Something lighter perhaps, contrasted with the more recent essays, but consider this the unfolded saga of my last adventure with a comic book publisher.
Aways back, my mom’s social security was abruptly ended without prior warning or after the fact explanation. So, I had to pick up some extra cash to cover her meds until the issue was sorted. I did not want to breach the comic book business ever again, but considering the talent-pool I felt it would be an easy ride. A relatively new small publisher was accepting short prose pieces for backmatter to their books, and after dejecting the first one they quickly accepted the next. The contract I signed was something like 150 for their digital rights, posting the thing on their website, with a clause providing an additional 50 should they later opt to print it inside one of their actual comics. They paid upfront and rather promptly, and I was vocal about the help it gave to keeping my mom around.
A year passes with no sign of my story. I figured perhaps I had gotten lost in the shuffle, or maybe they took note too late of my being blacklisted here and there within the confines of their industry. Then, I receive tax forms in the mail, except that the W2 I received was for some other freelancer, considering how the decimal followed several more numbers than what I warranted. So I contacted their publisher by email, informing him that tax papers had been swapped, and that someone else had possibly been given mine. I played it off with humor, suggesting that with them evidently employing a small army of Richards, such an error was mild and to be expected, and that they could easily publish an entire anthology of works exclusively by their Richards with the title Bag ‘o Dicks. They sent a replacement form, the correct one, followed by another year of silence and inactivity in regards to the story they had purchased. I worried the mixed up paperwork may have struck them as awkward and embarrassing enough to have blinders for my name. These are heliocentric allegations of course, as the reasoning could just as well be they’ve a skeleton crew multitasking outside their capabilities. And so would I occasionally hit their submissions box at their website, with political one-liners or links to new essays at my own website when they held any relevance to the trade. It was my way of showing them that there was no hard feelings, and that I wanted to remain on their radar, because even if I was not one of those countless, thirsty suckers hounding them with endless pitches, my productivity bluntly conveys me readily as a backup should they ever quietly find need for eleventh-hour proofreading or script-doctoring or ghost-writing. In all respects I do not approach problems with the intent of being a superstar, but to get things done, and my record speaks plainly for itself. But no matter how much assistance they could frankly use, slots are filled nonsensically by social networking experts, polishing turds as the old southern colloquialism used to go.
Flashback to blue collar bullshit when I was in my 20s, where actually performing my hired function in whatever job led those around me to think I was explicitly trying to make them look bad, and managers to think I was gunning for their own jobs. Because actually doing a thing, and free of lip service, is just so fucking unheard of.
Last year a surprise in the post, a packet with several comp copies of the final issue to one of their mini-series, with my story printed towards the back. Still no sign of my story online, which was what they paid for and now another half of a year later still unrepresented thereabouts. And the story appearing in print means by their own contracts I should be owed the additional 50. However, if I were to choose between an online display or a physical artifact, I am fine with how the cookie crumbled. No remaining time or interest from me to spare for kicking dead horses.
Somewhere in the long delays between communication however, I did get a very considerate email from their editor in chief, responding to an obituary I had written for Steve Ditko. He said openly that of his 30 or so years working professionally in comics, and almost twice as long as an active fan, he read in my obit several strong points that he had just never seen expressed anywhere else. And that while he could not bring himself to disagree with any of it, the fact of such points going unvoiced everywhere else, obvious truths gone unnoticed for decades, entailed unkind things about the creative industry he loved so much, which he would need to ponder. Which I took as insinuation of widespread ignorance of history and/or politics, and possibly an example of cancel culture occurring in an oxymoronic creative industry long before cancel culture ever got to be such a thing. As much as people care to equate Objectivism with Capitalism, there is a difference between the two, noted clearly by the difference between Steve Ditko and Stan Lee, a difference so vast it would end their working relationship and their friendship.
