Tempus Fugit…

Another new year, and once again I find myself asking where all the time went…!

I haven't bothered with New Year's resolutions for a long time, but if I'm going to make one this year, it's going to be that I'll reverse the shameful neglect of this blog.

I mean, yes, busy, yes, lots of work, yes, yes… there are lots of creative people far busier than I who maintain blogs more regular and productive than this one.

So… 2013 will see some more proper content on this blog. If you're not seeing it, nag me in the comments and shame me into making time for some regular bloggery.

Cheers!

Jim

Soapbox: Proposed UK Copyright Reform of 'Orphaned Works'

This isn't the promised update to my lettering guide -- which will be along in a few days -- but, instead, I'd like to talk about a proposed change to UK copyright law.


I'm not a lawyer, and I'm certainly not an expert on copyright, so I would urge you to read the government's consultation document (406Kb PDF file here) and form your own opinion. The document, in so far as I understand it, raises a number of areas of concern:


Foremost, it proposes to turn the legal entitlement to copyright protection from an automatic right to one that will require you to opt in; the default assumption under this proposal is that you are happy to have your work, if declared an 'orphan' work, exploited and licensed by a third party body -- a collecting society. Note that the proposal does not require you to be a member of a collecting society (which could very well be a private company) in order for that society to deal with your work.


There is clearly a massive logical flaw in this at its most fundamental level: if you make yourself (and, thus, your work) known to the collecting society, how can it be an orphaned work? By definition, the creator will have to be either unknown or uncontactable for the work to be declared an 'orphaned' one, but since when did the obscurity of work deny it legal protection?


The proposed reform claims to have safeguards built in, but these proceed from similarly flawed assumptions. It will, for example, be illegal to strip the metadata from a file, but once an image, or a design, or any other piece of creative work, goes 'viral' it will pass through so many hands that establishing at what point, or by whom, the metadata was removed would be virtually impossible.


Here's a hypothetical example: I put a piece of artwork up on my deviantArt site, which gets about 10 hits a day. It's a caricature of a celebrity I did for my own amusement, say. Someone working for a blog or site about celebrities right clicks that image, saves it down to their hard drive, and then re-uploads it to their blog, cropping it so that my signature is removed and failing to attribute it. I'm none the wiser -- there's no spike in traffic to my dA page, and I wouldn't see it on the blog, since it's not the sort of thing I read. The person who uploaded the image to the new location does a couple of dozen of these a day and doesn't keep a record of the sources.*


That image is now receiving thousands of times more views as an unattributed, 'orphaned' image than it will ever receive in its original location, with its proper attribution.


Enter the collecting society for cartoonists (remember that this could be a private company, and the proposal suggests that there could be more than one in each field; we're not talking about some cosy little creators' guild set-up, here) who declare it an orphaned work, license it to a clothing company for a fee and keep the money. My artwork is now on tens of thousands of t-shirts and, unless I actually see one, then I will be none the wiser.


And, let's say I do see one. There may be multiple collecting societies -- how do I find out which one has licensed my work? What if I am unhappy with the fee they have negotiated? Are they going to force the licensee to add my signature to all future printings of the t-shirt? What if I'm unhappy with the context in which my artwork is being used? Will the collecting society revoke the license? Compensate me for the inappropriate use of my work?


Remember also that this collecting society will be authorised to act on my behalf without my consent. It will be for me to expressly tell the society (keeping in mind that there may be multiple societies acting within the same field) that I do not wish them to do so.


But, and here's where we hit that problem with logic again, how will the collecting society know that the orphaned work is by me, and therefore not to be used in this manner? If they knew it was by me, it wouldn't be orphaned in the first place.


The proposal says that, amongst the safeguards, there will be a register of orphaned works.


Again, this demonstrates a complete lack of logical thought or understanding of the nature of what they're proposing: as a creator, are you supposed to make regular checks of this register to see if your work has been mistakenly entered onto it? I imagine that the register would quickly become quite lengthy. Plus, of course, the work won't be attributed to you and you'll have no way of knowing how it's been described.


