Your Tax Dollars at Work

This incident happened a while ago, back around January. I’m just now getting around to posting the story. Yes, I still have serious issues with procrastination and work avoidance. I’m working on it.

Anyway. I’ve been a fan of comic books since I learned to read, although I don’t buy any on a regular basis any more. I got older, my tastes changed, comics changed, comics got more and more expensive and I needed the money for groceries. I still keep up with what’s going on with Marvel and DC, and I’ve seen most of the movies from both companies. (On DVD from the library. Movies got too expensive years ago. Not to mention crappy.) Avengers: Endgame seemed like a good stopping point: it was everything the comics I grew up with used to be but aren’t any more. The last movie I saw in a theater was Spider-Man: No Way Home, and that was mostly for the nostalgia factor; Tobey Maguire will always be my movie Spider-Man. The first comic book I’ve bought in years is the topic of this blog.

For the non-fans, a quick catch-up: Marvel and DC aren’t the only two companies, just the biggest. These days Marvel (Spider-Man; the X-Men) is owned by Disney, while Time/Warner owns DC (Batman and Superman). Then we have Image, Dark Horse, IDW and a bunch of other smaller companies floating around the edges. Plus there are independent creators who use crowdfunding platforms like Indigogo to bankroll their publishing efforts. All of these involve physical print endeavors. There may be other creators whose work is solely available on the internet, but I’m not familiar with them.

And now we’ve got Eric July.

Like me and a lot of other long-time fans, July had stopped buying books from the Big Two because he wasn’t happy with the direction the companies had taken and the disrespect he felt was being shown his childhood heroes. So he decided to make his own comics. Except he didn’t stop at just that. Instead of going the crowdfunding route, he chose to eliminate all the middlemen and start his own comic book company, creating, writing, printing and distributing graphic novels starring his own creations in his own shared universe. He hired an artist, put the book together, created some merchandise (shirts and posters), promoted all this on his YouTube channel and, in July 2022, opened up shop with a 70+-day sales campaign. The comic was a 90-some page graphic novel on quality paper, priced at $35. July’s stated campaign goal was $100,000 in sales.

By the end of the campaign, he had earned $3.7 million. That’s million with a capital M, folks. Not bad for his first-ever comic book.

There’s more to his story—his second issue’s sales campaign is currently ongoing, and a lot of folks in the industry and on YouTube and Twitter are not at all pleased by his success. But that’s not what this story’s about. This is just the background. We now return to your regularly scheduled blog, already in progress.

I wasn’t part of the initial campaign. I came in when the mudslinging started. It made for entertaining viewing on July’s YouTube channel. I looked into his website and decided $35 was too much for my wallet at that point in time. However, my finances picked up after Christmas, so for my January birthday I decided to treat myself and support a fellow writer and former mainstream comics fan by buying a copy of his book.

This is where I ran afoul of the US Postal Service.

I had no trouble placing my order and paying for my purchase. Mr. July had no trouble accepting my money and shipping me my book. They even sent me an email letting me know the order had been filled, with a tracking number so I could follow its journey. (The new company is in Texas, while I’m in Pennsylvania.) I had fun checking in once or twice a day to see how things were going. Anticipation soared when I saw the book had arrived at the Lancaster distribution center and would probably be delivered at my house the following day.

Here’s where the system broke down.

The next morning I logged on and clicked the tracking info. The book was still in Lancaster. Then it was en route to Ephrata. Then it was in Ephrata. Then communication stopped. There was no information; the book had disappeared. Oh wait, there it was. For reasons known only to the postal gods, my package, which had made it all the way from Texas and safely arrived at the Ephrata Post Office, which is maybe a mile from where I live, had inexplicably been rerouted and delivered to the Christiana Post Office on the other side of the county. Uh, whut?

 Time to take personal action. Armed with my tracking number, I drove over to the PO and asked them what happened. They didn’t know. They had no explanation. The best they could give me was that the package had somehow been mislabeled and sent to Christiana by mistake. How did it get mislabeled? Shrugs all around. It must have had the right label on it to start with or it wouldn’t have been sent to Ephrata. So the mislabeling had to have happened at the Ephrata Post Office. Why and by whom? Again, no concrete answers. It was probably a machine because we all know government employees never make mistakes. All they could do was have it sent back to the Lancaster distribution center and start over. All I could do was go home and wait.

