Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, entertainment, Mark Millar, starlight

The Starlight Cover Competition That Isn't

Last week, Mark Millar made the following offer.

A competition for unpublished artists to get a paid variant cover gig on Starlight #6. Mark Millar has run similar competitions in the past with Clint Magazine – though only the first round came to anything, the winners of the second round were dropped and they created their own book instead.

A $300 fee to the winner and a variant cover on Starlight #6… However, this time, there was argument from the off.

So Mark Millar took his ball home, writing,

As you may have read this morning, I thought it might be fun to have a fan variant cover on Starlight #6 before it goes to press as a good opportunity for new talent who have maybe never been seen before. I would expect to print around 500 copies of this, but was planning to pay 300 bucks for the cover. It would be a small loss but I thought something we could do in future on the books where new kids starting out would have a chance to appear in the same book as the likes of Goran and Cassaday.

However, a bunch of artists and designers started tweeting that asking unpublished artists to send in their images is asking them to essentially work for free, even if they're new and doing as samples. They said this amounts to spec art and I'm profiteering from people who are just starting out and wanting exposure, etc. You can read the thread on Twitter. It's something I disagree with, but as artists rights is a huge deal to me (I'm the only comic writer, as far as I'm aware, who has halved his now-substantial producer fee on every project with all my artists as well as halving the movie rights money when we sell a book to a Hollywood studio). The rights money when a writer and artist sell their book to a studio can be DWARFED by a producer fee (which I build up with every movie deal), but I feel it's important to go fifty fifty on everything with your partner. Thus profiteering from new artists is obviously something I'm disinclined to be accused of.

So apologies to anyone who got excited about this and fancied the novelty of being published on a limited run comic-book cover, but I lecture writers all the time on being greedy with the artists and won't be accused of something like this. That said any drawings you want to do are always welcome in the Millarworld Creative Forum for people to gawp at and I'm going to run a wee backpages section in the books starting soon where people can see some of their art reprinted in the letter column for fun. There's 4 free pages to play with at the back of these books and I feel quite inspired to use them to showcase people who's work really stands out in these forums. I want to revamp the creative forum a bit and highlight some of the best artists we have in the hope of getting them assignments. Am v proud to see we've had over a dozen people who started just posting their drawings in there go full time.

Anyway, I'm afraid the fan-variant cover is off, sadly. Please do not submit.

Of course, some folk had started….

Jamon G posting,

Well anyway if this was still on, this would have been my cover:

It's worth considering that while the competition in these circumstances was probably entirely justified, what Mark Millar would have got out of it was promotion. Images being created for free, featured on his website a sense of excitement and fan involvement – encouraging the sort of activity that happens with larger companies IP without their encouragement, something Millar has often fostered. He doesn't need to do it with Kick Ass, people do it willingly, but less so with Starlight where he has to fake a woman's back tattoo to get publicity.

Nevertheless, for those involved, and those who entered this willingly without being conned or overpromised, it's a damn shame.

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