Copyright? Or Copywrong?: Epilogue
Sunday morning, shortly after I posted the last conversation, Thomas J. Foster replied one more time. The tone of the e-mail was civil and thoughtful and lacked the beautiful, colorful language of his earlier missives. In it, to his credit, he takes the time to acknowledge the source of my ill will. But let’s let him speak for himself. Here you go, the last word from Thomas J. Foster:
“I do now finally understand your point, Jeremiah. However, I do feel there is a gigantic piece of the puzzle missing from the table here. It may change your mind, it may not, and your are right to suppose that it doesn't matter.
First of all, I understand your desire to be acknowledged as a part of what's happened. You would deserve it far more than Bill McCoy, the first artist to work on the project. You were far more talented, interested, and dedicated to the overall scope and purpose of the comic.
”When we broke ways (in a fevered period when we did believe the Book had a chance of catching a ride on the zeitgeist) we employed several artists in an effort to remain timely. Ultimately we fell into a happy arrangement with Takis Simon (now the artist for the comic for five years). I suppose that our bad feelings between each other denied us a mutual dialog about what that meant and has helped create this emotional schism. We wanted to to whatever we could to help Takis creatively. That meant, to him and to us, allowing him to draw the book His way, to give him a chance to brand the book himself, as much as time and money allowed. We let him redo issues #1 and #2 (even #3, but that's a much longer story). Given unlimited resources, we would have him redraw #4 and #5, in order to satisfy the concept of artistic unity and artistic ego. I hope you understand that we would have understood your feelings if we'd stayed together, yet had an issue drawn by an outside artist. It's like a marriage, and the wife is never going to like who you slept with in the past. I am sorry to say it, but to Takis (and to us, fairly) you were and are, the ex.
“Please know that, beyond surface-type angry reactions to unfair forum posts, Ron and I hold no ill will towards you. It was what it was. Hopefully we can agree to denigrate each other no longer in public forums. Perhaps further communication can help to fill the larger picture, which to me is one of artists trying, always trying, to do the best work they can and finding the best situation for their efforts to shine.
One last note for this missive: Ron and I are under no delusion that Warner Brothers deliberately stole our concepts. However, our "harping" has a right and a place. The design for our first collection of issues, from logo to font to tagline has been "in the market" (such as the case may be; it is or was on shelves of comic book stores from New Jersey to California) since 2005. For a major movie company to launch an ad campaign (largely targeting comic book fans) with such a direct combination of similarities might be coincidental, but it is certainly lazy and technically theft. If anything, we deserve some publicity from this 'stunt'.
“Best,
“Thomas”
That’s their last word. Mine is "hindsight." See, early on in our partnership, they had informed me that I was the second Book of Jesse artist. The original, they had told me disparagingly, couldn't work at the pace they demanded. Looking on it now, that kind of thing is all-too-familiar, and nowhere is that more evident than is his marriage/dating allegory. To expand on this (and thus run the risk of being attacked by a facebook group), think to back when you were dating, and you meet someone who complains bitterly about an ex or two, and then months or years later, you're the ex they're complaining bitterly to someone about. Seeing them so effusively gaga about their current significant other (Takis Simon) truly is heartbreaking. "What about all the good times," I ask, "when you said you loved my drawings? Did out time together mean nothing?"
At the end of the day all of this does mean nothing. Any last scrap of my art will have been removed from their site, and no doubt by now I am no longer on the Third Party Politics mailing list, so I won't have to delete anymore of their messages. If Thomas’s sudden empathy extends beyond the reach of a private e-mail and into a brief acknowledgement on the website, I’ll never know because I have no intention of visiting their page again. Instead, I will return to my life full of my own challenges, and Ron and Thomas will return to their own corner of the universe where their genius is so absolute that the Warner Brothers and the Hughes Brothers (and one day, god willing, maybe even the Wachowski Brothers) blatantly rip them off because they are so darned brilliant with their eighteen issues of their comic that they've published over the past six years. (Which, subtracting six months for the time I worked on the book, comes out to about one comic for every three and a third months, which is, amusingly enough, the rate at which I, the infamous deadline-flaunter, produced. Enjoy that victory there, guys.)
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "If this means nothing, then why has Jeremiah written so much about it this past couple of weeks? Why did he register at Bleeding Cool just so he could visit an insignificant forum and leave a pointless comment that said, essentially, 'Ditto.' And if it truly means nothing at all, then why did he take the time to calculate the average length of time between issues?"
I did that last bit because it was childish and snarky and made me feel really fucking smug. The rest was inspired by the sheer audacity of their campaign which, if you read the early comments in the aforementioned forum, wasn't particularly convincing. And, as you can read for yourself, the whole campaign was really as cynical and self-promoting as I had initially thought it was.
Most importantly, I feel I should probably mention that this isn’t dating or marriage, and I’m not an ex. I was an employee who lived and breathed their company for over six months, only to be kicked to the curb and ignored as soon as the opportunity presented itself. For all their self-righteousness about being the little guy who hates big-business, they have more in common with Time-Warner than they think: they are both so viciously overprotective of what's theirs that they are completely blind to the fact that they would not have theirs without the people who gave them a hand; all the while hiding behind the legality of their actions. In short, they, like the red-state America they routinely mock, don't believe in sharing. The only difference between Third Party Politics and Time-Warner is that Time-Warner makes a profit.
So fuck you, Third Party Politics, and fuck your condescending bullshit.
Let me state one final time, in writing, that they technically owe me nothing. All of the characters in the Book of Jesse are the legal and intellectual property of Ronald Morgan and Thomas J. Foster. They created everything and deserve all of the credit for making their dream a reality, albeit a distorted reality where they can pretend that a mediocre artist didn't spend six months busting his ass and doing his best work for almost no guarantee of payment. Not that I am bitter.
Fuck that, I am a little bitter. But then I think that someone, somewhere, read something a friend (who is not my wife) wrote in my defense, forcing this someone to bellow into the computer, "You are a blowhard, sir, and a coward!" And then the bitterness dissolves.
Also, there's this.