I don’t want these to get lost in the shuffle so — lucky you! — it’s a weekend update at Fleen, as we review Scott Campbell and Leontine Greenberg’s show Adrift, which runs at My Plastic Heart in New York for the next four weeks.

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Zot!: The Complete Black and White Collection: 1987-1991 (hereafter, Z!C) is an odd thing to be reading at this stage in my life. As a freshman in college, I was handed a copy of the LOUDEST comic book in the universe, giggled, and promptly forgot about the creators. More than twenty years ago, I started reading Scott McCloud’s first creator-owned series about a do-goodin’ title character with a perpetually sunny disposition; I kept with it after the initial ten, color issues (not in this collection) transitioned to the stories of this collection. A move after college and a lack of good comic shops meant that I missed out on the “Earth Stories” that formed the final arc of the comic series.

More than fifteen years ago, I rediscovered McCloud through Understanding Comics; shortly thereafter, the Kitchen Sink Press reprints found their way into my collection, but KSP went under before the fourth volume, which would have comprised the Earth Stories. Ten years ago, I was the guy that liked The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln. In the past two years ago, I met McCloud, devoured Making Comics, and bugged him more than once But when will you reprint the Earth Stories?

In retrospect, McCloud has taken up as much of my reading time, over so many projects, as any author I can think of. He created the one villain (in all of the fiction of my lifetime) so chilling, evil, and plausible in his malevolence that he’s given me bad dreams¹. I’ve come to admire, respect, and treasure just hanging with the guy as much as I have valued his work — but here is this creation, from the beginning of his career, that I’d never seen in full. I paused before reading those final 200-odd pages, wondering if the past two decades would affect me and my reading, at long last, of the Earth Stories.

I shouldn’t have worried.
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Gotta keep this one relatively brief, as there’s things to get done before the road trip tomorrow to pick up my new coffee table/art cabinet; this is what webcomics creators have driven me to: I no longer have enough wall space to display my originals and must invest in furniture to store them. Anyway, two webcomics to compare/contrast — one’s brand new, one’s been around a while, both new to me.

Richard Kirk wrote:

For your consideration… Semi-autobiographical cartoon. Nice, clean website. I have no connection except for being a fan.

and David Reddick wrote:

I’m proud to unveil my new twice-weekly fantasy webcomic and labor of love, Legend of Bill, presented by the fine folks at SoulGeek.

Em Cartoons is a nice autobio strip, and I dig creator Maria Smedstad’s art style a great deal — something about the face being so minimally rendered makes it easy to project emotions to the reader. But I have to disagree about the website. While clean, the archive links require an excessive amount of searching to make progress through the story of Em, and that’s death if you’re trying to get people to a) read your archive (especially one going back to November of 2006) and; b) fall in love with the strip and become a fan/evangelist. It would be a bit of work, but translating Em Cartoons to a design that features the standard <<, <, >, and >> buttons would be well worth the effort. I want those who might casually come across Em Cartoons to find it easy to be engrossed, because I think it’s good work.

Bill is just starting (only two updates so far), but features an intriguing premise: standard fantasy-type barbarian gets started not because he’s born on a battlefield and fated to adventure … he just got really bored with his intern gig. Although it’s not quite as obvious in the strips that are up, scroll down to check out Reddick’s sketches and wallpapers … his art is very Sergio Aragonés-esque, and that can only be a good thing. Nobody does loose, scribbly, and fun like Sergio, and the man may yet overtake Tezuka for most pages of comics drawn in a lifetime. If that’s where Reddick’s drawing (ha, ha) inspiration from, he’s in damn good company

First up, a quick note from the Energizer Bunny of webcomicdom — Kevin & Kell, which has as good a claim on the title of “oldest continuing webcomic” as any contender I’m aware of, is releasing its thirteenth book next month. If, as they say, half of success is just showing up every day, Bill Holbrook’s a pretty damn successful guy. More details here.

Down to business. Recently received in my email:

Øyvind Thorsby wrote:
Hitmen For Destiny has reached 100 strips.

