choice, and it’s his right to make it.”

“So now – apples to apples – let’s make the B5 comparison,” he continued. “Let’s say Warner Bros. came to me and said, ‘we want to do more Babylon 5, and we want you to run the whole thing. We’ll pay you anything you want, give you a proper budget, and you will have complete creative freedom.’ [...] So let’s say that Warners makes that offer, and I said, ‘No, I don’t want it, take your accursed money, your big budget and your complete creative freedom and begone, get thee behind me Satan!’ Let’s say they came back and said ‘Okay, then how about we pay you vast sums of money just to consult? How about that?’ [...] ‘What if we sweeten the deal? What if we offer to give you full ownership of Babylon 5, legally and contractually, so you own it? How about that?’

“If Warners offered me creative freedom, money and a budget to do the show the way I wanted, up to and including my completely owning the show, and I said no to that deal, and if after Warners waited TWENTY FIVE YEARS for me to change my mind they finally decided to go ahead and make B5 without me … then I would have absolutely zero right to complain about it,” Straczynski wrote. “Because it was my choice to remove myself from the process, it wasn’t something foisted upon me by anybody else.”

He went on to address other related topics, such as the supposed “sacredness” and one-off nature of the characters, before concluding this morning in a separate post that, “At this point, quite honestly the work needs to stand on its own. So with equal appreciation for both the kind words and the hard questions, and having said pretty much everything I can think of to say on the subject, I think it’s appropriate for me to recede a bit now into the shadows. As the books come out I hope that everyone who spoke out here, pro and con, will reconvene to continue the conversation and express their thoughts with the same clarity and precision they have demonstrated today.”

Moore and Gibbons didn't count on Watchmen being extremely successful... So in effect, Moore screwed Moore. He didn't anticipate his own success.

Much of the belief that Moore and DC were burying the hatchet came when DC showed a videotape of Moore and Gibbons discussing Watchmen and Moore talking about the ABC line. The tape, according to DC, will be available for retailers to use in their stores to drum up interest in the Watchmen 15th anniversary hardcover. The book will most likely cost in the neighborhood of $100... ultimately, Moore is not happy with his participation in the project.

“They kind of got me to do a video for the San Diego convention which, it turns out, was under false pretenses,” Moore explains. “There were certain issues regarding the ABC books which I was waiting to be resolved, and where I thought I’d made it clear that the way in which they were resolved would have a direct bearing upon how I felt towards DC or towards anything DC proposed. A decision was delayed until after I’d done the video and all the rest of it, which, is about what I’d expect. If that has given a false impression to readers that I was back with DC, I apologize, but I was laboring under a false impression at the time.”

Otherwise, you can't really complain. Moore and Gibbons get just 8% of Watchmen profits and that's made them both very wealthy, in their own words.

Moore and Gibbons were not paid any royalties for a Watchmen spin-off badge set, as DC defined them as a "promotional item"

It should be pointed out that prior to Watchmen, no comic book stayed in print for long, and certainly not perpetually for decades on end. So it wasn't a case of Moore and Gibbons not thinking the book would be successful, but that they didn't anticipate it to be more successful than any other comic up to that point. So it's hard to blame Moore for not seeing that.

It's also hard to tell if there was any point where the sales dipped low enough that DC normally would've stopped printing the book, but kept it in print in order to retain rights. It's similar to the Corman Fantastic Four movie, which was made just to retain the movie rights, and was never intended to be released. Major companies will take a loss in the short term if they know it will profit them in the long run.

I do think that if Moore didn't feel so ripped off by DC, he would've been more open to other contributions, and even may have penned Watchmen related stuff himself. Still, DC has acted like giant dicks in working with Moore.
From:
http://web.archive.org/web/200812161...threadid=34286

They basically conned him into doing the Watchmen 15th Anniversary video, implying doing so would resolve an issue with another comic, and then after he did the video, didn't give him anything.

And if all anyone ever cared about was money, that'd be fine. That said, Moore didn't get any of the profits from the Watchmen movie because he didn't want to be associated with. I'm betting he won't take any money from these prequels either.

And there's this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Mo...3.E2.80.931988

Labeling merchandise as a promotional item so they didn't have to pay the creators is a dick move.

“I wanted to do a 20th-anniversary story, and it broke mostly because DC Comics would have loved me to do a 20th-anniversary story at the same terms that were agreed upon in 1987, when I was a 26-year-old unknown,” Gaiman said to Jam! Showbiz. “And my thought was, ‘You know what, guys, it really doesn’t work like that.’ I wasn’t going to do a deal at the same terms we had in 1987, and they were not willing to do any better than that.”

Whether it was a success, or whether DC would have just crapped out 100 re-prints of it every 12 months, the contract language, from everything that is known, was plain and unambiguous. Whether by success or whether by shady business practices, Moore should have seen this as a possibility, even if unprecedented for the time.

As far as Watchmen goes, he got rich off it, so again, he can't really complain just because his contract backfired on him.

I'm not condoning the fact that DC let this happen, but there is more to it than DC is a big faceless company that's just out to screw Moore.

You're right, he can't complain, if all he cared about was money. He obviously doesn't care about the money, as evidenced by him rejecting money he has every right to from projects he's in no power to stop. Obviously he's upset about something beyond just how much money he's made.

I'm sure there's good people at DC. However, DC's dealings with Moore over the years, whether or not the fault of a revolving door of "bad eggs" at the company, have been almost universally bad, so it's not surprising that Moore has developed a negative view of the company.

Also in "Prince Of Stories" is mention of the 20th Anniversary Sandman project that never was. First brought to light by LITG, Gaiman gives a lot more details on what it was and why he never reached agreement with DC.

The six issue mini-series would have been a prequel to the Sandman series, centred around exactly what Morpheus was doing and how he came to be captured for half a century, as detailed in the first issue of the fantasy comic series.

It didn't happen because DC wouldn't agree to pay Neil Gaiman something comparable to what he might get for the same amount of time working on a novel. Gaiman stated, "I get a fifteen percent royalty and an incredibly healthy advance, I did ‘Sandman: Endless Nights’ as my charity project; ‘Sandman: Endless Nights’ was a favor to Karen [Berger], it was done at the four percent royalty I've had since the beginning, for a twenty-thousand-dollar advance, and I found the time, I fitted it in and I just did it. It got them onto the New York Times bestseller list for the first time ever."

With more time pressure this time, and the realization that Vertigo couldn't pay a million dollar advance, he suggested that DC instead up his royalty rate on the entire Sandman line by another two percent. Which, over sixteen years, would have made Neil the same amount as what a novel would have. DC offered that increased royalty rate over eighteen months. Neil refused to drop his request. DC declined the project on those terms.

Neil also points out that he makes more from a sale of a hardcover $20 copy of a novel such as "Anansi Boys" that on each sale of the $100 "Absolute Sandman" volumes. So instead of writing a Sandman six issue series, he wrote a new novel instead. Which he owns completely.