Daylight savings, that magical time when American employers rob their workers out of an hour’s wages; a successfully long-running private joke for self-appointed social engineers rationalized by the greater populace as anything but what it is.
“That weird technology makes things differenter and differenter.”
Image comics, a mid-range publisher of comic books formed theoretically so that artists could own bigger pieces to the fruits of their labors, will be celebrating its 30th anniversary next year, although it has in recent days been experiencing a share of its staffers themselves forming what reads like the first real union in the history of the comic book industry. I know maybe a decade back Tony Harris was banging a drum for one, but I think honest commentary regarding booth babes got him cancelled before canceling was quite the thing. Also what derailed focus perhaps, was his granting more time to social media than to finishing his own work contracts. In the 1980s Eastman and Laird helped put together a bill of creator rights which looked and sounded promising but was thereafter taken as purely ceremonial in cause and effect. In the 70s, Neal Adams made so much noise even Steve Ditko reportedly came out from his self-styled witness relocation program for some meetings. Where he would have sat alongside characters such as Steve Gerber, who had himself just served a stint as editor in chief at Marvel and so possibly sensed for himself how futile the system was even for dealing with problems from the inside. And so a working labor union has never really come about before in the North American comics industry which USA-based publishers have dominated since its inception, because persons who obsess over fantasy notoriously do so in sacrifice of doing anything productive or constructive with what is evidently rather disposable attentions or resources. The story of America altogether.
To that very effect, Image itself is deflecting.
In fairness, some of what these workers are requesting reveal them to be a bit spoiled, but by and large most of the bucket list declares issues which, unanswered, guarantee that employment of any variety has been and will continue to ironically be unproductive, nonconstructive and short-lived. I mean, how can a company go three whole decades without realizing essential functions necessary to operations may require basic instructions for efficacy more detailed than what’s to be found in the actual job description itself? How shocking is this lack of open discourse when half the Image founders are no longer actively or amicably involved in the company? It’s not as though any of the founders took early success as justification for trading their own hard-working spouses for glossier editions or anything, as no ego in the history of recorded civilization has ever been predisposed toward making commodities of everything and everyone. When centerpieces to personality cults by design do more speaking than listening, taking more than giving either attentions or resources, why should anybody care to emulate them or aspire after their standards of achievements, much less pronounce distaste at how the chain gangs which those centerpieces are 100% dependent upon eternally, religiously even, get miscolored by said centerpieces as bucket brigades? Only a veteran porno performer could possibly understand you in that, mumbled slobbery requests for your fair turn with an entire set of cock and balls shoved down your gullet like so.
I explored the game for years to see how it works. I get advance marketing. Maybe this current effort towards unionization can be dismissed as a rookie collective deeply upset by how demeaning themselves is not affording them every variant cover, is not granting them invitation to contribute a cover themselves, even a pinup. Maybe they are made of sterner stuff than those who came before. But unlike most comics today they actually have an audience right now, outside their circles of friends. They need to think in broader terms, and they need to think long-term, either of which is proven difficult when considerably everything permissible in proper society favors the short sell to any follow through, whatsoever. Immediate gratifications only postpone the inevitable. The “fake it til you make it” pathology so popular among persons ready, willing and able to justify their natural fakery, has the same margin of error as family trees playing ignorant about what prompted the suicides among their very own number. Thoughts and feelings hold no verifiable meaning to outside perspectives under any given circumstances, so instead do something, do anything, with every action and with every life. A built house holds intrinsically more value than the prettiest picture of one. There is a huge void requiring fulfillment, but there’s no room for even the odor of shit.
As a sober adult I can no longer help but to equate creative industry unions with soldiers becoming antiwar activists after the fact. You could have simply not helped the instigator of conflicts faced by you. It’s not like there was no world of evidence guaranteeing you never to be the beneficiary of such trouble.