Short and to the point, I like that. A webcomic I’d not heard of, that’s good. And non-English character in the name? Gold. That was almost as far as I got, because Hitmen For Destiny is, sad to say, damn ugly. Not merely primitive in its art, but really, really, eye-hurtingly painful. Holy Assmaster I thought, it’s User Friendly with freakin’ big heads.

But we’ve talked about this before — the question of whether or not writing alone is enough to carry a strip. We’ve considered situations where the art is as minimal as will get the idea across, or deliberately taken out of the equation, but this is a case of Can writing save a strip where the art is just bad?

I think it might. There’s a clever idea serving at the core of Hitmen For Destiny — a pair of cadaverous (and in at least one case, otherwordly) goons work for Destiny (the proverbial Destiny — the anthropomorphic personification of What Will Be) making sure that prophecies come true, by killing anything that might get in the way. That’s a really interesting idea, but you have to sort of tease it out; it’s not explicitly presented to you. Along the way, a quite normal young lady gets thrown into a mix of prophecy fulfillment (even if she doesn’t realize it), leading to a cavalcade of bizarre monsters and absurd situations.

But balance that against the fact that Hitmen For Destiny contains an installment titled In which my throat inflation fetishist readers are catered for. Be warned: that link contains exactly what it promises.

Despite the visuals (and even if you didn’t click on that link, it’s in your head now — I had to see it, you have to see it, too) there’s a gleeful tone to the batshit insanity of it all, and even if 100 strips later the art hasn’t significantly improved from the first strip, damn if I couldn’t say I was curious to see what happened next. The story meanders, and the central conceit of an army of goons making sure Things Happen is only rarely addressed, but I wanted to see just what kind of whackjobbery Thorsby would come up with next.

If nothing else, a series of three different sets of antagonists fighting out in three-and-a-half different places in a house (there’s these portals, see, and they skitter around, and … nevermind, just read it yourself), with quick cuts from one confrontation to another, and space becoming not just where the action takes place, but an active component of the scene — it’s obvious that Thorsby is really trying to show us something that we haven’t seen before, and if the visuals don’t match up to the concept, I’m finding myself not entirely caring about the visuals. Except for the throat-inflation thing. That’s just — ew.

But it looks like you get a double-shot of Anders Loves Maria today, which is odd because I’m quite angry at Rene Engström.

Wait, that’s a terrible topic sentence. Let’s back up to the beginning. I’ve been following Anders Love Maria ever since this gorgeous guest strip ran when Paul Southworth was slackin’ off (something about spawning, I dunno). Combine art that beautiful, that many webcomics cameos, and make fun of a Disney flick, and I am officially intrigued — but there was no URL associated with the strip.

So a name search led me to a blog, which deepened my intrigue; after all, we are talking about a woman who shares her most shameful perversions in comic form. And I still wasn’t to the webcomic.

And the webcomic is why I don’t think I like Rene Engström. It’s a romantic non-comedy, about Anders (photographer, in love with the idea of being in love, with a tabloid-fodder famous mom) and his girlfriend Maria (younger, less focused, in love with Anders but still able to get pissed at him when he’s an asshole). They have a comfortable relationship together when Anders drops a bombshell: he thinks they should have a baby. Maria recoils, an old girlfriend comes into the picture, Anders feels the tug of temptation, and Maria gets pregnant inadvertantly. It’s messy, they’re confused, but love wins out in the end. Fade to credits.

Yeah, that’s Hollywood’s version of romance; this is Sweden — we’ve only covered two days of story, and life hasn’t begun to get complicated yet. A brush with the law sends the couple to the far north, to Maria’s family, who treat Anders poorly (’cause let’s face it, he’s a pussy). Old crushes and old enemies enter, all concerned make bad decisions, and we’re reminded that nobody can hurt us as much as somebody you know loves you — but doesn’t like you very much right now.