Well, they did get it sorted out by that evening, as I saw on the tracking info. It was returned to the Ephrata PO by morning and I finally got it by noon. The book was in good shape. Nice quality product. The story and art wasn’t bad. Better than I’ve seen from a lot of offers out of the Big Two lately. If Mr. July can keep this up, he’s got a winner on his hands. Can’t say the same for the Post Office.

This may wind up becoming a continued story. Like I said, July’s currently running his second campaign for issue #2. This time I ordered early. He’s going to start shipping orders out at the end of this month, via UPS. UPS has announced it’s going on strike at the start of August. Here we go again. Well, I’ve still got all my old comic books stashed in the closet. At least I’ll have something to read.

 

  

A Woman's Secret Weapon

Huh. Would you look at that. I’m actually getting some traffic on this blog. Not bad, considering I haven’t updated in years. It’s probably just Russian bots, but hey. A click’s a click.

For the record, I'm okay. I don't think I've got the virus. So far, so good. I had a bout of bronchitis in February,right before everything went to hell. Maybe that scared it off. I had to get home WiFi because all my sources of free WiFi disappeared literally overnight, and I need to download and send files if I want to keep getting paid. Other than that, for me it's been business as usual. I was working at home and anti-social to begin with. All the virus did was governmentally sanction my normal behavior.

And now I find people are looking at this. So here’s some brand-new content, for you, my devoted fans.

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If you’re a fan of superheroes, and tend to hang out with other fans, sooner or later the question arises: who’d win in a fight between Hero X and Hero Y? The pairings generally end up being either Thor vs. the Hulk or Superman vs. Thor or the Hulk. This is because heroes are usually judged by their powers or physical strength, and Thor, Hulk and Superman (in whatever order you choose) are the top tier, physically. (For the record, if it’s Batman vs. anyone else, the winner is always Batman. Just so you know in advance.)

Being of a different gender than the majority of comic book fans, I’ve been hankering to see a throwdown between Thor and Wonder Woman, because I’m pretty sure Diana would win. They may be evenly matched in physical strength—granted, Thor’s probably stronger—but when it comes to combat skills, armed or unarmed, Diana’s got the edge. She’s been trained in both by professional warriors. Thor’s reliance on his hammer has probably made him complacent. That, and his self-assurance that he can deck anyone with a punch, would leave him wide open to a skilled, experienced pro.

I can even picture it: Thor makes some chauvinistic remark about Diana’s outfit and she promptly knocks him on his ass. Thor gets up and—assuming he has more than two brain cells—reassesses the situation, wisely decides being an a-hole is going to get him pummeled, and rejoins the battle, which Wonder Woman wins anyway because, again, trained vs. untrained fighter. This is why you need to stay in school, kids.

Sidebar: back in the ‘70s DC put out a special one-shot tabloid-sized comic of Superman vs. Muhammed Ali. Google it if you don’t believe me. I just did to skim the plot, since I never read it. It turned out just the way I figured: they nullified Superman’s powers for the duration of the fight, making the two even in physical strength. Whereupon Ali mopped up the ring with Supes because Ali was a trained, experienced boxer. Superman just throws punches. Take away the advantage of super-strength, or pit him against someone of equal strength but better skill, and he’s liable to get flattened. Same for Thor. Maybe not the Hulk because the Hulk is too stupid to stop fighting. This isn’t about strength anyway. I’m about to get to my point.

Back to Thor and Wonder Woman. The above used to be my guestimated scenario, until Thor: Ragnarok came out. In that movie the God of Thunder underwent a serious power upgrade, emphasis on “god.” I’m not sure what Diana is: Amazon, demigoddess, mutant, who knows, but she’s no longer in Thor’s class. After the events of Ragnarok, we might have to leave the battle of the sexes to Thor vs. the Scarlet Witch. In spite of her strength and formidable skills, I don’t think Diana is capable of going toe-to-toe with Thor any more.

Unless…

There’s one trick Thor wouldn’t know but Diana would, if not from her Amazon instructors then from her female friends from outside Paradise Island. It’s the first self-defense skill girls are taught and every man’s afraid of. That secret weapon is The Knee. Delicately put, it involves the impact of a woman’s solid kneecap against not-so-solid parts of the male anatomy. It’s considered a dirty move, but when you’re in a bar and some a-hole’s hitting on you and he’s a foot taller than you are, outweighs you by a hundred pounds, won’t take no for an answer and starts getting belligerent, a dirty move is not only acceptable, it’s downright necessary. It’s that or pepper spray, guys. You get to carry guns, so don’t whine.

