Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Wes Molebash on Zuda

ComicMix ran an interview with Web cartoonist Wes Molbash written by Rick Marshall.

Wes is an established Web cartoonist. He's drawn You'll Have That, a Web comic strip, for four years. I don't know if that brings in a living income for him. He decided to produce a new comic strip, The Litterbox Chronicles, for the DC Comics-run Zuda Web site.

Zuda demands all rights. Wes knows that he would lose his ownership of the cartoon he created.

Here are 2 paragraphs from the interview:

"I was listening to an interview with Kevin Grevioux, the guy who wrote the film Underworld, and they're interviewing him when the sequel came out, Underworld: Evolution. They asked him how much involvement he had in the sequel and he said he had no involvement in that movie. For the first movie, he didn't even have an agent. He basically threw it away. And they were like, 'Wow. Why did you do that?' And he told them something like, 'Well, the first project you have to throw away. You have to do it and you're probably going to get screwed, but at least you get your name out there.'

"And this did end up opening a lot of doors for him. Now he's writing comic books and he has a pretty good career screenwriting, even though he's probably not making the money off Underworld that he should have with that project. But because he didn't have a name before that project, he kind of got the shaft. That's how I'm feeling about this."

I think that if you want to give away all your rights, then it's your decision. If you truly believe that you have no option than to sign away your work, then that's your business.

But telling people "you have to do it ..." was dreadful.

There are fans who look up to the level of success that Wes has achieved. Some of them might be cartoonists one day. They need to know that it's not true.

You can make better, more informed choices.

Good luck to Wes. I don't know you, but I hope it all works out in the way you imagined.

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