Art and Letters Links
on February 15th, 2010Stan Lee is being sued by a law firm for non-payment:
Lee, 87, former chairman of Marvel Comic, comic book writer, editor, actor, producer is facing a heavy lawsuit for money over due to Lavely & Singer.
One lawyer from the firm claims that Lee refused to pay them for legal works that was done for him since 2007 for his creations of Spider-Man and X-Men.
Former Pirate Bay scalawag looks into micropayment scheme.
“The money you pay each month will be spread evenly among the buttons you click in a month,” said Peter Sunde.
“We want to encourage people to share money as well as content,” Mr Sunde told BBC News. “It’s a test to see if this might be a working method for real micropayments.”
The price of a “free” web is your privacy. NO, we do not collect or sell info at my websites. I wouldn’t know how, anyway.
Every day Google gathers millions of search terms that help them refine their search system and give them a direct marketing bonanza that they keep for months.
Every week Facebook receives millions of highly personal status updates that are kept forever and are forming the basis of direct advertising revenue.
Every month free newspapers plant and track a cookie tracking device on your computer that tells them what your range of interests are and allows them to shape their adverts and in the future, even content around you.
So you’re not just being watched, you’re being traded. The currency has changed.
It costs THIS MUCH to run the supposedly free, information-wants-to-be-free-so-lets-not-pay-the-people-who-work-to-provide-the-content internet:
BusinessWeek’s Spencer Ante got ahold of Digg’s financial statements. They are frightful, even for a startup. Last year, the company took in $4.8 million and spent $7.6 million, for a loss of $2.8 million. In the first nine months of this year, losses grew almost as fast as revenues: Digg took in $6.4 million and spent $10.4 million, resulting in a $4 million loss. At an annual clip, that’s more than $5 million out the door a year.
And sad financial news at YouTube:
According a recent report by analysts at the financial-services company Credit Suisse, Google will lose $470 million on the video-sharing site this year alone. To put it another way, the Boston Globe, which is on track to lose $85 million in 2009, is five times more profitable—or, rather, less unprofitable—than YouTube.
Enjoying the taste of all that free? Isn’t it yummy.
Old news. Wow, I need to clean up my system.
A boo-hoo blogger scammed thousands of readers with a story about a terminally ill baby.
She is actually Beccah Beushausen, a 26-year-old social worker from the Chicago suburb of Mokenka who says she didn’t know how to free herself from the web of lies she wove.
“Soon I was getting 100,000 hits a week, and it just got out of hand,” she told the Tribune. “I didn’t know how to stop. … One lie led to another.”
Novelist/jockey Dick Francis dead at 89. This article covers the Grand National loss that led him to a writing career. Also, interesting tidbits about who may have been the talent behind the bestsellers:
Mary was a crucial part of the thriller-writing ‘team’. Although partly paralysed by polio and suffering chronic asthma and bronchitis, she researched all the books – in the process becoming a computer expert, photographer, accountant, painter and wine buff, even qualifying as a pilot for the book Flying Finish…
In 1980, Mary told me: ‘Yes, Dick would like me to have all the credit for them, but believe me, it’s much better for everyone, including the readers, to think that he writes them because they’re taut, masculine books that might otherwise lose their credibility.’
…Mail on Sunday reported that Mary was ‘evasive when asked bluntly whether she is the true author.
She said equivocally, “It is not exactly true to say that I write Dick’s books … I could get him to write you a letter and you would see he can write”. The amount of sharing we do is, to my mind, sort of private. We would really like people not to press us too hard on this”.’
This looks like junk science to me, but what the heck. A study of a handful of people seems to indicate that exposure to luxury makes people greedy. Because, yeah, after one Chanel suit, I confess I want two.
“Results . . . suggest that when primed with luxury, people endorsed self-interested decisions that could potentially harm others,” the researchers said in the study.
“Luxury-primed individuals tend to make decisions that are self-interested and arguably unethical.”
holy cow, Dick Francis. I read those in my mystery reading days, after I’d finished every Agatha Christie and went looking for more like it. My mom recommended him, and she was right, it had a similar “feel” to it. Little did I know that these, too, were written by world-educated Englishwomen XD
No wonder he hated the fame he got from the books. It wasn’t his to begin with. Now there’s a twist ending.
While Dick Francis and his wife obviously got along fine with their arrangement, it does bring to mind that Keane Kids article I wrote awhile back:
http://adistantsoil.com/2009/01/29/keane-kids-and-kawaii-manga/
There must be many instances of women ghosting work for their men, or more precisely, having their work co-opted by men.