What this proposal appears to do is turn the entire internet into one massive stock library for larger companies, giving them an easy point of contact (the collecting societies) to negotiate licenses to use content they don't own. Better yet, the collecting societies get to do this without your knowledge and then keep the money.


Why should there be an automatic assumption that any and all works are available for commercial exploitation unless explicitly stated otherwise? UK copyright law has, quite correctly, assigned all intellectual rights to a piece of work to its creator and they remain there unless the party wishing to exploit those rights can produce a document explicitly signing them over. 


Just because I create something and put it on display does not mean that I want to sell it, and if a third party can't elicit my express permission to do so, for whatever reason, then that third party should consider the work not for sale.


This government is prepared to aggressively defend the intellectual property rights of 'big content', of the record labels and movie companies, enacting legislation forcing ISPs to keep detailed records of the data usage of their customers, introducing punishment by association**, but is happy to allow the rights of smaller creators to be drastically curtailed.


This government has proven itself remarkably sensitive to public opinion on some issue (although not the NHS, sadly) so I would ask you to consider signing the online petition I've set up, and to share the link (and the reasons for signing) with as many people as possible.


You can sign the petition here…


Thank you for reading. Normal service will be resumed shortly.


(For a more in-depth look at this proposal, please read this blog entry, brought to my attention by John Freeman.)


*This part is not hypothetical, it's happened to me and, once, I did it to someone else in error. Fortunately, they contacted me directly and I was able to correct the mistake and attribute the work properly.


**By threatening disconnection of an entire household's internet access based solely on the actions of one member of that household.

Radio Silence: An Apology

Whew. Time certainly does fly when you're having fun, doesn't it?


Well, perhaps not fun, but I've been crazy busy and my focus hasn't been here, on this blog, for far too long. 


The first thing I've realized is that the old PDF version of my lettering guide was being hosted on Apple's iDisk service, which has just been discontinued! My apologies if you've been looking for this file without success -- I've reinstated it via a different online service, and added a link for it to the Illustrator Tutorial section to your right.


By small way of making amends for my shocking neglect of the blog, I will endeavour to update the final part of the series of articles by the end of next week and get it online, after which I'll also update the PDF. I have half-formed plans to make the PDF available as a POD book as well, if anyone's interested?


So, once again, please accept my apologies if you've been checking in here over the last couple of months looking for new content… I'll make a concerted effort to do better for the second half of the year!

Design Basics: Logo Advice

Just a quick post in response to having seen many logos posted to design forums for critique recently that seem to have been unaware of this fundamental piece of advice:

Design your logos in black and white

Seriously. If you design your logo to one colour scheme, you may find it doesn't work in other colour schemes… what if your original colours clash horribly with some future piece of artwork onto which it has to be overlaid? You're restricting the flexibility of the logo enormously by designing it with a colour scheme in mind. Use black and white for all your strokes and fills plus one solid grey tint if absolutely necessary. If your logo doesn't work within those limitations, your logo doesn't work, period.


No effects. No bevels, no embosses, no gradient fills. If your logo needs these things to make it look interesting, then it's a boring logo. No amount of icing and sprinkles will disguise the fact that your cake isn't properly cooked; pretty much the same principle with logos.


Make a nice, strong logo that works in solid black and white. If your logo doesn't do the job in monochrome, scrap it and do a new one. Once you have a logo strong enough to catch the eye in black and white, you can spiff it up to your heart's content. But here's the thing: you won't need to.

Happy Birthday, 2000AD!

This month, Britain's beloved SF weekly anthology celebrated its thirty-fifth anniversary, the last, defiant survivor of a market that doesn't even exist any more. I've already sung the praises of the Galaxy's Greatest Comic as part of Down The Tubes' extensive tribute to the title, but I wanted to say a little more on the subject…


It's impossible to overstate the importance of 2000AD in the history of the comics industry, and its place in the hearts of its fans. 

Prog 104: Thrill Power Encapsulated!

