Platinum sets up "Cowboys," lands sponsor, and criticized by creator

Platinum Studios has been making plenty of news this week, so let's start with the big annoucement: Platinum has set up its comicbook concept "Cowboys & Aliens" at DreamWorks and Universal.

Deal features lots of big names. Producing are Imagine's Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, Platinum chief and "C&A" creator Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, "Transformers" scripters Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci. Strip Art Features founder Ervin Rustemagic and Rich Marincic will co-produce. Script will be by "Children of Men" and "Iron Man" scribes Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby.

Rosenberg, who ran Malibu Comics and launched one its lesser-known books, "Men in Black," to big-screen success, came up with the concept for "Cowboys & Aliens" more than 10 years ago and began pitching it upon opening the doors of Platinum Studios in 1997. Concept finally saw print in December as a heavily promoted (and discounted) graphic novel written by Fred Lente and Andrew Foley and drawn by Dennis Calero and Luciano LIma. Given that the concept is pretty much self-explanatory and flexible, film version could either stick close to the graphic novel or go in a completely different direction. 

Also this week, Platinum announced that AT&T has signed on as a presenting sponsor for its second annual Comic Book Challenge competition, with the top 50 entrants' names (with bios to follow) posted on AT&T's Blue Room site. Challenge will be held at Comic-Con in San Diego next month, with contestants vying "American Idol" style for a shot at having their comicbook pitch published by Platinum. Last year's winner, DJ Coffman's "Hero by Night," just wrapped its four-issue run.

But Platinum has come under fire in the comics blogosphere, first a few months ago in a brouhaha over credits that turned out to be a bit of a misunderstanding, and again earlier this week when a creator, Mike Strang, who signed over the rights to his creation to Platinum in a work-for-hire contract a few years ago, complained on his blog about having lost control of his property. (Sadly, Strang admits to not having read the contract he signed — obviously never the best course.)

Platinum's business model has always involved acquiring the rights to comics properties, whether existing or original, to exploit in multiple media. In that way, it's no different than most other production companies or studios. (Interestingly, co-ownership is becoming more common in comics: some of DC's upcoming Minx books and TOKYOPOP''s OEL manga are copyrighted in the names of the creators and the publisher; I'd be interested to know how such deals compare to full creator ownership and who has the controlling interest.) In an interview conducted in April for a profile of Platinum I wrote for Publishers Weekly Comics Week, Rosenberg said the company's deals with creators are determined on a case by case basis and ownership is not as essential to the company as the ability to develop a property in other media. Creator ownership is available at Platinum for those who ask for it and can negotiate it into their deals. What Platinum wants is the ability to make money off whatever deals it can make for a property, whether its toys, mobile phone applications, videogames, TV shows, cartoons or movies. Owning the property outright surely makes all of that at least a little bit easier, especially if it's a new property that's going out into these markets for the first time.

It's hard to blame Platinum for offering such contracts to people who are willing to accept the tradeoffs inherent in signing them, but there are some risks. The comics industry's history of abuse under work-for-hire conditions means such deals carry a stigma — especially when they're applied to original properties — thanks to the shoddy way such deals turned out for the likes of Siegel and Shuster and Jack Kirby. Also, Platinum may not legally be required to credit or compensate the creator should an original property acquired through a work-for-hire contract go on to become a huge hit movie, but the bad publicity that would accompany such a story would exact its own price on the company's image and reputation that would be hard to repair, and not just in the comics creative community.

One key question that has been asked is what will happen to the many properties Platinum has acquired in its ten-year history. While some will see print now that Platinum is publishing comics (in conjunction with partner company Top Cow), others will end up on the webcomics site DrunkDuck.com, others may be revamped by other creators and some will never see the light of day. Sure, that will be a disappointment to creators whose work didn't turn out the way they wanted it to, but that is part and parcel of working in any kind of entertainment business.

So far, looking at  the material on DrunkDuck and the list of projects once in development at Platinum, it seems unlikely that such practices are denying comics readers the chance to read unheralded masterpieces of the medium — which is beside the point from a purely moral perspective, but from a creative and legal perspective makes it hard to argue that whatever these creators were paid for their projects was outrageously unfair.

But this should still serve as a reminder to creators not to sign away the rights to their ideas if they have a problem with losing control of it. The state of the industry is nowhere near as limiting for creator ownership as it was in the the Golden Age or even of the 1970s, when Marv Wolfman and Steve Gerber created characters for Marvel that became the subject of later lawsuits over ownership.

What remains important is for each creator to cut deals that they can live with. Some will doubtlessly see an advantage in surrendering some or all rights for upfront payment and improved chances that the work will be published in one form or another. But those who can't bear to sell the rights to their project have more possibilities than ever before, and if a project is truly good enough to succeed in the market, finding a publisher who will work with you on ownership terms will not be a problem.