And that’s where we are, on the cusp of 100 strips (my usual threshold for a review, but it appears that Anne has forced my hand; I shake my fist at her, thus!), with a pair of protagonists that I feel emotionally drained by. They act so utterly, confusingly, exasperatingly real, that I want to comfort them, scream at them, advise them, and kick their asses. Engström has put me through this wringer, leaving me enraged and empathetic towards her creations at the same time. The last time a character left me this deeply conflicted, he wore a red ski cap and a Speedo (for the record, that’s a very good thing to remind me of); seriously, I halfway believe that Rene Engström is really just a front for Wes Anderson. There is a precedent, after all.

One last thought — I’d emailed Engström earlier in the week that I was possibly going to hold this review to sometime past strip #100; I was waiting for a point of resolution in the story to say, Okay, here’s a good break, jump in. She pointed out that I might be waiting for a while if I was waiting for these latest emotional wounds to close — they aren’t even fully open yet.

And that right there is why I adore this strip — just like real life, there are no clear intervals in the story, there is no upswell of music at the end of the reel, there never will be a neat resolution where everybody gets to go Awwwww. There’s just more life and the choices we make, and I guess I really do like Rene Engström after all. Read Anders Loves Maria, and you’ll like her, too.

Okay, so we’ve picked apart the contracts, and we’ve all had plenty of time to think about things. Let’s put this to bed, shall we?

The Zudadeal is both very, very good and very, very bad.

On the good side, it’s out in the open, completely above-board, fully-disclosed, and they even encourage you to take legal advice from an actual lawyer (that would not be me) prior to entering, because just entering requires you to sign the Submission Agreement.

There are even some bits in the contract that can only be seen as progress from what comics contracts used to look like:

• retaining copyright
• having the theoretical ability to recover other rights
• defined payment schedule
• audit rights
• return of originals

These were all unheard of in years gone by.

But while the contracts may be better than what has historically passed for a comics contract, it remains explicitly work-for-hire and falls far short of what were identified as fundamental rights for comics creators nearly twenty years ago.

And that’s where all the bad comes in. If the Zudainitiative were all about finding “traditional” comics concepts, artists, and writers for the future, and it were positioned as, “Show us a good enough idea, and maybe you can come work for us”, I think I would honestly have no problem with it.

But it’s positioned in two very different ways:

• Show us a good enough idea and you WIN!
• Yay, webomics!

The first of these is less worrying — if you’re reading the contracts like they tell you to, and you’re getting legal advice like they tell you to, you should understand that this isn’t a case of “you’ve got the best stuff, we’re going to make all your dreams come true”. It clearly is a case of “you’ve got the best stuff, we’re going to buy it from you for what sounds like a decent chunk of money, and maybe you’ll make it big, but we will absolutely make more money off it than you will.”

This is not a knock on Zuda — it’s a fact. Royalty rates top out at 40%, and what strikes me as the most likely royalties to be paid (for print editions) are 1%. That’s what publishers do, and you’ve contracted to work for a publisher. You have not contracted to be partners and grow rich together; see the Rights Agreement, paragraph 24, and Services Agreement, paragraph 25:

INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR. Nothing herein contained shall constitute a partnership or joint venture by and between the parties hereto or constitute either party the agent of the other. (emphasis original)

The second item concerns me more. The prolific Mr T is of the opinion that the contract is pretty good, and it may be as far as the comics industry goes.

But Zuda has been specifically pitched as webcomics, and that’s a place with a decade-long history of not doing work-for-hire. Those making their livings from webcomics do it on their own, not by partnering with a corporation and giving away the rights to their creation (exception: Penny Arcade, who managed to do exactly that twice, and bought themselves a five-year legal struggle; you won’t be that lucky).

How much does the Zudamodel stand in contrast with the Webcomics So Far model? Let’s just take one thing that Zuda will do for you: print your webcomic. If you work with them:

• they bear the costs of printing, publication, and promotion, but are under no obligation to do so (cf: Rights Agreement, paragraph 21 and Services Agreement, paragraph 22)
• they could get your book into the Diamond catalog or regular bookstores, but probably the bulk of purchasers will come from Zuda readers on the web
• they keep 99% of cover price for the book, you get 1%
• they own trademark on your webcomic for as long as they want

If you do things on your own:

