Pat Mills moving onto new things it would seem

[ming]

In possibly related news... American Reaper picked up for film adaptation?

https://bleedingcool.com/movies/american-reaper-flanagan-foy-amblin-comic-adaptation/

[Goosegash]

In possibly related news... American Reaper picked up for film adaptation?

https://bleedingcool.com/movies/american-reaper-flanagan-foy-amblin-comic-adaptation/

Heh, I was just about to delurk and mention that.

Could this be the real reason Pat's chosen now to sever his ties with Rebellion? The timing certainly does seem very apt. I know he's been trying to get film projects based on his IPs off the ground for years, I could well believe he we was just biding his time, waiting for the right offer to come along before jumping ship.

I'm not criticising him for that, if anyone's earned a big payday after years of hard work it's Pat, but I'm just wondering if some of his comments in that blog post are a bit disingenuous given this development.

[IndigoPrime]

Given how much of a control freak he is over his IPs (not a criticism, note—plenty of writers are), it’ll be interesting to see how he responds to someone else writing all over his original concept. Even the most slavish of comic book adaptations change a bunch of stuff, sometimes on the original author’s recommendations (Old Guard, e.g.) and sometimes not so much.

If this takes off, I’ll be glad. I wasn’t keen on the thing when it ran in the Meg, but it has its fans—and the more stuff from the House of Tharg being adapted, the better, frankly.

[JayzusB.Christ]

Aye, though I'm not quite sure why that particular Pat strip is of interest to the cinema world, as opposed to Slaine, ABCs, Nemesis, Marshal Law etc.

 Now where's that Rogue Trooper film, Zowie Bowie?

[Goosegash]

Aye, though I'm not quite sure why that particular Pat strip is of interest to the cinema world, as opposed to Slaine, ABCs, Nemesis, Marshal Law etc.

 Now where's that Rogue Trooper film, Zowie Bowie?

American Reaper was specifically intended to be a creator-owned IP that Mills could pitch as a film, he and Clint Langley co-own a limited company to develop concepts they can sell as film ideas. This is the first fruit of that, and it's only taken...fourteen years. Blimey.

I think we're unlikely see any big Hollywood adaptations of Mills's 2000AD material any time soon, as Rebellion owns them and (presumably) they're holding onto those as their own potential future projects.

[Professor Bear]

I think Marshall Law is in a similar boat, with DC owning the comics, but not the adaptation rights.  Rebellion just spent 100 million on a studio, I would imagine they'd want to produce adaptations of anything they own "in-house" if possible, as while Rebellion aren't operating on Marvel's level, I don't think they need to be to learn the lessons Marvel did with farming out the rights to Spider-Man and X-Men.

NHS workers (and apologies to Bolt if I'm misinterpreting his post) would negotiate better conditions and wages if they could, and so should comics creators wherever possible.
As Jim alludes, payment rates in comics are affected by the perfect shitstorm of almost the entire industry being based on freelance labor and "house" characters or properties, so setting uniform rates for creators is impossible because creators are not the commodity, characters and IP are.  Even those creators who get to go their own way on a miniseries they hope will be "picked up by Netflix" aren't the valuable part of the comics package they put out: their elevator pitch is.

[Tjm86]

Fair enough, I can understand the frustration there.  Especially when you consider that Scarlet Traces is an example of greater creative ownership in the prog. 

Is it?  I thought it was creator-owned but that the creators sold the IP to Rebellion before starting on the most recent story?

Yeah that's my understanding. This also reveals that the idea of owning your own property isn't a simple promised land it can be made out to be. Ian Edgington and D'Irsaeli have assessed their options with a lot more practical insight than we and other 'sage' internet experts have and come up selling their property.

Why? Well I'd guess looking at the balance of risk, cost, reward and probably just the plain practicality of getting your story out there. They will fully understand the factors involved.

This is the thing isn't it.  IIRC Scarlet Traces started out of their own independent work but they took it to Dark Horse for a while.  The meg ran with the second series (counting their War of The Worlds adaptation as the first) along with a selection of D'israeli's independent work.

So having experience of going it alone, tackling the Yanks or throwing in with Rebellion it does seem that they have some idea of the pros and cons.  They seem to have made their decision on that basis.  So that raises the question of how Rebellion stacks up against the other options.

[Leigh S]

I'm all for Pat's (and Alan's and a lot of others) principle of ownership - what strikes me as most frustrating here is that this is the first we hear (from Pat at least) about a genuine offer of return of copyright (rather than just better deals going forward) - one that Pat knew about at the time.  As I said before, it looks like a chink in the door, however begrudging, but who pushed at it? I had my dates wrong - this is clearly after Maxwell buys them up, but before Sanders left, which wasnt that much later?  It is half a story - Pat's "it was just a ruse to wind up creators" seems a wild conclusion unless the other half of the story confirms that - has any comment been made by MacManus or indeed Gibson about this in the wake of Pat's blogpost?  I would love to hear their side of it, and maybe fill in the blanks of a pretty darn massive revelation  - If Moore had been persuaded back, if Pat and John had gained similar terms (Hilary Robinson gaining her copyright would be a few year down the line from this?).  Such a pivotal point in the comics history - why did it fail? why wasnt Pat (and John, and Moore for that matter) taking this seriously as an offer?  What was the catch?  Did anyone even look if there was one?  Did Moore just tell them to stuff it either way on the back of Watchmen et al (a shame for Gibson if so)?

[Leigh S]

Sanders is there the self styled progressive - if you look at how most comics had been created before Pat came along, they were more commodity than art.  See Tom Tully's famous opening line "My names Tom Tully and I earn more than the Prime Minister" - it wasnt there wasnt much money in comics, there just wasnt much art, or at least, much perception of a vaule as art beyond filling those pages that week, never to be seen again - the 5 year rule on reprints is another sign of that attitude.

