An ethical debate, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing...

This is a bit different from my usual screed in that, rather than going on about the stupid things that the neighbors do, or railing against the latest idiocy from the Sock-Puppet-In-Chief, I’m going to ramble on a bit about ethics and obligations owed.

Now the obligation in question is not necessarily a deep and meaningful obligation, but it’s one that I’ve been puzzling over lately, and one for which I don’t really have an answer.

So, I’m throwing the question out for public rumination.. I’d be interested to see if anyone else, preferably a deeper and/or wider thinker than myself picks this up and runs with it. (Paging Akicita…)

Postulated: An artist who uses another artist’s creation in hir own work owes that original creator a debt. This can be a debt of acknowledgement (“A tip of the Hatlo hat to:…”) or a financial debt, as a fee paid to a writer for the rights to make a movie based on hir story.

Question: Does the debt owed potentially (or perhaps even necessarily) include the duty not to make the character(s) act in a manner that the original author would not recognize as hir creation?

The item that’s got me thinking about this is the forthcoming graphic novel “Lost Girls”, by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie. In the book Dorothy Gale (The Wizard of Oz), Wendy Darling (Peter Pan), and Alice (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass) meet in an Austrian hotel as adults in 1913 - shortly before war breaks out in Europe. They tell each other, in graphic and profusely-illustrated detail, the secret stories of the sexual awakening that each experienced during the course of her adventure. This is apparently going to be, in its final form, more than 300 pages long.

Leaving aside the child-porn-ish aspects, and the question of whether bringing the raincoat brigade into comic book shops is a good or a bad thing, it’s the use of the characters that has me pondering.

Certainly, the book would not resonate so much with its potential audience if it featured three completely original characters telling their tales of adolescent awakening in wholly unique fantasy lands. No; obviously, the choice of heroines was intentional, and meant to provoke a response. Whatever one may say about Alan Moore, and whether or not one always agrees with his decisions, he does not appear to act without some thought aforehand, and to deliberate effect.

Now this is not the first time that Mr. Moore has taken another author’s characters and run with them – to good effect, I might add. Sometimes he creates pastiches of recognizable characters – half of the fun in reading the stories in the “Top 10” comic, set in the city of Neopolis, where EVERYONE has super powers, is recognizing on whom many of the characters are based. In the classic series “Watchmen”, the heroes are pastiches of heroes created for the now-defunct Charlton Comics line in the 1960s. On the other hand, in “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” he acknowledges that his characters are “the real deal”: H. Rider Haggard’s Alan Quartermain, Bram Stoker’s Mina Harker, Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo, and others.

Now here’s where it all gets a bit murky.

When “League” was made into a (stupid but moderately entertaining) movie, Mr. Moore insisted that all mention of his name be removed, as they had not made HIS “League”. And therein lies my problem; with the exception of the “Fiendish Chinese Devil-Doctor”, whose inspiration, Dr. Fu Manchu, was still under copyright by the estate of his creator, Saxe Rohmer, all of the characters that Mr. Moore used were in the public domain. This meant that, while the obligation postulated above – to pay or otherwise acknowledge his debt to the creators of his templates was made moot, the question posed of an obligation to the characters themselves, and the original authors’ conceptions was not.

In essence, the impression given was that making someone else’s character, for example, a laudanum-addicted wreck was acceptable usage, but turning him back into a swashbuckling adventurer was not. (Or naybe it was just the whole Dorian Gray, Tom Sawyer thing that he couldn’t stand…)

(He did the "take my name off; this isn't MY story" thing again with “V for Vendetta”, which was completely his creation with David Lloyd – as far as I’m concerned, it’s their toy and they can do what they want with it.)

“Watchmen”, on the other hand, was an interesting case. Mr. Moore had originally intended to write the story using the Charlton heroes, but when told that in fact DC Comics, the current rights-holder, had plans for the characters he went back and created recognizable surrogates to use in his story. Assuming that this did not change the basic structure of Mr. Moore’s story, this, in the original, would have meant established heroes betraying, raping and killing each other during the course of the series; all, presumably, without input or consideration of the original characters’ creators’ feelings or opinions as to whether their creations would betray, rape, or kill.

Now in the comics industry, where characters are, for the most part, owned by mega- media conglomerates and creative teams on books are routinely, almost promiscuously, swapped around, it is not unusual for continuities and defining characteristics to change in a blink; so we’re sort of used to seeing, for example, Bruce Wayne’s Batman be retconned (RETroactive CONtinuity changed) from millionaire playboy adventurer who jokes with his youthful “chum”, to the near-psychotic (I’m being charitable, here) grim avenger of the night with scarcely a thought for the character, much less for what the original creator might have thought of any of his creation’s later incarnations.

Which brings us back to the original question: What (for want of a better term) moral responsibility does an artist have to someone else’s creation? Is it enough to tell a good story with the character? Or is there an obligation to use the character in a manner that is respectful of who and what that character is to its creator and its fans? Alternatively, when does Rider Haggard’s Alan Quartermain stop being Rider Haggard’s and become Alan Moore’s Alan Quartermain? And if you’re willing to take another writer’s characters and turn them upside down, do you have a moral right to complain when someone does it to one of yours?

Now my gut feeling is that, from an ethical, “do unto others…” “what goes around…” sense, the answer to the last question is no. On the other hand, in a “does this make a good story?”, “Is it art?”, sense, I have to go with Robert Crumb’s Rule of Thumb for artists: “Whatever works!”

So, as you can tell, I come down firmly in the “I don’t know” camp.

The floor is now open for discussion.