I'm a letterer because of 2000AD. Back when I got my first regular issue (Prog 104, fact fans) despite the phenomenal ink stylings of Carlos Ezquerra, the vibrant, dynamic cartooning of Ian Gibson, I was immediately drawn to the clean lines and heavy blacks of Dave Gibbons' rendition of Dan Dare. My Dad had grown up with Eagle and so I was pre-emptively disposed to like the character, I suppose…

Collector Ceri Levy owns this page, the splash page from that very issue. But click the image to enlarge, and take a look at the credits… Dave did his own lettering and got his name on the credits twice! To my ten-year-old brain, this was literally the coolest thing ever. From that moment on, I was unable to read a strip without noticing the lettering, without wondering how this effect or that technique was achieved, without mentally assessing which letterers' work I liked, which I didn't, and trying to work out why.


Of course, as artist, Dave had the advantage of being able to work his sound effect work into the art. In US comics, lettering was done by hand onto the pencils, so the inker was able to work around the SFX and integrate them into the art, but 2000AD letterers got finished, inked art (one artist usually produced the complete B&W page) and physically stuck lettering onto the art board, which made SFX work slightly more problematic.


Whenever I approach my sound effect work, I have Dave's lettering in mind, and the exemplary sound effect work of Alan Davis and Arthur Ranson.

Killraven: Art by Alan Davis

Button Man: Art by Arthur Ranson

Doctor Who: Art by Dave Gibbons

I'd also draw your attention to the clean, careful penmanship of letterer Steve Potter on the Button Man page above. Whilst the late Tom Frame is quite rightly acclaimed as the heavyweight of British hand lettering, Steve's contribution sometimes gets overlooked…

Nemesis The Warlock:
Art by Kevin O'Neill

Sadly, I don't have the issues to hand, and can't find a scan online of some of Steve's more inventive lettering work on Nemesis -- for the giant, intelligent spiders in Book II, for example, their dialogue balloons are anchored to the edges of the panels by streamers of webbing!


The simple fact that hand-lettering was so time-consuming meant that 2000AD maintained a large roster of letterers, all with instantly recognisable styles: Jack Potter (any relation to Steve? I have no idea!), Pete Knight, Bill Nuthall, John Aldrich, Tony Jacob… later joined by Rich Starkings, Annie Parkhouse, Ellie De Ville, the latter two have taken 2000AD through into the era of digital lettering and have been joined by the admirable talent of Simon Bowland.


So… 2000AD letterers all, I salute you. And a special word of thanks to the Godfather of 2000AD himself, Mr Pat Mills, whose decision at the title's creation to eschew the standard letterpress machine lettering of the time in favour of hand lettering throughout went so very far in ensuring that the comic felt like nothing else on the stands at the time.


I could go on … and probably will, but that will have to be a post for another time.

Interleaved Balloons

One of the key skills of being a letterer is the ability to cram unfeasibly large amounts of copy into spaces that clearly were never intended to accommodate them!


There are many ways to maximise the efficient use of lettering space but one I haven't covered before is to interleave connected speech balloons:

A merged shape, as you would normally use to create a linked balloon like this, can only be at one level in the stacking order, so you have to do a little cheating to get one balloon behind the "Thanks, Joe" balloon and one in front.


I'm not aware of any hard and fast rules for the stacking order. I think of the balloons being laid down in the order that they're spoken, with the 'oldest' being laid down first and the each subsequent balloon going on top, becoming 'nearer' to the reader as they get 'nearer' chronologically. There's no good reason why you couldn't do it the opposite way round, but I would strongly advise consistency: pick one way or the other and stick to it.


So, in this example, the dialogue goes 1, 2, 3:

These are just normal speech balloons, exactly as you would usually create them. Use the Arrange -> Send Forward and Send Backward options to get them in the correct stacking order.

Next, draw a connector:

(As an aside, some letterers draw their connectors wide-to-narrow in the direction of the reader's eye; I prefer narrow-to-wide, since the connector and the balloon are coming 'towards' the reader.)

Select the connector with Selection tool (black arrow), and hit CMD-C to copy. Then use the (ungrammatically named) Paste In Back function:

This will place a copy directly behind the one you've just drawn. However, it won't be far enough back in the stacking order for your purposes, so then use Arrange -> Send to Back to place the copied connector at the very back of the stacking order.

(Note: you could create separate layers for the elements that make up the connecter, but I don't think it's really necessary.)