• you have to produce the book, sinking money up front into printing books you hope you can sell
• you have to handle orders and fulfillment
• you probably won’t get into the Diamond catalog or regular bookstores, but the bulk of purchases would have come from your readers online anyway
• you’ll keep about 90% of cover price, but must assume the risk of unsold inventory
• alternately, you could use a print-on-demand service, which drops the risk and fulfillment from the equation, but you’ll only keep on the order of 40% of cover price
• even 40% >> 1%, and it’s still your property

Put these two points together, and Zuda is equating You Win! with We Own Your Stuff. Yes, they’re a publisher and that’s what publishers do. Yes, they do all the things that you don’t want to do because you’re a creator and dealing with the business aspects gives you a migraine. But the cost/benefit ratio is all out balance here — this is not 1942, when the only way for a kid with a head full of dreams to tell that comics story was to partner with a corporation that had figured out the very expensive disciplines of printing, distribution, promotion, and sales.

We’re talking about webcomics here; the barriers to entry are as low as human ingenuity can make them, and the only bar to success is the quality of your work. If you truly have a meltdown when considering all those business-related aspects, or if you’re honest and decide that you have no talent for them, and if you do them on your own you’ll only screw things up, then the Zudadeal is still not what you need. You need to hire somebody to handle the business instead of a business hiring you to handle the creative.

Let’s play What If for a moment.

Is it not possible for a company to make money off that deal? Of course it is. Aduz just won’t make as much as Zuda, and Zuda is interested in maximizing its return while paying out as little as possible while still attracting talent.

All that business stuff that gives you a headache? Zuda’s got people that eat it up, and they’ve precisely calculated the point that maximizes their return and minimizes their payout, and enshrined it in these contracts. If it’s your dream to work in comics and this looks like your best way in, if you can honestly look at everything described here and say you’d be happy to exist under these terms, then enter the contest and I hope you win and prove me wrong in every possible way.

But as written, the Zudadeal stands in opposition to the creator ownership that has been one of the core strengths of webcomics since Day One. Webcomics can do better, and so can you.

Editor’s note: we continue our skim of the Zudacontracts, with Big Ideas to be developed later. Today: the terms under which you supply ongoing contributions.

First impression: the Services Agreement is between the Submission (short) and Rights (long) Agreements in length. As before, numbers are taken from the various paragraphs in the contract, and it starts with standard boilerplate about who you are and why you’re signing.

1. You are being hired (“engaged”, in the text of the contract) to produce 52 pieces of work (“Screens”) based on your winning entry. Unless you and Zuda agree otherwise, it’s weekly, at $250 each. That’s $13,000 you’ll be paid under this contract, plus the $1000 from the Rights Agreement, plus whatever royalties may apply.

2. By mutual consent, at the end of 52 weeks, Zuda may hire you at the same rate to keep producing stuff. Said stuff can be immediately after the 52 week run, or delayed until schedules work out. If you opt not to, Zuda can hire somebody else to do your webcomic. I’ve said it before in these write-ups: if your webcomic is your baby and you don’t want to wonder who it’s running around with after curfew, then Zuda (indeed, any work-for-hire arrangement) is not for you.

3. You have a schedule for delivering your work, Zuda has one for publishing.

4. In addition to what you get in the Rights Agreement, you receive your per-screen payment of $250 within two weeks of delivery, plus 4% of cover price of print works. Merch is 6.4% of SRP or 12.5 of gross receipts, reprints are 30% of net, and both foreign-language reprints and English reprints outside the US/Canada are 15% of net. The implication I’m getting here is that the royalties under the rights agreement are what Zuda pays you for their long-term ownership of the material, and this paragraph covers your payment to make it.

5. But there are reductions to the amounts in paragraph 4. If you’re part of a team, those that produce the work split the money; if you’re part of a collection or anthology with other creators, you get pro-rated; combination with other properties is likewise pro-rated (so if your ICSWAFP gets paired up with — I dunno, Batman — and they become partners, you get half I guess). And here’s the interesting bit:

If Zuda exploits any Print Work, Retail Product or Licensed Reprint Edition that includes Material for which You rendered Services in a way or on a media platform not contemplated by this Services Agreement, whether now known or hereafter devised, Zuda shall pay You in accordance with the consideration structure created by Zuda, in good faith, for such exploitation.

