The respective values and interests of legendary writer Alan Moore and corporate publisher DC Comics had clashed again and again in the many years since Moore had transformed Swamp Thing and created Watchmen, but despite a public disavowal of the company, he had found himself back in the belly of the beast when DC purchased WildStorm, publisher of Moore's America's Best Comics line. Earlier this year, Moore announced himself so desperate to sever the strings that bound him to DC and its corporate cousin Warner Bros., that he would bring to an end all ABC titles except the creator-owned League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and would turn his back on hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties potentially coming to him for movies adapted from his work. He directed instead that his portion of such royalties be divided between the other creators who had worked with him on a given comic book. Why make such a sacrifice? "I felt it was the only way people would take notice," he told the Journal. "It seemed to me it was the sort of thing that should be expressed in the strongest terms possible."

Moore's refusal to share in the proceeds of movies drawn from his work is an unprecedented gesture in these times when many comics creators have no higher goal than to reap a share of Hollywood profits. Meanwhile, Moore's longtime friend, the equally legendary Neil Gaiman, was awaiting the imminent release of Mirrormask, an original movie resulting from the close collaboration of Gaiman, Dave McKean and the Jim Henson Studios. At the same time, Gaiman's new prose novel was just about to come out from HarperCollins. As a comics writer, he is no longer as prolific as he once was, but for much of his career, he has been a busy bee in the comics-industry garden, flitting between Marvel, Dark Horse, Image and, especially, DC Comics, where his Sandman series had a profound impact. "It's fair to say that DC has always treated me incredibly well," Gaiman told the Journal.

Moore and Gaiman have much in common: two British-born writers whose complex and literary themes have expanded the comic book's aesthetic range and pointed the way toward a serious graphic-novel readership. And yet each has had decidedly different experiences with corporate American comics.

The Big Two corporations of the American comics industry, Marvel and DC, have, for better or for worse, established the template for the way the art of comics interacts with the commerce of comics and have set the bar for what the general public expects of the comics form. There are, of course, other templates, represented by small-press and alternative comic publishers like Top Shelf and the increasingly bookstore-focused Fantagraphics Books (publisher of The Comics Journal), which allow comics creators to retain ownership of their work. But what the general public knows of the comics industry is largely based on corporate-owned properties created as work for hire by writers and artists according to assembly-line methods. However much their writing may have been a radical departure from most corporate comics, both Moore and Gaiman are writers, as opposed to cartoonists, which means the corporate factory system (which joins writers with artists, inkers, letterers, colorists and editors) is, to a degree, conducive to their work. In any event, most of their comics work was done in that corporate environment.

Last year saw the release of a documentary called The Corporation by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan and a related book by Bakan called The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. The idea of the both the book and movie was to start from the corporation's status and rights under the law as a "person" and ask what kind of a person a corporation would be. To answer the question, the author and filmmakers applied diagnostic criteria from the World Health Organization and the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual to develop a personality profile of the typical corporation. Based on the exercise's results, a corporation is not somebody you would want to have over for dinner. List of traits: 1) Callous unconcern for the feelings of others; 2) Incapacity to experience guilt; 3) Reckless disregard for the safety of others; 4) Deceitfulness: Repeated lying and conning others for profit; 5) Failure to conform to social norms; 6) Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships. After adding it all up, Bakan concluded the corporation is a psychopath.

But are all corporations alike? Is the comics industry the same as, say, the oil industry, the insurance industry, the book-publishing industry or the movie industry? Instances of the comics industry endangering anybody's safety don't come immediately to mind, unless you count Fredric Wertham's contention that the comics industry was turning the nation's youth into violent delinquents. Glimpses of most of the others, however, are likely to be seen in the following case histories -- especially the incapacity to maintain enduring relationships.

[To read the rest of this story, please see The Comics Journal #271.]

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