Highway 62

So asked Michael Stipe in LIFE'S RICH PAGEANT (one of my favorites, even if it wasn't as earthshattering as MURMUR or an album I come back to even now such as FABLES OF THE RECONSTRUCTION.)

News Sleazy Tintin book raises ire of estate - News from Spain - Expatica

So if I call it Tintin fanfic, I suppose I'm going to get a kick in the teeth, right? Oddly, it seems like this whole thing is kind of a non-issue. I mean, there's an issue, but if this book had been written by Herge, the there'd have been no kerfluffle at all, right? The point is that this was an unauthorized work that's being clamped down on by the holders of the copyright.

I realize that I hold an unpopular position in this regard. I don't think that there's any inherent right to profit from fanfiction based on characters for whom you don't own. If you can convince the copyright holders (better yet, the creators, but these two parties are often not the same, sadly) then, great, go ahead and publish the new work. But if you don't own the work and you go ahead and publish it, then you oughta expect to be clobbered.

Now, would anyone in the abovementioned case have cared about the book if it hadn't supposedly been about Tintin in the first place? No. It would have been an unremarkable potboiler by all descriptions. Seems to me that the writer was banking on a character that he himself didn't create (but spent some time re-imagining) to sell their work. I'll allow for the possibility of misreading things, but I don't think that I have.

Now, I realize that in comics we're quite used to pastiche. You know, pastiche, where you copy something not to make fun of it (that's parody) but to comment on it, obliquely or otherwise. For instance, WATCHMEN is a pastiche of the Charlton heroes, whom DC had bought up the copyright on. This allowed the story to go places that it couldn't have gone had the characters in WATCHMEN been The Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, et al. As much as I regard pastiche as theft (in the Wildean sense of stealing and not borrowing), there's a difference between it and outright theft (ie, writing a book about Tintin and getting frisson from the character doing things that they'd not ordinarily do. Yes, you can make the same argument about say, Grant Morrison and Rian Hughe's reimagining of DAN DARE, I'll allow it.)

We've come to lean heavily on pastiche, on "oh hey, so and so is this universe's Superman analogue," and it's far too much like borrowing for my taste. Write your own material. Comics aren't alone in this, mind you. There's been a whole raft of literature since the fifties and sixties where you get "WUTHERING HEIGHTS told from a minor character's point of view." The guilty know who they are.

We're already standing on the shoulders of giants. No need to advertise it.