Conservative Republicans claim to love the writings of Ayn Rand, but her working title for Atlas Shrugged was The Strike, and historically, going by Howard Zinn, Republicans are precisely the ones to have called in the strikebreakers. I think Rand herself was either an Objectivist who became a Capitalist, or she was always a Capitalist playing at an ethos contrarian to the status quo, one which was taken to heart by persons such as Ditko, who found logic in the idea that the process was more important than the end results, which is very much anti-capitalist. And while none can name a more devout follower or practitioner of Objectivism, if Objectivism and Capitalism are indeed synonymous, if ever they were across his 50+ years of going by the orthodoxy, then such a statement has not, cannot and will not explain his infamously refusing checks for anything beyond his strictly work for hire contracts. He’d have been begging for interviews to pitch his wares, as nauseatingly ever-present as Lee himself, as opposed to working nonstop without distraction as was the case up to the month of his death. Documented reality suggests actual Objectivists would be the last people in the world to sell their talking points from behind avatars and proxies, when their ethos depends on a regarded thing speaking for itself. When comic book professionals today with great prevalence read nothing outside of comic books themselves, weighted volumes of ideology never quite make it onto their reading lists, allowing self-inclined marketing to do their thinking and feeling for them. It seems so obvious, yet not one of the highbrow comic book reviewers so desperate to validate their fondness for escaping from reality has ever considered such a matter, suggesting that what they take at face value is always taken as 2-dimensional, and that they side always with the most vocal of lynch mobs. Thus giving in to the very same might makes right mentality of means justifying the ends purported to be the heart of the Objectivism they insist they are so opposed to, descriptives which Capitalism fundamentally relies upon for its own Laissez-faire perpetuation. It’s childlike idiocy to believe that evil comes from anything but the exertion and imposition of ego, the same unharnessed egoism which motivates and propels Capitalists the world over, the same egoism demolishing from within every form of political and religious system yet devised. What Capitalist would ever turn down their legal share of IP they created circulating billions in revenue? With no sense of irony or word definitions from the comic book elite, had Ditko been the Capitalist that Lee was, it’d be another story. Maybe he wouldn’t have had to crash at the YMCA from time to time over his self-published works being openly ignored by the press, either for lack of corporate profit or for lack of sexy affirmations denying that consuming knows no end because audiences are left empty by the very society and culture they refuse to abandon.
Ditko was disowned because he could not find reason in facades or window dressing or sugary sentiments, wanting more emphasis regarded for his work than his image, which runs counter to the reasons for being shared by every comic blog ever to have existed, and all the commercial artists wasting moments of their lives on social media, wishing desperately to follow or to be followed without reapplying that effort to a work which might provide those opportunities in real life. Far more recently the field lost John Paul Leon, easily one of the most skilled and talented artists the medium will ever experience, but what nobody addresses in their mournful outcries is that, if John Paul had instead applied his skill and talent toward invigorating anything with principles or convictions beyond the thoughtlessness and heartlessness comprising the food-chains of for-profit escapism from reality, then perhaps his family would find no value in a postmortem crowd-funder. I lacked his skill and I lacked his talent, and so lacked his reach, but even I could smell the unorganized mess of dried blood from a lifetime away. Dabble in anything for the new experience or for necessity, but giving yourself over to an institution, to any institution, is giving yourself over to its egos trickling down all things problematic, indulged to maintain its illusions of importance, the adherence that no other fantasy come to pass.
Truth hurting doesn’t make given truths less true, as its function is something other than to flatter. Demanding flattery at the expense of truth is kind of where the Republican party today is shooting itself in the face. I’ve next to nothing in common with Steve Ditko, but I get the same reactions from the same personalities, because escapism ever making room for reality would be counterproductive to its bottom line. Not everyone needs to hide from the world though, or else things won’t ever get done. There is a world of consequence greater than any flattering appeals, greater especially than entertainment necessitating and rationalizing exploitation or entrapment or extortion. Matters of consequence requiring commitment and the actual vigilance of confrontation, but one will never know of such things, much less resolve such things or solve any real problems at all, if everything they know they learned from watching television. Buying esteem is meaningless and weightless, as is selling one’s own, because the bed-pans do not really clean themselves with esteem.
I actually save a non-figurative life every night and day, through self-sacrifice. For years now. It is exhaustive and disheartening, and avoidable only were I as self-serving as everyone else, leaving me too busy to be buying or selling anything. And regardless of the reassuring buzzwords of marketing to the contrary, if you are not buying or selling anything but in fact find purpose well and beyond, you hold no value. If you would dare find better application for your gourd than burying it in the sand, dreaming for some perceived Atlas to kick it about, others cannot wrap their heads around the pointed truth of the matter, and in spite of the creativity they prize and yearn will have no earthly idea what to make of it.