Creator Rights OR Platinum Sucks
Jul. 7th, 2008 09:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hertinknessI haven't blogged about it here, but you can't be my friend if you don't like at least one comic, dead tree version or otherwise. And the comic that you should be saddest about right now is the late, great Hero By Night.
Hero By Night was created by DJ Coffman. I can't do the story justice by trying to summarize it, but it was a tale of a second-generation not-quite-willing-or-ready superhero, Jack, who has found the ring and old gear of the former Hero By Night, David Day. The tale is set in a fictionalized Pittsburgh (one of my favorite damn cities on earth, thankyouverymuch) called Steel City, but if you've ever set foot in Pittsburgh, you'd recognize it as such in less than two panels.
DJ took this story to the Comic Book Challenge and won a contract to do the comic through Platinum. This worked out well- for a few months. Then Platinum stopped paying him, so he had to put the non-paying job on hold so that he wouldn't lose his shirt. Fans of the comic were asking him why he had put HBN on hiatus, and he was honest with them.
You can guess what happens next, right?
Yeah, they guys at Platinum don't like DJ so much anymore. And while the bastards* finally paid him, they retain the rights to HBN, which means he can't do anything with it, including continue the story that was REALLY STARTING TO GET GOOD!
All of this makes me a rather Angry Geologist. But wait! There's more!
The HBN Webcomic on Drunk Duck has been... compromised. The last three pages of the new book that DJ posted have disappeared into the aether along with the comments posted on them, leaving just the last page of Issue 4. DJ also informed on his blog that he is locked out of the account.
You know what, frak all of Platinum. The staff might know a good thing if it bit them on the ass, but they don't know how to hold onto it. And because they just bought Wowio, I'm no longer getting anything through that- I'm going to give them as little of my money as possible for frakking over one of the better independent creators.
*DJ, if you somehow manage to stumble onto my little blog, I'm sorry dude. I know you wanted to put this behind you, but... it's my blog, and they're still bastards.
Hero By Night was created by DJ Coffman. I can't do the story justice by trying to summarize it, but it was a tale of a second-generation not-quite-willing-or-ready superhero, Jack, who has found the ring and old gear of the former Hero By Night, David Day. The tale is set in a fictionalized Pittsburgh (one of my favorite damn cities on earth, thankyouverymuch) called Steel City, but if you've ever set foot in Pittsburgh, you'd recognize it as such in less than two panels.
DJ took this story to the Comic Book Challenge and won a contract to do the comic through Platinum. This worked out well- for a few months. Then Platinum stopped paying him, so he had to put the non-paying job on hold so that he wouldn't lose his shirt. Fans of the comic were asking him why he had put HBN on hiatus, and he was honest with them.
You can guess what happens next, right?
Yeah, they guys at Platinum don't like DJ so much anymore. And while the bastards* finally paid him, they retain the rights to HBN, which means he can't do anything with it, including continue the story that was REALLY STARTING TO GET GOOD!
All of this makes me a rather Angry Geologist. But wait! There's more!
The HBN Webcomic on Drunk Duck has been... compromised. The last three pages of the new book that DJ posted have disappeared into the aether along with the comments posted on them, leaving just the last page of Issue 4. DJ also informed on his blog that he is locked out of the account.
You know what, frak all of Platinum. The staff might know a good thing if it bit them on the ass, but they don't know how to hold onto it. And because they just bought Wowio, I'm no longer getting anything through that- I'm going to give them as little of my money as possible for frakking over one of the better independent creators.
*DJ, if you somehow manage to stumble onto my little blog, I'm sorry dude. I know you wanted to put this behind you, but... it's my blog, and they're still bastards.
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Date: 2008-07-08 04:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-09 01:48 am (UTC)Every now and then I take a look on Monster to see if something has opened up.