Author: Graeme McMillan

Pop culture is half about enjoyment and half about denial. If I can spend four minutes watching a Kanye West video, that’s four minutes that I’ve wasted in my life, but it’s also four minutes that I haven’t had to think about the shit in my life. It’s a toss-up is what I’m saying. A balance – both awful and wonderful.

I’ll say it again – make it a mantra: Credit is easy, credit is free, and credit is proper. Nobody loses anything when a company or their spokesperson says, ‘Thanks to Gerry Conway for creating Vixen in the first place.’ That doesn’t cost anyone anything but a few sentences. More importantly, it’s a statement of fact. No creation of Vixen = no Vixen animated series. No hundreds of jobs for the people on that series, no income stream for the company making that series, no Annie Award if it’s amazing. There was an artist involved with Gerry, too [Bob Oksner], and it simply doesn’t take very much effort to point them out as the starting point. There are three intros in the ‘Art of Big Hero 6’ book, and all three talk about ‘origins’ of the project – not one mentions us. There’s a video piece on the origins of BH6 on the Blu-ray – it doesn’t mention us. That’s just not right.

Some companies line up behind a defense that comics are cumulative works and therefore credit is tricky because there is no one creator. But that’s not the case. We went to a comic convention last year – and I won’t name names – but one of the guests introduced themselves as the co-creator of a Lee/Kirby character. Now, this person certainly worked on the character and did a great job – maybe the definitive job and certainly my favorite run on that series – but they didn’t co-create the character. Miller’s run on ‘Daredevil’ defined that series for me, but Miller didn’t co-create Daredevil. He added to it. A lot. I worked on X-Men. I also wrote a Superman book for Vertigo that I think added something to the mythos. But I didn’t co-create Superman or the X-Men. I think it’s pretty simple to identify who created characters and say, ‘You came up with that. Good for you.’