So here we have Thor and Wonder Woman on the battlefield. She’s got him beat in weapons and hand-to-hand. Then Thor decides to teach the uppity hussy a lesson and starts flinging lightning bolts at her. Now she’s in trouble. Until she remembers the first move taught to her by her mother the Queen of the Amazons, about the quickest way to put a stop to grabby demigods. And she realizes Thor, arrogant alpha-hole that he is, isn’t wearing a cup.

She gets in close and takes aim. Game, set and match.

Afterwards, hanging out in Valhalla with the guys, Thor will tell his buddies she was a worthy opponent and he let her win because he’s a gentleman. Loki figures out the truth and never lets him forget it. Diana never even bothers to tell the Justice League. She fought a god and won. No big. It’s all part of the job.

Which leads to the ultimate question: would The Knee work on Superman?

If he’s at the height of his powers, and if kryptonite isn’t involved, then probably not. Not even from Wonder Woman. She might cause him a little discomfort, but I doubt if she could bring him down. I don’t think it would work on the Hulk, either. Yeah, it would hurt, but he’d just get angrier and keep fighting. Not much stops the Hulk. Although The Knee from Superman might do the trick. Except he’s a dude, so he’d never even think of it.

His cousin Kara, on the other hand…

There’s the member of the El family who could take out the Hulk. Supergirl’s female, and she's spent half her life on Earth, among human males. You better believe she knows about The Knee, and if the Hulk came charging at her, she wouldn’t hesitate to use it. She might even use it on cousin Kal if he pissed her off. I don’t know if Kryptonians have to deal with PMS, but it’s probably wisest to stay on Kara’s good side.

So, in the case of superhero smackdowns, the winner would be … drum roll… Batman. Because he’s the goddamn Batman. Or Dr. Strange. I don’t care how strong you are, when your opponent waves his hand and flings you through a portal into another dimension, you’re pretty much up the creek. (Ask Loki, again from Thor: Ragnarok.) I just find it a shame guys don’t adopt The Knee as part of their skill set, if only as a last resort. Imagine if Iron Man had used it on Thanos. Infinity War would have been a whole different movie.

Think of the Children

Well, the genie’s out of the bottle now. His name is Deadpool, he’s a superhero, and his movie got a pile of rave reviews and made an even bigger pile of money. It was also rated R, and for a slew of good reasons: over-the-top violence, nudity, sex, adult situations, and swearing out the yin-yang. Not the kind of movie you want to take the little kiddies to, though their mid- to late-teen siblings would probably get a kick out of it.

Deadpool is hardly the first superhero movie to earn big bucks at the box office, and it’s not the first R-rated superhero movie. (I’m not sure what that was. Punisher: War Zone? One of the Blade movies? I don’t think it was Watchmen.) However, as far as I know, it was the first superhero movie to be both popular and earn massive moolah with an R rating attached. And with Hollywood involved, we all know what that means: more, more and even more of the same, as Tinseltown rushes to cash in on what they think made Deadpool so profitable. Which means we’ve got a tidal wave of R-rated superhero flicks looming in our movie-going future.

I can think of a couple comic-book characters that could handle and even benefit from the adults-only treatment. Wolverine, for starters. Let’s be honest: Wolvie’s shtick is that he goes into berserker rages and guts people. That’s what the claws are for. Check out this scene from X2: X-Men United. This is the Wolverine we know from the comics. This is the scene we wanted to see in the first X-Men movie but had to wait for. Wolverine is beloved by fandom. Put him in a film with no ratings restrictions and people will line up around the block.

I’ve already mentioned the Punisher and Blade. If the upcoming Suicide Squad isn’t rated R, there is no justice in the world. We deserve to see Harley Quinn in all her psychotic glory. Batman? Not necessarily. His is a whole other breed of nutzoid, and doesn’t require ratings restrictions. The Joker? Definitely. DC is releasing an animated version of The Killing Joke graphic novel, and it’s rated R. Yes, you heard me. A cartoon based on a mainstream comic book has been given an R rating. If you’re familiar with the story, you know why.