At this point, the back version of the connector will be selected, but if you accidentally deselect it, or need to select it again for some reason, simply draw a marquee with the Selection tool over both connectors:

And then SHIFT-click on the top one, which will deselect it, leaving only the bottom one selected.

The next thing to do is increase the stroke value of the back connector. Whatever your current stroke value is, double it:

This is because half of the thickness of stroke will be hidden when you do the next step.

Select the top connector and set the stroke to 'None':

So now you have a white connector with no stroke on top, masking the edges of the balloon and giving the appearance of a merged shape but enabling you to have the balloons in different positions in the stacking order.

Simples!

Please, sir, can I have some Mo(o)re?

(This blog post shamelessly repurposed from some musings yesterday on Facebook.)


Honestly, I don't see the fuss over DC's Watchmen prequels.


Alan Moore signed a work-for-hire contract, so DC are free to do with the property as they see fit. Now, I think it is fair comment to note a certain amount of barrel-scraping creatively (given that DC has already managed to spin a major crossover event out of a six-page Green Lantern story Moore wrote nearly 30 years ago).


I say the following as someone who has boundless admiration for his work and deep personal affection for the man himself, having met him a couple of times (albeit many years ago), but… 


I find Moore's stance on copyright perplexing and bordering on the hypocritical. Just once, instead of slagging off, say, 2000AD, I'd like him to say that he appreciates the fact that Steve MacManus gave him a platform from which he went on to become arguably the most successful comic writer in the world, instead of winding up in prison due to being "the world's most inept drug dealer."


(I should point out that this last is actually Alan's own description of a part of his pre-comic-writing life.)


It's true that he and Dave Gibbons would have got the rights to Watchmen back if DC had let it go out of print, but does anyone seriously think that DC would have kept on printing the book if it wasn't selling? I suspect that once every six months a royalty cheque drops through Alan's letterbox that would make the rest of us very happy indeed…


(I also can't help but wonder what Moore's position on the rights to Watchmen would be if Dick Giordano had OKed it when it still used the Charlton characters that were in the original proposal…)


I can see how some of the ABC stuff and the like might make Alan very, very suspicious of the motives of mainstream comic publishers, I can see how the LXG movie lawsuit has left him very wary of the entertainment industry in general, but I don't believe anyone ever forced him to sign a contract at gunpoint, or that any of those contracts were materially worse than anyone else in the industry was getting at the time.


At the same time, though, I don't quite understand how Moore squares his own position on creators' rights with his seeming belief that he can plunder the literary back-catalogue with impunity; or that contracts he signed somehow shouldn't now apply to the work he created under them.


Frankly, it baffles me and I wish Alan would just shut the hell up about it, since this one frustrating, illogical position he insists on banging on about is starting to colour my opinion of a man whose writing genuinely changed my life.


However, I have to undermine my own rant with the following caveat:


Alan Moore doesn't go to conventions; doesn't have an internet connection; doesn't even have an e-mail address. I genuinely believe that Alan has not the least idea (and probably cares even less) how famous he actually still is in the comics industry.


I don't believe for one second that he spends his days in some fever of seething resentment at the iniquities heaped upon him by the comic industry. Rather, I suspect he potters about Northampton opposing the closure of local libraries and gently removing small rodents that have taken to nesting in his beard and gives not the most passing of thought to the state of the comic industry…


Until, of course, Rich Johnston (or whoever) phones him up and presses the "guaranteed to elicit a number of pithy quotes from Alan Moore" button, after which they sit back to enjoy the sounds of gnashing teeth from the serried ranks of comic geekdom and to watch the hit counter on their website spin round so fast it becomes a blur.


It bears repeating that Alan Moore does not have an internet connection. For Alan's opinion to make it onto the internet, someone has to have actively sought it from him. Now, it's perfectly fair and natural for comics news sites to seek his opinion, but it's also important to remember that the man himself is not publishing vitriolic screeds on his blog or issuing the comic book equivalent of fatwahs via Twitter.


In fact, I suspect if Alan really knew how famous he still was in the comics industry that he would bellow at us (in that splendid accent of his): "IT WAS TWENTY-FOIVE YEARS AGOW! MOVE ON!"