The sad part is that some of these young artists *still* think it is a good idea to sign with Tokyopop after being exposed to more experienced commentary about the contract (i.e. Bryan Lee O'Malley's dissection of the entire thing).

See their comments on page 12 and 13 of TP Pilot Program thread: http://messageboard.tokyopop.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11709&page=12

It is their decision in the end but I'm so amazed how they think it will turn out differently for them than it did for the majority of TP's first wave OEL creators.

That the contract is written with a slant toward, "Hey, we're your buddies here. Them French sure had funny ideas, didn't they?" is just so obviously fake in tone that most of us who read it will see it as a scam-type offering. But it is the young hopefuls who will read it and get taken in.

"We'll sell this car to you at a loss and make up for it in volume!"

"Want to make a thousand dollars a week working from home?"

It has been reported elsewhere that the contract pays $750 for a completed comic book. That's roughly $31 a page for 24 pages. A completed comic, not just the writing. Good luck finding any artist who will draw and ink and color an entire comic for that kind of money. A whole month's worth of work for $750 is $9000 a year. You can easily make that much working in the fast food business.

Yugh.

In fact, hiring someone to ink someone else's work and hiring someone to create something completely new out of whole cloth can both be work-for-hire, depending on the arrangement between the artist and the company.

Tho', I kinda like DEATH NOTE.

Or am I missing some thing vital about what it means to produce creative work for a corporation?

I'm not being snarky, by the way, I just see T'pop's notion of a "contract" here insanely unfair and am trying to figure out how bad it really is if we look at real world expectations of what comic book creators should receive....

I would differ on one slight, minor point - poorly written contracts are a slight aid for the party that did not write them, for ambiguity almost always goes AGAINST the party who constructed the contract (as just a matter of natural fairness - if you write a crappy contract, you can't get the benefit of possibly misleading the other party due to your poor writing).

But yeah, it's a joke of a deal. Very lame, and also, yes, fairly unsurprising, too.