Which I’m reading as, “We’ll come up with a rate for that brain-beaming. Trust us.” Once again, it’s these ambiguous cases that I hate, because it lets whichever party has the advantage in a contract (one guess as to who that is) leverage things further to their advantage.

6 and 7. Except for the biweekly $250 installments, payments and accounting are as in the Right Agreement: every six months and only if you’re owed at least $200, and you’re allowed to audit the books at your own expense.

8. What you create under this contract is subject to the same rights transfer as the Rights Agreement.

9. You may be assigned an Editor, and you will do what (s)he says.

10 — 13. Boilerplate matching the rights agreement: you created this stuff, it’s yours to assign, nobody else has a claim on it; if either you or Zuda screw up somehow, the other is not to blame; you’ll get credited on things that Zuda produces/prints; you get free stuff.

14. Layin’ down the law — if you fail in certain ways, you’re in default of the contract:

• not meeting deadlines
• not providing satisfactory work
• not doing anything else in this contract for any reason (including being incapable)
• not being straight about who you are and being legally able to enter into this contract with respect to this work

Given that I’m not any kind of lawyer (much less entertainment/IP), I’m guessing that this paragraph is entirely boilerplate; it’s reasonable enough to have things like deadlines, and if Zuda were to become arbitrary about what’s “satisfactory” or make a habit of coming up with unworkable deadlines with the sole purpose of screwing you, word would get around pretty fast. Hell, just putting these contracts out there in advance of accepting any submissions tells me that they aren’t interested in screwing you in an arbitrary fashion.

Zuda are apparently going to be avoiding the all-too-common situation in comics where a “monthly” book slips to “bi-monthly”, then “quarterly”, then “we’ll let you know when we can re-solicit”. As a reader, I applaud them for this; when asked for advice about how to build a webcomic audience, pick a schedule and stick to it is always at the top of my list.

BUT if you have circumstances in your life where, at random times for unpredictable durations, you’re unable to work (health or family issues, crippling creator’s block, whatever), best to disclose that at the beginning and find out if Zuda are willing to amend the contract or not; being in breach (no matter how unpredictable the reason) is not somewhere you want to be. How much do you not want to be there?

15. You got 10 days to fix the situation after you’re in default, then you’re subject to termination. You’ll get nothing more (except for what you’d be entitled to from the re-presentation of your work in other forms). Let’s call paragraphs 14 and 15 the Howard Tayler sez, “Keep a damn buffer!” section of the contract. You don’t get to run guest weeks at Zuda.

16 — 27. Repeats from the Rights Agreement: you or Zuda can transfer your interests to another (but you can’t up and say, “Pay Bob over there for the strip ’cause he’ll be drawing it from now on”); Zuda can do business with other Time Warner companies; register all issues in writing; law of New York state prevails; in the event of dispute, your only recourse is a suit; waivers are specific to individual items; Zuda isn’t obligated to actually publish you; if it’s not attached to this contract it doesn’t exist; you can’t be compelled to do something illegal; you and Zuda are not partners; paragraph headings are descriptive and have no legal meaning; and there are no third parties.

Editor’s note: we continue our skim of the Zudacontracts, with Big Ideas to be developed later. Today: the rights and reversions under which you operate.

First impression: the Rights Agreement is about twice as long as the Submission Agreement. This could take a while. It starts with boilerplate — who you are, who they are, you won, yay. Numbered paragraphs ahoy.

1. Everybody on a creative team has to agree to sign the contract. Question (and this isn’t a knock against Zuda) — what if one contributor doesn’t? Presumably the team loses the opportunity to sign and then we have the question from yesterday — what rights from the Submission do you get back?