There’s talk the recent Superman v. Batman should have gone after the R. I think the Blu-Ray has added scenes that bump the rating up a notch.

Whoa. Superman? Are you telling me Superman belongs in an R-rated movie? No. Just no. No way, no how. Superman and Spider-Man are where I draw the line.

Aren’t you people forgetting something? All these big-budget blockbuster flicks are based on comic books. Once upon a time, comic books were disposable entertainment for kids. Little kids. Interest in comic books generally waned around the time puberty hit, when girls became more interesting than musclebound guys in tights. But until hormones kicked in, comics were something to keep kids quiet on rainy afternoons.

All that began to change in the 1960s, when Marvel Comics discovered their reader demographic was mostly college students and older, and adjusted their sights accordingly. Also, the comic-book readers of yesteryear had grown up to become the comic-book pros of the present. They wanted to tell stories for the people they were now, not the children they’d been. So the storylines began to skew upward, into more grown-up themes.

Then Watchmen came along, with its deconstruction of standard superhero tropes, and showed violence, nudity, heroes having sex, and “heroes” who were flat-out wacko. It was hailed as ground-breaking. It made a lot of money, which meant from that day forward all heroes must be violent emotional basket cases. If you’re sick to death of all the “grim and gritty” comics that have clogged up the stands since the 1980s, go blame Alan Moore.

Or maybe not. In Back Issue magazine #79, artist/co-creator Dave Gibbons had this to say: “The message that was perceived by a lot of creators was, ‘Oh yeah! We gotta get really dark! We gotta make all our characters mentally ill and emotional wrecks.’ We didn’t ever intend that to be the case and we felt very sorry for all the depressing comics that came in the wake of Watchmen.”

What he said.

There should be room in the market for a little of everything, but comic books for pre-teens seem to have gotten squeezed out. Bad enough we’re now paying $4 for a flimsy pamphlet we can read in ten minutes and we don’t even get a full story. Those stories aren’t even aimed at the kids that were once comics’ primary market. Publishers like Harvey, that catered to little kids, aren’t around any more. Archie Comics, for decades a cartoony bastion of all-ages comedy, recently revamped its line into a more realistic style, with teen-centric realistic stories. And now kids can’t even go to the movies based on these comics unless they’re 18 or older. Where’s the audience of tomorrow going to come from, if there’s nothing for them to get hooked on early? Will nobody think of the children?

That’s why I feel Superman needs to be exempt from the grim-and-gritty grownup world. He was the first. He epitomized what used to be the traits we wanted our kids to aspire to. The alien being from another planet showed us all the heights a human could achieve. And you want to make him a scowling, psychotic jerk who solves all problems with punches? Batman already is a scowling, psychotic jerk, and even he stops short of killing people. We don’t need another one.

Ditto Spider-Man. He was the first teen superhero who wasn’t somebody’s sidekick. He was a geeky science nerd who couldn’t get dates and was bullied by the football team. Even those of us without spider powers could relate. Spider-Man taught us “with great power comes great responsibility.” And he did it without going dark.

Ease up, creators. Give Superman and Spider-Man back to the kids. We took all the other heroes away from them. They should get to keep the icons. If you want to make an R-rated superhero movie, then show us Wonder Woman in all her 1940s glory, with the bondage and the fetishism intact. I’ll bet Deadpool himself would pay big bucks to see that.

The Idea Machine

Where do you get your ideas?

If you’re a writer, or trying to be, sooner or later some wide-eyed civilian is going to ask you this. The standard answers are, “Everywhere,” “I don’t know, they just come to me,” or “Schenectady.” (This last is a famous joke among science-fiction writers. I believe it was Harlan Ellison who started telling fans he got shipments of ideas from some guy in Schenectady in exchange for a monthly fee. SF fans, who on the whole have no sense of humor, started demanding the guy’s address. I’ll bet some enterprising person in New York State made himself quite a mint with that scam before he got found out.)

For myself, I’m going to have to go with answer #2, or maybe a combo of #2 plus #1, because sometimes I honestly don’t know. I’ll be reading something, or watching TV, or overhear something while standing in line at the supermarket, and all of a sudden I’ve got a new character or plot.

