Colleen Doran Puts a Burr Under My Saddle

Mark Evanier posted this interview with writer and artist Colleen Doran. I don't know Ms. Doran and have only passing familiarity with her work, but she says two or three things in this short piece I found very interesting. If you've got five minutes, take a look then come back . . .



Mark described Colleen as an artist with unusual business acumen, which I think comes across. One of her points is the importance of a creative person understanding that his or her work has value. People who recognize that value more than the artist does will try to take advantage of it. It happens all the time. I know people who've made bad agreements in good faith and lost money, opportunities, or the right to work on or profit from their own creations.

A corallary of knowing your rights and what your work is worth is being willing to walk away from a bad deal. I think that can be tremendously hard to do. This may be the only offer you get! You'll rationalize that a bad deal is better than none--that getting your work into the world in any fashion is better than having it sit unseen in your drawer. I don't think so. Nothing will make you more miserable later than being stuck in a bad contract with exploitive jerks. (I emphasize I'm drawing lessons from the experience of friends, and haven't felt exploited myself. My dealings with my publisher and freelance clients have been respectful and fair.)

Colleen also touches on the economics of the Digital Age, our glorious "Information Should Be Free" era in which people would rather read Doran's work pirated on BitTorrent than on her website--where the content is already available free!--thus denying her the pennies in advertising revenue she would've gotten. I can't tell you how much this mindset of entitlement sticks in my craw, and the harm I foresee it doing to the creative arts.

Here's where I stand on that: Creators' rights are important. Copyright is important. I created something. It was hard work. It took a lot of time. Without me, it wouldn't exist. I get to decide if my work is best presented on paper, pixels, shadow puppets, or theater-in-the-round. If I want to give it away free, fine. If my publisher and I set a cover price of $14.95 or $24.95, you can pay it or not if you think it's worth it or not. Those are your only ethical choices. Downloading a copy that someone scanned without my permission is not an ethical choice. It is not the behavior of someone who professes to be a fan.

It's not about the money. I'm thrilled when people loan my books to friends or check them out of libraries. I think "Great, another reader!" not "Rats, another lost sale!" It's about respect. When you take my stuff, you're telling me it's literally worthless. I disagree. We may have a legitimate argument about whether it's worth $14.95 or $24.95, but it's not worthless.

A peripheral discussion comes up a lot in webcomic circles, where many cartoonists offer their comics for free and earn their living through advertising and product sales, sometimes derided as "selling mousepads and t-shirts." This is championed as the 21st-century business model that we'd better darn well get used to. Get on board or get left behind. It works for some people and I'm happy for them. What irks me is its fundamental assumption that the work itself--the writing and art that lures readers to the site so their eyeballs can be captured by ads--has no intrinsic value except as bait. There's something wrong with that.

What has more value than an idea no one has ever expressed in quite the same way? A story no one has told before? A character you'll never forget? Information you didn't know but which will enrich the rest of your life? A genuine laugh or tear? How much more valuable are "Macbeth" or "Starry Night" than a t-shirt or mug of the same?

It's an upside-down world, brother.

I've got no beef with someone who wants to give away their work, for whatever reason. When I serialized my Mom's Cancer webcomic it was free, with no advertising or product placement. I wanted my story to be read, and the Internet offered the easiest, cheapest way to present it to the world. I trusted that if readers thought the story was good, then good things would come from it. I was lucky; they did. That was an emotional and artistic choice rather than a business decision (it almost by definition couldn't have been a business decision, since no money was involved). The key is that it was my choice.

But I'm a writer, not a t-shirt salesman. I want to make words and pictures and stories that other people think are worth $14.95 or $24.95 or whatever price might earn enough that I can afford to make more. If I can't come up with material that's worth something to someone, I don't deserve to be in the business. Why would anybody with an ounce of self respect set out to create stuff they believe is worthless? Why would anybody read it?

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Whatever Happened to the Comedy Album?

