This is unbelievable. I guess Alan Moore was right after all. 

I was about to say the same.  DC's lawyers could just as easily present that as him abandoning his claims to the work, leaving it their property.  Even if the public domain thing carried any weight, DC has the muscle to threaten anyone who wanted to do something with it, with endless litigation to make it too costly to pursue, like when Marvel intimidated Dez Skinn into stopping his Marvelman revival, in the UK and going with a new title, at Eclipse.  They tried to do it with Valiant X-O Manowar and Shooter called their bluff; but, he also had venture capital investors who could play hardball in litigation, if Marvel tried it.

Burroughs Inc has gone after people using Tarzan, despite the early books falling into the public domain and have lost, in court; but, that doesn't stop them.  They still have a trademark on the name, that still gives them leverage, when someone tries to do something derivative.  They can't do much to stop someone from publishing their own edition of Tarzan of the Apes; but, they can stop you from using the name, for a film title.

I have to say, reading his statements, it was the first time I had heard Dan Didio called a standup guy.

It will certainly be interesting to see DC response to this.

No. I stand by the statement that Epic wasn't necessarily a better deal, in the long run. Jim Starlin benefitted from the initial push, but still ended up taking his ball to First and Eclipse. I can name one book that got some major attention, which wasn't owned outright, by Marvel and that was Moonshadow. Epic's biggest seller was Elektra Assassin, because Marvel promoted the hell out of it, because they owned it. That was the problem of Epic. Archie Goodwin dealt fairly, but Marvel didn't bust the humps to support the projects they didn't own. So, they published your title and they had first refusal rights for anything related to it. That was their deal. First comics offered ownership, but they had very long publishing rights. Eclipse and Dark Horse offered something a bit more favorable, though possibly with a lower budget behind it. Comico offered partial ownership, which led to all kinds of headaches when they went bankrupt, as did other company terms, when they also went bankrupt.

If you don't own the publishing company, you are pretty much always going to be on the losing end of the deal. Dave Sim preached that from the start of Cerebus. If you want to be the sole authority of your work, don't go to a publisher, do it yourself. Sim did it, Jack Katz did it, the Pinis did it. They controlled their destiny. Yes, some of them went to the big publishers or were approached by them to reprint stuff, or to publish other things. Colleen Doran and Jeff Smith took their stuff to Image, for a while.

The creator is always negotiating from a position of weakness, when dealing with a publisher, because they are looking for the publisher to invest the money to print and market their work. You are dealing with the devil, even in the best of companies. The question is, how much are you willing to give up, in chasing your goal? Miller didn't seem to mind the terms of Ronin, because he had alternatives. DC offered him X amount, which he liked, plus whatever other terms were in the contract and then also let him play with Batman. He made a ton of money off the latter. Ronin did well, initially, but wasn't that huge a selelr, in trade, compared to other individual books or other Miller work. He opted for better terms for Sin City, though and got them and has had more long term success with that, though probably makes more up front from doing another Batman or Daredevil project, plus his royalties.

Moore and O'Neil retained ownership of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which isn't necessarily that lucrative, given that they were working with public domain characters so nothing could stop someone else from doing the same concept under a different name, even with the same characters

Moore & Gibbons were diddled by the fine print of their contract and Warner's greed and so, apparently was, Willingham. Moore at least has the excuse that copyright law in the UK is different from the US and he retained some ownership of his work and may have wrongly assumed that he had more legal protections than he did. Willingham owned his own property before, with Elementals, and ended up selling it off. Just because he says that Fables is now public domain and anyone can make movies and such doesn't mean that they can, until a court makes a ruling, if and when Warner contests that idea and you know they will. If they have actively tried to cut him out of the picture, then you know they will contest the legality of his claims that he can just turn the work over to the public, when DC has a contract that gives them some rights related to it. No matter what he says about owning the IP, it ends up being what a court rules, when one party contests it. As I said earlier, they could easily contend that Willingham abandoned his ownership, leaving them as the de facto owners, due to their publishing contract. if a court agrees with them, it becomes fact and Willingham is still up the creek.

If this is Willingham's idea of sticking it to DC/Warner, it seems to be a bit of tilting at windmills, because it gives him no leverage with DC and probably gives their lawyers more ammo to gain even more control. As I said above, they still have economic power to intimidate any potential Fables users from going forward, even if they don't have the legal right. They can tie it up indefinitely with injunctions and legal red tape indefinitely.

The one instance I can cite, in the comic book world, of a publisher who pretty much gave talent everything on a silver plate and dealt fairly with them was tundra and Kevin Eastman and he sunk $14 million into that and barely had anything to show for it, later. It got the Crow more attention and launched Mike Allred, with Madman and let Rick Veitch and Steve Bissette do some things without kissing corporate backside; but, Bissette ended up with massive headaches trying to run the actual publishing side of things, for Tundra, while Eastman was buying Batmobiles and scream queen wives and Veitch ended up making more money by doing 1963 at Image, in the early speculator days, than just about anything else.

Except that what DC did with Watchmen had literally never been done before in the then fifty year history of comics. So it wasn’t remotely foreseeable that it would happen. I’m fact in the history of publishing up to that time there were only a handful of titles that had been kept continuously in print. Barring Moore and Gibbons having a crystal ball they weren’t going to foresee something that no contract lawyer at the time would have seen as a reasonable possibility.

I'll admit to being a bit puzzled. The concept of taking fairy tales and growing them up and having connected stories can't be original to Willingham. Didn't ABC have a show a few years back called " Once upon a time" that was the same type of story ?



And Slam_Bradley, surely you're not saying what DC is doing is justified?  You might hate both sides but it appears that they are robbing  and cheating Willingham.  Boy, am I tired of seeing the sad story of a bigger entity using an army of lawyers on you until you run out of money to win a case.