Journal

Saturday, March 01, 2008

little bit of politics

This came through this morning,

I was just wondering if you had seen this yet. It popped up on my friends page and I wasn't sure how you would feel about your work being used in this manner. I would think someone should have asked you.


http://img89.imageshack.us/img89/8339/4db8fa6df104decb060a885nc0.gif


and I clicked and saw


that someone had taken the contest in Sandman 4 and set it between the Democratic Front Runners.

(Click on the link above to see it run through its course.)

Given that permission on this isn't mine to give or withhold (DC Comics owns Sandman, after all) I honestly don't mind at all. I think of me twenty years ago phoning the late Gytha North and picking her brains for the opening ("Do we want warrior to wolf or warrior to deer?") while writing a comic I figured would probably be cancelled by the end of its first year*, and it just makes me smile that it's a well-known enough sequence that someone would use it for political stumping.



* Yes, I know people think this is me being modest or something. It really isn't. Sandman was never really a huge commercial hit, and even when it was successful, it was often successful under the radar. A quick Google threw up The Overstreet Guide for 1992 quote that's talked about in this blog entry about what was considered successful for the long term health of comics and what wasn't. As Overstreet told the world back then, people buying multiple copies of X-Force #1 was what comics was all about, whereas,

"A Sandman push with T-Shirts, statues, trade paperbacks, a glow in the dark cover and other promotional gimmicks did little to produce long term additional interest in the title."

Or as a comic store employee explained to me back then, the problem with Sandman was that people bought it to read, and they couldn't be persuaded to just buy lots of copies as investment items.

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