Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, darkness, david hine, dc, marvel

David Hine On Biting The Hand That Fed Him

Published Fri, 06 Apr 2012 17:30:47 -0500

Over at Broken Frontier, David Hine seems to have done a rather good job at burning his bridges.

A familiar smaller press name from the nineties, David Hine relaunched his comics career at Marvel, working on a numbr of titles including X-Men and Daredevil. He also write Azrael until Flashpoint and the New 52. 18 months ago, we noted he has six books out in one month. A year later, however, he had none.

He was writing for Radical, Spawn for Todd McFarlane and putting out his own comic with Shaky Kane, through Image.

He's also started writing The Darkness, the first issue of which has just gone to second print.

So what's up?

At Broken Frontier he wrote…

Working for the Big Two publishing companies puts you in front of a very big audience that you would have to bust a gut to reach any other way. But there are enormous drawbacks to working with characters that were created by other people, people incidentally, whose contributions have, for the most part, never been adequately recompensed because they were work for hire.

I'm not going to get into the legal issues here. Frankly I don't give a shit that creators pissed away their rights on lousy contracts or when they signed the backs of their pay cheques. No amount of courtroom verdicts can alter the fact that the creators were treated badly from an ethical perspective and that taints everything that is produced by Marvel and DC until the day they make reparation, not because a court rules that they have to, but because it's the right thing to do.

Goodness. I mean he's not wrong. But as Steve Niles discovered, that's the kind of thing that only makes you a pariah amongst those who are working for The Men…

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