2000AD changed that - it took long enough for that to be recognised, but (however bluntly Sanders is putting it here), that memo does seem to suggest that recognition had crept in.  Why did this fizzle out?  What did the creators do to try and push on this? What was the fatal blow to any progress on this?  I gotsta know! 

Possibly the America Reaper deal is no coincidinky, but also, when will we see Sanders book due out?  Has Pat seen an advanced copy and is getting his retaliation in first?

[Dark Jimbo]

...I'm not quite sure why that particular Pat strip is of interest to the cinema world, as opposed to Slaine, ABCs, Nemesis, Marshal Law etc.

For the same reason there's been films of History of Violence, Accident Man and (imminently) Button Man. All primarily about men with guns in the present or near-future - fairly easy to realise on a modest budget.

[Funt Solo]

American Reaper already looks like a movie, and has a beginning, middle and end. I think the high concept is also easily accessible - it's a great hook idea that old people are stealing young people's bodies. (And, as mentioned, the budget - it's mostly people waving guns around.)

You can drop the other titles as names ("Slaine, ABCs, Nemesis, Marshal Law etc."), but which particular stories do you think deserve to be turned into movies? Where's the story arc? Probably (given the grand sci-fi spectacle), some would work better as animated features (in terms of budget).

What Slaine story would work as a movie?

[sheridan]

I think Marshall Law is in a similar boat, with DC owning the comics, but not the adaptation rights.

You're probably thinking of Metalzoic, which was first published in colour by DC Comics in a short-lived range of high quality printed graphic novels (compared to the print quality of the era) and then reprinted in black and white in 2000AD, as every squaxx know.


Marshall Law was first published by Epic Comics (imprint of Marvel) but judging from its subsequent print history is owned wholly by Mills and O'Neill*.




* except for the crossovers with Pinhead Cenobite, Savage Dragon and The Mask.

[sheridan]

American Reaper already looks like a movie, and has a beginning, middle and end. I think the high concept is also easily accessible - it's a great hook idea that old people are stealing young people's bodies. (And, as mentioned, the budget - it's mostly people waving guns around.)

You can drop the other titles as names ("Slaine, ABCs, Nemesis, Marshal Law etc."), but which particular stories do you think deserve to be turned into movies? Where's the story arc? Probably (given the grand sci-fi spectacle), some would work better as animated features (in terms of budget).

What Slaine story would work as a movie?

Most of Sláine could be done on a reasonable budget (bear in mind that my prog slog has just go to the end of Dragonheist).  Main costs would be warp spasms, the time monster and the dragons.  The rest is people running around in loin cloths hitting each other with swords and axes (half-dead might be expensive depending on which zombie approach  you wish to take).

As long as you've got access to some industrial waste ground, Marshal Law needn't be prohibitively expensive, while still doing justice to the source material.

Then I'd place American Reaper in costs, followed by ABC Warriors and (much to my chagrin as it's my favourite) Nemesis the Warlock.

[Tjm86]

it wasnt there wasnt much money in comics, there just wasnt much art, or at least, much perception of a vaule as art beyond filling those pages that week, never to be seen again - the 5 year rule on reprints is another sign of that attitude.

2000AD changed that - it took long enough for that to be recognised,

It's probably worth reflecting on this against the backdrop of British comics of the time.  TPO (IIRC) is pretty clear on the life expectancy of many comic titles.  Think about the "hatch - match - dispatch" policy of the IPC days.  As for comic collecting, I'm sure many of us remember the perception it had as a niche, nerdy activity back in those days.

Wasn't it the Titan / Eagle Comics reprint issue that got everyone's noses out of joint?  This is part of what "Tharg's Head Revisited" from Prog 500 was aiming at, no?  So the value was recognised but the largesse not shared.

[Dandontdare]

Been meaning to add my two penn'orth for a while, so I've been catching up on the last few pages, and I am frankly unnerved by what I read. A complex argument conducted with respectful debate and carefully chosen examples? Don't you people know what the internet is FOR?

I've often said that while I find much of his recent output a bit tiresome, his stupendous body of work and contribution to 2000ad means that he has earned the right, in perpetuity, to four or five pages in any prog to sound off about whatever the fuck he wants - and it usually looks beautiful (in my head, Slaine is now just a framing tool for some stunning fantasy art, I long ago lost interest in the character's angst and speechifying).

As others have done to death, the creator vs work-for-hire debate is not the simple good v evil situation Pat sometimes makes it out to be, it's a complex thing, especially in a rapidly developing industry. Maybe in the future, when print media has sadly died, creators will not be as reliant on publishers and the costs/risks will be less for a creator-owned property, but they said Myspace would destroy the record labels and that didn't happen. As Pat would testify, the Suits will always exploit the market as much as they can, and they often react faster to changes have the money and clout to succeed, but that's a truism of every single aspect of society (yes, thank you Pat, I got that decades ago, can the robots be funny again please?) I do think however that creators now are more savvy and have more freedom and options than previously, so fingers crossed for that ongoing battle.

American Reaper felt like a movie pitch from day one, and he and Langley weren't coy about that, which is one of the reasons I think it offended me (there were others). Interesting news in that piece - his own script drowned in development hell, so new people are rewriting it? That could be interesting. Whatever happens to that movie, in Pat's revisionist lens it will ultimately be a glorious victory/shameful suppression of the People's Rights.

tl/dr version-
*You people are nice
*Pat's a legend and no more Ro-jaws makes me sad
*It's a complex and changing industry, but you've always gotta Be Vigilant or the suits will fuck you over
*Pat's in full spin mode