I woke up this morning suddenly aware that a big piece of culture had slipped away without me noticing: comedy albums. I don't know why I woke up with that on my mind, but I did (I also woke up this morning calculating the Earth's mass in my head . . . just checked, I was only off by a factor of three, which I consider pretty darn order-of-magnitude close).

Karen, when I get that faraway look in my eyes, this is where I go. Sorry. Love 'ya.

In my teens, it wasn't unusual to get together with friends and listen to comedy albums. I remember doing it in the family room of a good friend in junior high; I remember doing it with 15 people crammed into a college dorm room. Does anyone still do that? Or does it sound as antique and exotic as a malt-shop sock hop to someone under 35 or 40? Or was I just hanging out with freaks and weirdos all along (a real possibility)?

My prime comedy listening years were pretty much the 1970s, though I heard and appreciated material from before my time. In the mid-'70s, San Francisco AM radio station KSFO had a wonderful block of nighttime programming. As I recall, the evening started at 8 p.m. with Radio Mystery Theater, which broadcast modern original dramas. At 9 p.m. came old programs from the 1930s through '50s, a rotating mix of classic dramas such as "The Shadow" and comics like Fred Allen and Jack Benny, as well as occasional obscurities. Then at 10 p.m. came comedy, hosted by D.J. John Gilliland, and oh was that terrific! All the great stuff from the '50s and '60s. There were probably a good two or three years there where I disappeared into my room after dinner every night to listen to old radio programs and cuts from comedy albums. Most parents of teenage boys worry about them because they don't know what they're up to; I imagine now how my parents must've worried about me because they did know.



On top of that were comedy albums that friends and I bought, shared, swapped. A terrific mix of old and new. I loved Bob Newhart's button-down mind, both Bill Cosby's high-concept and well-observed family stuff, Allan Sherman, Nichols and May, Spike Jones. Tom Lehrer. Monty Python put out some albums that played with the vinyl medium as much as their films and television programs played with theirs. I knew a girl in junior high whose parents were so cool they let her play George Carlin loud! Richard Pryor. And poor Bill Dana . . . Mr. Dana came out of the Danny Thomas-Spike Jones-Steve Allen school of comedy and had the misfortune to play a dim-witted character named Jose Jimenez just when it became obviously wrong to do so. When I was 13, I didn't know Jose Jimenez was racist; I just thought he was very funny. (Mr. Dana later retired the character with apologies and received an Image Award from the National Hispanic Media Coalition.)





Comedy wasn't just an obscure niche of the recording industry. "The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart" was Number One on the Billboard pop chart in 1960, ahead of Elvis Presley. The last comedy album I'm aware of having a significant cultural impact was Steve Martin's "Wild and Crazy Guy" from 1978, which hit Number Two on the album charts and went double platinum. Everybody had it. Looking over the list of Grammy winners, I don't see much in the 32 years (!) since: some Weird Al, PDQ Bach (which I love), Chris Rock, welcome little blips from veterans like Carlin, Jonathan Winters, and Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, and a new generation rising with Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. Some good work, but nothing explosive and universal. Certainly nothing I can imagine college freshman huddling around an mp3 player listening to.

Is that it, then? Is the comedy album a relic? Cable television doubtlessly stole a lot of their steam; whereas Bill Cosby put out at least one record a year between 1963 and 1973, today someone like Lewis Black produces HBO or Comedy Central specials at the same rate. Then there's the obvious fragmenting of culture, so that you and I could go our whole lives unexposed to each other's artistic and entertainment touchstones.

Maybe I'm becoming a cranky old coot (check that: I know I'm becoming a cranky old coot, I'm just not sure whether it applies to this issue), but it seems like something valuable has been lost. Something communal, some secret clubhouse conjuring the theater of the mind. It's hard to put a finger on it. I didn't even notice it'd gone missing until this morning.

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Great new word of the day: Pleonastic. It means repetitive or redundant (perhaps like that definition itself). Work it into a conversation.

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