"Publishing Follies"

Todd Allen did a lengthy interview (about 1800 words, give or take) with me about my tenure on Broken Frontier. Allen writes about business issues and opportunities facing cartoonists in a digital world. I found his questions and statements fair and insightful.

PF: Did the terms of the contract match your verbal discussions?

T: Not at first. The first thing I signed was an NDA about their upcoming business plans (not, obviously, their past and current practices, or we wouldn't be talking). Then they gave me a modified version of the same boilerplate that they give to artists on their properties. But it wasn't modified enough. The language could have been interpreted as a non-compete clause, which I sure as hell couldn't sign when I was doing my own online comic that competed with Platinum's Drunk Duck for mindshare! Things like that. So I asked Platinum to modify the contract and sign some statements which would address all my worries, and they did so. (The noncompete was narrowed to mean that I couldn't work for other comics news outlets like CBR.)

More.