2. Okay, it’s boilerplate, but it’s still creepy:

You grant and assign to Zuda, its successors, licensees and assigns, solely and exclusively, in any and all languages and media, whether now known or hereafter devised, throughout the universe, for the term of copyright, all rights in and to the Material (emphasis mine)

So when somebody invents direct brain-beaming of comics on Omicron Persei VIII, this contract already covers how Lrrr can read it. Creepy. Specifically, rights include:

You can sell your originals, as long as they’re labelled with copyright & trademark (more below), and 100 repros/year. Ownership of your originals is one of the elements of the Creator’s Bill of Rights from 1988 (see Reinventing Comics, pp 60 — 62 and here), so I’m very pleased to see this here.

3. Zuda wants you to sign the Services Agreement and create more work for them; presumably that contract has the details.

4. You get royalties, plus whatever payments the Services Agreement spells out. This is going to be fairly important, so details are:

5. Teams split money paid out evenly, unless all team members agree to a different split. If your work is commingled with others (say, in a Best of Zuda ‘08 anthology), you get pro-rated based on amount of content in the total package. If you don’t complete on deadline and Zuda has to pay somebody to finish for you, they get paid out of your royalties (up to a 50% reduction in payout to you). These all seem pretty reasonable.

6. Royalties are biannual, but you don’t get anything unless it amounts to at least $200. Fair enough.

7. The proverbial big one. This is going to be a vicious reduction to first principles:

• You keep copyright. That’s good.
• Zuda gets trademark. That’s less good.

Going back to the popular Siegel & Schuster example, if they’d kept copyright on Superman from Action Comics #38 and DC’s forerunner kept only the trademark, they would have wound up in about the same place as they did by having neither. S&S could have determined how and under what conditions the specific content of the Superman story would be printed and distributed. But the idea of Superman, and the ability of DC’s various historical identities to use Superman however they saw fit would stay with DC.

Which of those two is more valuable in the long term?

8. But you might get your rights back. After four years of your last hand-in of material under the Services Agreement, if Zuda hasn’t paid you at least $2000 over the prior two years, you can request in writing that all rights return to you.

It seems from a cursory reading that if your property if worth enough, but the royalties (or the terms of the Services Agreement) are slight enough, Zuda could just issue a new edition, cut a check, and keep the rights in play. This reminds me of the famed “Alan Moore gets the rights to Watchmen back as soon as it goes out of print” paradox.

And there’s my answer in sub-paragraph b: within six months of your request, Zuda either (choose one):

• returns the rights
• pays you for more services on mutally-agreed terms
• finds a way to pay you at least $2000
• brings material back into distribution

There’s the out — as long as Zuda are willing to cut you a check of at least $2000 every other year, you will never get the rights back. The cynic in me notes that what with pre-press, promotion, legal & other sundry costs, $2000 is probably a lot less than it would take to a) prepare a new release; or b) negotiate new work with you. So pretty much it’s either give you back the rights or cut a check.

The next sub-paragraphs indicate that if Zuda doesn’t give you your rights back, the 2 year clock starts again, and if they do, you get everything back. Given the long history of comics publishing treating all creator effort as work-for-hire, I suppose that even the theoretical return of rights is a step forward. But given that Zuda is meant to be working in the space of webcomics, which has a history of creator ownership, this model is about 180 degrees from the way that virtually every webcomicker works. They may be able to attract people who are not presently known and pro-grade webcomics creators, but I think this is a dealkiller for any existing webcomics creator.

The rest of paragraph 8 is technical details: you can publish whatever you like after reversion, but you have to leave Zuda’s name off it; anything they created in conjunction with you work they keep; any licenses or options (say, for ICSWAFP: The Movie!) in effect at the time of reversion stays in effect (but reverts to you on expiry), and nothing strikes me here as unreasonable.

9. Zuda has power of attorney to make deals on behalf of your material. Makes sense.

10. You can audit the books at your expense; bring your own forensic accountant.

11. You have the legal authority to assign rights to Zuda because this really is your work and nobody else has a claim on it. Boilerplate.

12. If you screw up, Zuda is not to blame and you can’t sue them, and vice-versa.

13. You get credited as creator of the work “in a size and manner consistent with Zuda’s standard practices at the time of publication”, which could include the fabled Teeny-Weeny Eyestrain-o-Vision. But if anybody fails to credit you as creator, inform Zuda and they’ll try to fix it.

