Illustration Agreements

Harvard Law School attorney Stu Rees did his thesis on comic strip syndicate contracts. Stu represented me and several other cartoonists and helped change the way syndicate contracts were written and negotiated. Here's a link to his thesis.

The Graphic Artists Guild keeps an eye on what types of contracts illustrators are having to sign. It offers a good resource for understanding contracts as well as offering some real-life contracts as examples. GAG Contract Monitor.

The Authors' Guild has Negotiating tips for nine typical contract clauses.

Famed Illustrator C. F. Payne has some strong thoughts on Work-for-Hire agreements. While hard to avoid, WFH agreements remove an illustrator's legal authorship to his or her work. You're not just selling rights, nor simply the original art, but your very claim to authorship. Not a new article but an important one, especially since Payne's career has skyrocketing (at least compared to mine!) since he wrote this article, indicating it's not necessary to sell out in order to make a living.

Our best luck is with clients who do not have a boilerplate contract. Oftentimes clients who do have a contract have "borrowed" it from someone else, rather than having an attorney draft one for them. In any case, it is better for the Illustrator to have his or her own boilerplate, often referred to as a Letter of Agreement (see GAG Contract Monitor above). This allows the Illustrator to have more control in the negotiation process, and creates a better opportunity to explain the terms for usage of rights.

It is best to grant usage rights as specifically as possible. For example, Exclusive North American print rights for one year in March 2007 issue of Passing Classical Gas magazine. After that point, all rights revert back to you.

Limit the number of unpaid revisions to one or two. Chances are this will halve your annual workload and double your income for the year! I'm only slightly exaggerating.

How do you know if you've negotiated a good deal? If afterward you don't feel like you just screwed yourself. Never be afraid to say No and ask for what you are worth.

Ted

Lay Down Sally

It took me forever to find the name of the artist for this wonderful illustration. It's by Arthur Rackham, an influential illustrator around the turn of the century, who I should have learned about in school but instead learned about "real" artists and how to make mosaics.

Here's what ticks me off. There are some great books out there that have hundreds of illustrations in them. Yet there are no credits given to the artists. The book I found this pic in had not credits, but acknowledgements. This means the photo or art service. This is a disservice to the illustrator and the reader. It is also, in my opinion, an immoral industry to supply photos of works of art in the category of, essentially, clip art.

Anyways, it took a while but I found it, and discovered that Arthur Rackham was an incredibly talented and prolific illustrator. He illustrated several classic books such as Wind in the Willows, worked with Barry on some Peter Pan books, and there is a website with scores of his illustrations, but I won't put the link up because all it is is an attempt to sell prints and mugs and postcards of his art. Wouldn't he love that? How can someone with no talent themselves stoop to going around pulling bad reproductions of public domain work and make a business out of selling bad prints and matchbooks of the art? (notice the watermark on the Valkyrie illo.)

On the other hand, I'm no big proponent of what modern corporations are doing to keep their properties from falling into the public domain (like Superman), by having copyright laws changed that don't really help creators, just corporations... and "re-creating" characters so that they can legally call them new properties (like killing Superman and bringing him back... a shallow attempt to create a new property from an old one just when the copyright and trademark end was looming near.)

All the corporations, and even some art reps, were sending lobbyists to Washington to fight the Freelance Writers and Artists Protection Act, which would have removed us from anti-trust laws which disallow us from negotiating prices and terms as a group against media giants. It would be nice to have some laws concerning art and writing that actually are in the interest of artists and writers. Making Work for Hire illegal would be a good first step! And how about giving credit to all artists, whether living or dead.

The reason the Laws concerning art are important is because that affects the public attitude toward art.