Might be The Lawyers Among Us soon.
Yesterday Bill Willingham, creator of the Fables and The Wolf Among Us comic series, made a lengthy post on his Substack. The gist of it was, at 67 and not possessed of the resources of a multi-billion dollar corporation backing a significantly less-than-profitable comics publisher, he couldn’t fight to get the rights to his work back. According to his post, the original deal was a creator-owned publishing contract, and one of the few non-negotiable parts of the contract are that he could, as the sole owner of the IP, sell or give it away to whomever he so chose.
As of now, 15 September 2023, the comic book property called Fables, including all related Fables spin-offs and characters, is now in the public domain. What was once wholly owned by Bill Willingham is now owned by everyone, for all time. It’s done, and as most experts will tell you, once done it cannot be undone. Take-backs are neither contemplated nor possible.
Bill Willingham
And so he decided to release these IPs to the public domain. part of his reasoning is below:
1) Practicality: When I first signed my creator-owned publishing contract with DC Comics, the company was run by honest men and women of integrity, who (for the most part) interpreted the details of that agreement fairly and above-board. When problems inevitably came up we worked it out, like reasonable men and women. Since then, over the span of twenty years or so, those people have left or been fired, to be replaced by a revolving door of strangers, of no measurable integrity, who now choose to interpret every facet of our contract in ways that only benefit DC Comics and its owner companies. At one time the Fables properties were in good hands, and now, by virtue of attrition and employee replacement, the Fables properties have fallen into bad hands.
Bill Willingham
Since I can’t afford to sue DC, to force them to live up to the letter and the spirit of our long-time agreements; since even winning such a suit would take ridiculous amounts of money out of my pocket and years out of my life (I’m 67 years old, and don’t have the years to spare), I’ve decided to take a different approach, and fight them in a different arena, inspired by the principles of asymmetric warfare. The one thing in our contract the DC lawyers can’t contest, or reinterpret to their own benefit, is that I am the sole owner of the intellectual property. I can sell it or give it away to whomever I want.
I chose to give it away to everyone. If I couldn’t prevent Fables from falling into bad hands, at least this is a way I can arrange that it also falls into many good hands. Since I truly believe there are still more good people in the world than bad ones, I count it as a form of victory.
As the rest of the post goes, he’s had nothing but issues with DC: royalty concerns, agreement violations ownership issues. This led to him warning the company of this exact eventuality months prior. While he loved creating these series, his views on copyright and trademarks have changed over the past 20 years. This move is, essentially, his test of these new views.
DC, however, is obviously not taking this sitting down. They’ve published their own statement on the matter:
The Fables comic books and graphic novels published by DC, and the storylines, characters, and elements therein, are owned by DC and protected under the copyright laws of the United States and throughout the world in accordance with applicable law and are not in the public domain,” the statement reads. “DC reserves all rights and will take such action as DC deems necessary or appropriate to protect its intellectual property rights.
There’s no real telling where things are going next. That said, it’s a bit odd that they’re trying to protect rights that supposedly didn’t have in the first place, right? Kinda seems like overreach to me.
Source: SuperHeroHype
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