Steven Grant on the Comic Creator's Bill of Rights

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Greg Stephens
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Steven Grant on the Comic Creator's Bill of Rights

Post by Greg Stephens »

The Comic Creator's Bill of Rights is, of course, something Scott McCloud had a hand in way back, well, a few years ago, now. It gets mentioned every so often (sometimes spawing such silliness as the Comic Reader's Bill of Rights, as if one didn't already have the right NOT to buy lousy products), and in today's Permenant Damage column, Steven Grant mentions it, tangental to another topic. I think he mischaracterizes it a little when he says:
Steven Grant wrote:By the late '80s, self-publishing was in full bloom, with an attendant snobbery about an implied natural superiority of those who write, draw and publish their own books (preferably incorporating writer, artist and publisher into a single entity producing a unified vision), a bias eventually subtly codified into "The Creators' Bill Of Rights." (Such snobbery pops up regularly in comics fandom and prodom alike, as if being a singular creator was inherently superior to being a member of a team, or attempting to distinguish between "readers," "collectors" and "fans," as if one term or another connotes a natural superiority or inferiority, or as if there's something automatically better about reading any manga than a SUPERMAN comic or vice versa. But there's never any real rule of thumb; these are judgments that can only be made on a case-by-case basis. Anything else is mere bias.)
Whereas the Bill was the product of self-publishers' discussions, I don't think there's anything inherent in it that espouses the point of view Grant expresses. I was going to follow this up by asking if the CCBOR was outdated anyhow in this new digital age, with the rise of webcomics and all that, but after perusing it, I think that it still reads as a viable document with sound principles, no matter what the medium is.
Good morning! That's a nice tnetennba.
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