I just received a royalty check from Disney Worldwide Services, Inc. It was for something I wrote many years ago for Marvel which they recently reprinted and I have no idea what it is. I could figure it out from the invoice they e-mailed me and perhaps I will just for my own accounting purposes. But unlike when DC reprints something I wrote for them, Disney/Marvel doesn't send me a copy of the new book. In this case, I might lose money on the deal if I went out and bought a copy.
So don't be even a smidgen impressed that I got this check. It did though give me two immediate memories from half a century ago. One came the first time I wrote a comic book story for Disney. This was for the Disney Studios, not for Western Publishing Company, which published the American Disney comics in their Gold Key line. I went to work for Western later.
Western Publishing was not publishing a vast amount of Disney comic books in the early seventies. The company was on the downside then, having great trouble getting their books distributed to newsstands. The marketplace for comics was shrinking and one of the execs there told me — and I'm still not sure how much I should believe this — that DC and Marvel were getting relentless in squeezing competitors off the racks by all possible means. In fact, "relentless" was the word he used.
A year or two later, Western gave up even trying to get distribution in several states, including New York. Their best bet, they thought, was selling their comics in bagged lots to toy and department stores via the same channels they sold their Whitman line of activity books (coloring books, puzzle books, etc.). This method worked for a little while. In fact, they even sold some of their competitors' products that way. Eventually though, it stopped being practical and Western got the hell out of the comic book business.
In 1969, Western wasn't publishing a lot of Disney comics and some of them were all or partially reprints. Western did commission new stories and when they did, the Disney organization could sell photostats of those stories to foreign Disney publishers to reprint overseas. For Disney, the cash that came in from that was almost pure profit since Western had paid for the writing, drawing and lettering. Furthermore, the demand for Disney comics in other countries was so great that a division on the Disney lot began commissioning comic book stories just to sell to the overseas publishers.
I began submitting scripts to them and I think my first sale was a Three Little Pigs story. Western wasn't doing any Three Little Pigs comics at the time. One day, I received a check from Disney for it — a very handsome (in design, not amount) check with a full-color picture of Mickey Mouse on it.
I showed it to my parents…and I could have shown my father a Nobel Peace Prize or a Pulitzer I'd won and he couldn't have been any prouder than he was of his son at that moment. Come to think of it: An hour later, he walked into my room and said, "Mark, could I see that check one more time?" He had me promise that before I deposited it, I'd make a Xerox of it — and he didn't say this part but I think he was thinking, "…just in case no one ever pays you for your writing again."
The next day, I walked up to the branch of California Federal Savings where I had my savings account. I stopped off at a drugstore where you could make copies for a dime each and made two copies — just in case no one ever paid me for my writing again — and then it was on to CalFed, which at the time seemed like the most solid, wealthy financial institution in the state. Which it was until 1994 when it was shut down by federal regulators.
I endorsed the check, filled out a deposit slip, took them to a teller and she began staring at that check. And staring. And staring. And it took me a minute or two to figure out what the problem was…
She thought it was a toy check.
It had Mickey Mouse on it and a 17-year-old kid had brought it in. She was wondering if maybe it was part of a toy set called something like The Mickey Mouse Bank that came with toy money, toy deposit slips, toy free calendars and toy notices of foreclosure. I was getting $20 in cash back from my deposit and for a second there, I thought she was going to try to give it to me in bills with Jiminy Cricket on them.
Instead, she took the check over to some superior who told her it was real. It dawned on me later that she was just new on the job and had simply never seen a Disney check before. They must have had a lot of them there…a hunch which was confirmed for me a few months later when I went in to make another deposit and found myself waiting in line behind Sebastian Cabot. Mr. Cabot was, among his other job, the narrator of the Winnie the Pooh cartoons for Disney. He lived two blocks from that outlet of California Federal Savings and might have deposited a lot of Disney checks there.
So that was one of the two memories that today's check from Disney resurrected. The other was a few years after that and for this memory, I want you to get a certain tone of voice in your head. Imagine for a moment that you are a very small child and you are being lectured by an older person in a position of power at a big company.
You have just asked an innocent question and the older person is not only telling you that what you ask is impossible and will never-in-a-million-years happen, he is trying to make you feel like you know less-than-zero about what you're talking about. And he even says in these very words, "If you understood anything about this industry, you'd know that it would cease to exist if we ever did what you are asking!"
Okay, so you've now got that tone of voice and that italicized quote in your brain. And my Disney check today for something I wrote years ago for Marvel reminded me of that tone and that quote from a senior executive at one of the big two comic book companies. He was responding to my question about whether they might consider paying reuse fees to their writers and artists when their work was reprinted.