Sometimes nothing happens with these creative snippets. I jot them down in a notebook for resurrection when I have a dry spell. Either I get back to them or I don’t. Sometimes the idea demands I go to work on it right friggin’ now, and I end up writing the story. Sometimes a couple of these ideas mash up together and create a whole new story.

The requisite examples: I’m currently on the second draft of a mashup story. A couple years back I toyed with the idea of a M/M romance between a rancher and a shapeshifter posing as a mustang. Nothing came of it until last year when I was trying to get a romance between two motorcycle enthusiasts to gel. It didn’t work until I made one of them a werehorse with a love of bikes. I made his boyfriend an ex-Army man suffering from survivor’s guilt and it practically wrote itself.

In another case I was reading an interview with a comic-book writer and how his childhood obsession with the Wild West, Wyatt Earp and Universal’s monster movies eventually morphed into the Wynona Earp comic and TV series currently airing on SyFy. Out of nowhere I got a flash of a comic book writer/artist with a crush on his neighbor who uses the guy as the model for a superhero character. The comic book takes off, much to the neighbor’s chagrin. I’ll get to that when I’m done with the other six ideas I’ve got waiting their turns.

Sometimes it gets weird. I’ve been reading a lot of ménage and erotica lately as part of my freelance job. In one book a restaurant owner offers the BDSM heroes banana splits, “made special, just the way you like them.” Instantly I pictured big mounds of ice cream with nipple clamps on the cherries. I didn’t say all my ideas were good ones. This one’s good enough for a laugh on the Shapeshifter Seductions blog, where it will be appearing tomorrow.

I’m beginning to think some people are just wired this way, to be idea machines. Their brains mis-hear words, make jumps in logic, smoosh non-related notions together and create something entirely new. How many dozens of patents did Edison file in his lifetime? Or Da Vinci. Did the man ever sleep?

Closer to home we’ve got the legendary Jack Kirby. If you’ve seen a Marvel movie in the last five years, you’ve seen Kirby’s creations on screen. Thor. Iron Man. The Fantastic Four. Captain America. The Hulk. Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. Ant-Man. The Black Panther, comicdom’s first black superhero, is about to make his big-screen debut in Civil War. He first appeared in the Fantastic Four comic, as did Galactus, the Silver Surfer, Dr. Doom, and the Inhumans (who Marvel is pushing until they can get back the film rights to the X-Men—another Kirby co-creation, by the way). Not Spider-Man, though. That was Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Although it’s rumored Kirby may have helped design Spidey’s costume.

You want to see an idea machine running at full throttle? Look at Kirby’s output during the ‘60s and ‘70s. I’m pretty sure he never slept either.

It’s debatable how many of these concepts were Stan Lee’s or created in conjunction with Lee, and how many may have been pure Kirby. But consider this: Kirby left Marvel for DC in the 1970s. While at DC, Kirby debuted his “Fourth World” series—four different comic books, each with their own brand-new characters and concepts, that when read together told one huge, overarcing story, something unheard-of back then. He also did a couple other new books on the side. Stan Lee did not create any new characters for Marvel after Kirby left. Eventually he moved into the publisher’s chair and stopped writing altogether.

I’m not saying all Kirby’s ideas were good ones. And his execution sometimes left a lot to be desired. His writing, for instance. Kirby’s dialogue tended to be “stiff” and “stilted,” with a lot of phrases in “quotation marks,” which made the “word balloons” look like “this.” Like William Shatner talking, but in prose. As an artist, he set the standard for years. As a creator, he was more prolific than anyone this side of God. As a writer … eh. They can’t all be winners, folks.

That’s the other problem with ideas. You can’t always go with the first one that pops into your head. Sometimes they just need to sit and ferment for awhile. You may have to mix two or three together in order to create a plot or characters that work. Or maybe the idea’s okay, it’s your execution of it that’s not working. Hand that one off to a writing friend and move on to something else.

If your idea machine’s running, you won’t have to worry about running out of inspiration. In fact, you could make yourself a nice little sideline selling the extras to aspiring writers, like that guy in Schenectady. I’ve got a dozen ideas right here to get you started. Just send me $10.95 every month …

Creationism

I wasn’t planning on watching Fox’s new crime show Lucifer. And not because I have any moral objections to the Devil being portrayed in a positive light. Bad guys are usually the most interesting characters in any given fictional story (see: Darth Vader). My problems with the show stemmed from the pilot, where Lucifer confronts a dying shooter who’s just murdered an old friend of his and fails to ask the most obvious question: Who hired you? Yeah, the show would have been over in the first ten minutes, but that’s no excuse for a lapse in common sense. Besides, I prefer the version of Lucifer on Supernatural, where he’s a deliciously over-the-top bad guy. Currently Misha Collins is playing him, doing his best Mark Pellegrino impression, which only adds to the fun. Last week we got both Misha and Mark, playing the same guy. Wins all around.

