The Contractual Obligation Post

As a result of the movie's success, volumes of V for Vendetta are really moving off the bookstore shelves. Newsarama gave us some specific numbers last week.

Last week, for example, the trade was #4 for trade paperback fiction and #1 in graphic novels sales at Barnes and Noble; #10 trade paperback fiction and #1 in graphic novel sales at Borders/Waldenbooks; #3 overall and #1 in graphic novel sales at Amazon.com; and at # 8 on the BookScan Adult Fiction Trade Paperback list for the week ending March 26, 2006. The trade also debuted at #89 on USA Today's bestseller list, and moved up to #40 this week. Additionally, in terms of comic shops, the V for Vendetta trade was the #1 reorder title for the week of March 14th-20th, according to Diamond.

But you can't talk about sales on the V book without talking about the author, his opinion of the movie, and his contract with DC Comics. In the comments for that same Newsarama post, Don Murphy, producer of Natural Born Killers, (and more importantly for this discussion) From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Rich Johnston square off to debate the matter, and Eddie Campbell and J. Michael Straczynski drop by later. It's an entertaining read, even if it rehashes points we've heard before and will likely hear again.

But one thing Rich says has bothered me for a while. When he mentions Alan Moore's contract with DC for V, he asserts that "the deal had repercussions that neither party could conceive of at the time." This seems to be a regular Moore talking point, and Moore mentioned it himself last year in an interview with Heidi MacDonald for Publishers Weekly. According to Moore, he and David Lloyd sold DC the rights to V, and those rights would return to them after the comics had been out of print for 18 months. Moore implies that DC had intended to publish the 10 issues that made up the series and, 18 months later, it would all be over and he and Lloyd would have the rights again. Who could have ever guessed that the comics would be collected in a paperback book that would never (yet) go out of print? I'll grant that the timeline might've been far-fetched in the mid-'80s, and maybe Moore himself never foresaw the rise of graphic novels, but I find it hard to believe that DC didn't have plans when they signed the contract to publish V as a paperback collection. The contract Moore describes is a book contract, not a periodical contract. Since when would a periodical contract be concerned with how long a work stays in print? By definition, a periodical doesn't stay in print, so there's no need to include a provision for reversion of rights. Periodical contracts usually involve first serial rights--possibly with some provision for reprinting--or outright work for hire. If the contract did indeed resemble a book contract rather than a periodical one, it suggests that DC was thinking in different terms than Moore claims he was. Even if DC didn't have specific plans to publish a collection, there's no question in my mind that they were preparing for that possibility.

In a case such as this in which the success of the work was far beyond what either party would have reasonably hoped, it wouldn't be unusual for the contract to be renegotiated. I have no idea what attempts or rebuffs might have occurred on either side, but too much water seems to have passed under the bridge for any changes in the contract to be made now.