14. You get free copies of various stuff. I like free stuff.

15. Zuda can sell their rights to the work, and you can direct them to pay your share to somebody else.

16. Zuda does business with Time Warner companies, and you agree not to challenge dealings solely on the basis of their having a common corporate parent. Still and all, expect Warner TV or movie productions to have a leg up on the option for ICSWAFP.

17. All notices in writing, make sure you get a receipt, and don’t send it postage-due (’cause honestly, you’d be a jerk if you did).

18. Again, all of this is governed by the law of New York.

19. Except as laid out above, none of Zuda’s interests will ever be given to you unless you sue and win.

20. Severability again: If any part of the agreement gets waived, it’s specific to a given item and not applicable to the rest, or to future agreements.

21. Zuda doesn’t have to publish your work at all. If that’s the case, look for a reversion after four years if they decide they don’t like your idea, or $2000 checks every other year if they do.

22 — 26. There are no side agreements, neither party is compelled to do anything illegal, you and Zuda are not partners, paragraph headings are labels only and have no legal meaning, and there are no third parties to the agreement. All boilerplate.

Four elements of the Creator’s Bill of Rights — right to accounting, legal counsel, prompt payment, and original artwork — are addressed in this contract. In fact, as others have pointed out, Zuda is recommending that you get a lawyer to advise you on the contracts before you decide to submit, so that’s actually progress. Unfortunately, the other eight — especially the first, The right to full ownership of what we fully create — are wavied under this contract.

Editor’s note: for those who missed yesterday’s rare weekend posting, we’re looking at each of the three Zudacontracts as quick overviews; the real analysis will come later. Up today: the terms under which you can submit.

Okay, the Submission Agreement. It’s not too long — about five screens full; much shorter than other contracts I’ve read. Numbering is as in the contract.

1. Definitions of terms — who are You, who is Zuda, what is the Website, etc. Most interesting part: “Submission” includes everything:

title of the work, the art and script comprising the work and the concepts, plots, themes, storylines, characters (including names and images), environmental settings, devices, characterizations, logos, trademarks, designs and other elements to the extent included in the work. (emphasis mine)

I have a feeling those things in bold are going to be critical;

2. If you don’t get selected, “Zuda shall have no rights at all in or to the Submission.” — that’s better than I hoped for.

3. You can’t use your submission in any other way during the review period (and presumably if you get selected that will be governed by the other contracts). If you were thinking about using Zuda to try to get a current project a wider readership, into print, or make some money off of it, stop thinking that now. You have to take it down and not show it in any form while it’s in consideration (which is for 90 days after submitting, or until explicitly rejected, whichever comes first). You cannot run a Zudaentry on your site.

4. If you’re chosen as a winner and sign the other two contracts, they come into force. Make sense. But if you decide not to sign with them, does Zuda get any rights to the work? I don’t see that explicitly laid out. That’s bad.

5. Okay, if Zuda doesn’t reject you and it’s not 90 days yet, they can enter you into a capital-C Competition; this extends the time you cannot use the work any other place and

6. If you’re selected for a capital-C Competition, you get $500 in exchange for everything in paragraph #5 (make sure you submit your W-9; I wonder if this disallows non-US residents?). If you get included in an anthology, it’s another $1000 (unless you win and are governed by the other contracts). If they reprint a hardcover anthology as softcover, or any other variation of form with the same content, you get nothing more. Sneaky.

7. Just a definition of how winners are chosen in capital-C Competition; usual bit about DQ for ballot-box stuffing.

8. This looks like the important one in this contract — what happens if you win the capital-C Competition? You get sent the Rights Agreement and Services Agreement (anaylses forthcoming), and you sign ‘em within 10 business days, and then you’re governed by those contracts.

If you don’t sign, then “Zuda shall have the right to rescind the deal offer and select the runner up as an alternate winner.” Still no explicit description of what rights Zuda retains and what reverts to you if you don’t sign. The disposition of everything in graf 5 is not laid out in that case; that omission is making me nervous.