So I figured I wouldn’t be tuning in to the crime-busting, semi-good guy version of Satan any more, unless I heard the writing got better. Then another week rolled around. I wanted to watch TV and nothing better was on. The writing hadn’t improved by much, but the actor’s cute and he has a British accent. That’s enough to rope in most women, me included. Though I still prefer Supernatural’s Satan. Maybe the networks will do a crossover.

While we’re waiting for that, allow me to clue you in on a little something I noticed about the show’s credits, and who’s getting paid—and who probably isn’t—for this.

Fox’s Lucifer is an adaptation of a DC Comics/Vertigo title. Yep, the Lord of Lies had his own comic book series for a while. He was HQ’d in Vegas in that one, which makes more sense for the Devil than the Los Angeles of the TV show. I didn’t read the comic, so I don’t know who came up with the idea, or who the originating writer and artist were. (Note: It was writer Neil Gaiman who introduced Luci in the Sandman comic. Thank you, Internet!)

Familiar with how comic book creators tend to get the shaft when characters they created get the big-screen (and big-bucks-earning) treatment, I kept a close eye on the opening credits. There’s the usual cluster of producers, the episode writer and the director. And a single “Developed for TV by” credit for somebody. No “Lucifer created by” credit for the original writer and artist. Not even a “Based on the comic created by” or “Inspired by” credits anywhere I could see. Maybe the acknowledgement to the original creators is crammed into the closing credits, which flash by at Warp Factor 12. There’s an eyeblink shot of the DC and Vertigo logos right at the tail end of the closing credits. That’s the only hint you get that the show started life as a comic book.

Something tells me the original writer and artist aren’t getting paid for this. That happens a lot in the industry, especially now that comic book adaptations into movies and TV have turned out to be so lucrative. All those billions of dollars generated by Supes and Bats and Spidey and all their amazing superfriends have to go into somebody’s pocket, and somehow it never seems to be the creators’.

Which could be tricky in Lucifer’s case, seeing as how he was created by God.

Maybe that’s the excuse they’re using. “We can’t pay you for creating the comic because you didn’t create the character.” True. Lucifer previously appeared in another famous book. The Lucifer in the Vertigo comic is too derivative of that character to earn royalties for his creators. (This excuse was actually used in regards to the Barbara Kean character on Gotham. Here’s what Babs’ creator, Alan Brennert, has to say about it.)

So that’s why there are no creator credits on the show. Though a “Lucifer created by God” credit would have been polite.

Which leads to other problems. You get on-screen credit, you’re owed money. That’s why these credits are so important. If God created the show’s lead character, shouldn’t He be getting a cut of the take? Where would you send the royalty checks? The Vatican? Does the Lord have direct deposit? We know for a fact He’s got tons of cloud storage, but what about a bank account? There’s also that Lucifer on Supernatural. Is God double-dipping with his characters?

But aha, say the corporate lawyers. The Bible was produced before copyright laws. The Bible and all its contents are in the public domain. This particular version of Lucifer is copyrighted and the property of Time-Warner. We can do whatever the hell we want with him, pardon the pun, and we don’t owe You a cent.

So God, creator of everything, doesn’t get jack squat. He winds up in a bar on the outskirts of Hollywood, where Alan Brennert buys Him a beer. “Welcome to the world,” says Alan.

Now that’s true evil. You don’t suppose Lucifer is on the board of directors at Time-Warner, do you?

I know for a fact he works for Disney. Everybody works for Disney.

Now the question arises: what happens if Lucifer gets cancelled? Will it trigger the apocalypse? Will the world end? Will Mark Pellegrino and the guy who plays the Devil on Fox have to fight it out? Either way, the writers and artists and deities who created the heroes and anti-heroes we’re watching won’t see so much as a dime. Remember, kiddies, always read a contract all the way through and make sure you understand all the clauses before you sign your rights away. Don’t let this happen to you.