I think men are far more likely to take credit for work they didn’t do than women are. A de minimus contribution (or no contribution at all, just proximity) will be conflated to a collaboration in two minutes with some guys. That’s been my experience, anyway.
I can see that — “I talked with Colleen Doran at a con for two minutes years ago – therefore I’m co-creator of A DISTANT SOIL!”
Yah, no. But I can see some guys trying to pull that sort of thing. In fact, I HAVE seen guys try it. In my life, I could usually beat them up, so they don’t try it with me, but….
The Keane thing was the first thing that came to my mind as well. Criminy :-/
LOL! Well, not quite that bad.
Here are some true terror tales:
You’ve seen my meticulous pencils. Be prepared to hear male inkers lie through their teeth about how LITTLE the LITTLE WOMAN did and how MUCH the big strong MALE INKER did to bring that pic to pro quality, because we all know chicks can’t draw. This has happened to me repeatedly. I haven’t worked with an inker since 2003, and while I would gladly work with a few inkers again, I would even more gladly throw most of them under a train.
Male who does absolutely NOTHING but paste on tone sheets and spend no more than a few hours spotting blacks, brags to everyone in earshot that he has worked with me for YEARS, and that he and I write and draw comics TOGETHER. Alas, he did this within my earshot. Bye, dude.
Male background ink assistant claims to all that he draws all my backgrounds and does ALL my designs, going so far as to put MY work from A Distant Soil in his portfolio. I did almost ALL of the background inks IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Turns out he barely touched the parts of the book he did work on, he actually hired other people to help ink my backgrounds. I am not at all sure the dude did anything. I later re-inked the whole shebang, so in the end he did nothing. I no longer see A Distant Soil on the resume at his website.
Absolutely broke dude I allowed to sell some of my work for me at shows so he could earn a few extra bucks from a percentage of sale announces to everyone in sight that he is my agent, manager and boyfriend. None of the above. I even found EIGHT PAGES about me on his website, including an entire page of instruction about how to get commissions through him from me. Claimed to everyone in earshot he supported me, made all my travel arrangements, made every decision for me.
Not only also none of the above, but the dude was so broke, that I think in the last few years I knew him, he was virtually incapable of ponying up for lunch.
Found out all of the above via emails he sent to third parties. Oh yeah, and it’s the same dude who was writing an unauthorized bio of me, which was especially funny because he bragged to his correspondent that he had never even read my work. Ha Ha.
The good news, all was years ago. The bad news, I went through this sort thing repeatedly.
I think I can spot them coming now, but dang.
You should work with more English gentlemen.I don’t see anything wrong with him showing samples of inked work if he did the work.What’s this keane business?
I don’t have a problem with people showing samples of work they did, I have a problem with people showing samples of work they did not do.
He did not do the work.
He claimed he had created my space ship designs, for example. He did not.
One background on a single panel was partially inked by a lady named Tracy J Sommerall. He put that page in his portfolio and claimed he did it all himself. He did not.
He claimed he had done figure inking. He did not.
I did more than 99.9% of ALL the inks on A Distant Soil – foregrounds and background. PERIOD. By MYSELF. I have not allowed anyone to do anything on A Distant Soil for any reason since 1987, except to help spot blacks and paste tone sheets. My mother does that, and she does not run around claiming to be an inker.
I do not conflate credits and I won’t go anywhere near people who do. We have a simple word for that behavior.
Lying.
As I clearly state, he didn’t do the work. And he cruelly stole the credits from people who DID. Including me.
English gentlemen…um, OK. I don’t believe I made mention of the nationalities of anyone I have dealt with in this post, but I don’t think it’s relevant.
The Keane business is discussed in the link in the second comment.
And BTW, another person this fake assistant dude ripped off for pay and credit was named Sonneson, and I have an extensive correspondence with him and several other people who got rooked by assistant dude.
For the assistant did not pay the assistants who actually did the work.
And one day I was at a convention and they all showed up trying to get me to pay them, even though I had never heard of them and had no idea the scumbag assistant had hired people to ghost his assistant work.
Sadly, a couple of people, including Sonneson, said they were so badly treated by this assistant dude, they gave up art entirely. That makes me sadder than anything else.
It is not uncommon for people to hire folks to ghost work (I”ve worked as a ghost for a number of artists,) but it is very unusual for a BG assistant to hire ghosts.
It is also not unheard of for people to put the work of others in their portfolio to get assignments, then to hire out other people to actually perform the labor and not pay them for it.
You need to read this:
http://www.bleedingcool.com/tag/josh-hoopes/