9. Looks like the standard, “You are who you say you are, you created the work, you have the legal right to dispose of the work as you wish, and you aren’t going to cause us any legal headaches down the road” boilerplate. No big deal.

10. I was wrong about paragraph 8 being the important one in this contract. Let’s quote Number 10 in its entirety, shall we?

You acknowledge that Zuda has no obligation to You for Zuda’s use of material that was created by or for Zuda without the benefit of the Submission, before, during or after You submitted the Submission, and that is similar or identical to the Submission in theme, characters, ideas, plots storylines, formats or other similar respects. In addition, Zuda shall have no fewer rights with respect to the Submission than any member of the general public. (emphasis mine)

That second sentence is just ass-covering, but do look at the first one. By my reading, it says that Zuda can create additional work that is “similar or identical” to your entry at any time and they don’t owe you anything.

In one reading, this could be interpreted as, “Well, we once ran a story that was about an ice-cream scooper with amazing freeze powers who fights crime, so you can’t submit something similar and claim we ripped you off.”

On the other hand, it could be read as, “You submitted a story about an ice-cream scooper with amazing freeze powers who fights crime, and after we rejected you we created a new character who’s an ice-cream scooper with amazing freeze powers who fights crime, and it’s become the biggest thing since Siegel and Schuster signed away Superman, which by the way is a situation you should be very familiar with on account of it’s what you just did, Sparky.”

Let’s put it in bold — by my I Am Not A Lawyer, plain-English reading, this is the paragraph that explicitly identifies Zuda as an idea-farming mechanism and win or lose, you just gave up your story idea for ever and ever, Amen.

11. Standard severability boilerplate — if any single part of the contract isn’t valid, the rest still holds.

12. Standard jurisdiction boilerplate — the contract takes place in the state of New York, and if you want to dispute elements of it in future you have to do so there. If you live a long way from New York, enjoy the commute to court.

13. Standard completeness boilerplate — this contract (and the other two, if you win a capital-C Competition) is the entire legal agreement, nothing else governs the deal between you and Zuda.

I still don’t see the explicit reversion of rights to you if you get selected as a capital-C Competition winner but don’t sign. Zuda explicitly waive all its interests if you lose, but nothing about what happens if you reject them. Keep in mind that it’s a hole in a contract that does not completely answer a question that makes for lengthy fights in future.

And hey, guess what? DC Comics (wholly owned by Time Warner) has a hell of a lot more IP and contracts lawyers than you do, not to mention an annual legal budget that looks like the GDP of a small South American country. No matter how strong your position in a dispute, they can wait you out.

The remainder of the contract is divided into Technical Requirements (the 4×3 dictate, the length of the submissions, format of the images, and text descriptions), and a list of wherever the work may have previously appeared or currently appears.

To sum: by Zuda’s own declaration:

Everyone wishing to submit a comic to Zuda must read and agree to this agreement. If you don’t agree with it you should not submit your work.

If anything here (particularly the logic hole referenced in paragraphs 4 and 8, or the terms of paragraph 10) gives you that prickly feeling up the back of your neck, stay away. If you can, on careful reflection and consultation with an actual attorney, live with what’s here, then come back tomorrow as we look at the next contract.

Thanks to everybody for trying to gin up some conflict on my behalf; you’ll never know how much it touches me to know that webcomics were willing to start a riot on my behalf.

We’ll start with a little something for our readers in the northeastern corner of the US: looks like they won’t be digging up Tom Carvel after all, and I think we all know the reason: zombies.

Megatokyo Volume 5 dropped yesterday; gotta say, it reads much better in bulk than on a per-installment basis. I’d pretty much given up reading MT except in three- to four-week chunks because I’d lose the thread of the story. Of great interest are the timeline and reader’s guide in the back of the book:

• the former puts the whole plot into perspective — from strip 1 to the present day is roughly two months of story time, and everything from June 2001 forward represents a week
• the latter includes character bios so you can remember just who the heck everyone is

Now I’m starting to wonder just how big a story Fred Gallagher intends to make out of Megatokyo; at this point, I think I’d be surprised if we’ve reached the halfway point yet.