Most of these tips are culled from a pamphlet I produced years ago titled 101 Things Your Publisher Doesn’t Want You to Know. Dozens of creators provided handy contract and business tips for the education and protection of their fellow pros.

Illustrator William Stout recommended that you make sure you get a purchase order number for every assignment. If there is a dispute over payment, the court will likely ask you to provide a purchase order number for the assignment to prove the client contracted you.

Usually, comic book companies have purchase order numbers preprinted on their standard invoices. If there is no standard invoice available, request that the publisher follow up on any verbal agreement with a purchase order number (PO#) for the job.

If your publisher fails to pay you, that PO # will be the first thing the judge asks for.

Remember, you are an independent contractor. For whatever reason, many creators fail to follow through with the simplest business paperwork, especially with small press clients who seem like old friends, they’re so accessible. Sometimes they are friends, and those friendships sour. Don’t let a verbal agreement be all you have to prove someone was supposed to pay you.

Contracts aren’t for the good times, they are for the bad times. It’s simplicity itself to dash off a quick letter of agreement via email.

And if you have made this mistake yourself, don’t feel bad. I have been badly burned in the past as well to the tune of thousands of bucks.

If anyone ought to know better, it’s me.

Ever heard that old saying that good fences make good neighbors?

Think of your quick letter with a PO# as a good fence. Professional clients will respect you for it. And unprofessional clients who avoid putting agreements in writing should be avoided at all costs. I don’t care how well you think you knew them.

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The Low Down:
Strategies for Artists During the Recession
Date: Saturday, May 16, 9a.m.-4:30p.m.
Registration deadline: Friday, May 8, 5p.m.

The economic crisis is having a large impact on the art world, but what does this mean for individual artists? What can artists do to prepare, survive, and even thrive during a recession? The Spring 2009 Business of Art Conference will look at the recession’s impact on the arts with input from art world professionals,accountants, artists and others.

The Low Down will start with a candid panel discussion about the effects of the current economy on the art world from the perspective of galleries, nonprofits, foundations and city government. An afternoon seminar will provide concrete financial planning advice geared toward the needs of artists. The day will conclude with a panel of artists sharing their experiences and new ideas of how to navigate and redefining the art world.
Complete conference schedule available online.

Location:

Barney Building
Department of Art and Art Professions
New York University Steinhardt School of Education
34 Stuyvesant Street
New York, NY 10003

Cost:

Artist Rate: $55 per artist

There are a limited number of scholarships available to artists in need made possible through the generous support of an anonymous donor.

NYFA Artist Rate: $50
(This includes all NYFA Fellows and Fiscally Sponsored Artists and Organizations, and Immigrant Artist Mentors and Mentees)

NYU students, staff and faculty: $20

Registration:

To register on-line please visit http://events.nyfa.org/
Registration deadline: Friday, May 8, 5.pm.
Please contact NYFA if you are having any trouble registering online, and we will take your registration over the phone.

Questions: Contact Jocelyn Elliott at jelliott@nyfa.org or 212 366 6900 x249.

Organized by the New York Foundation for the Arts, the conferences are made possible by a generous grant from McGraw-Hill Companies and the Empire State Development Corporation. Additional support is provided by the Department of Art and Art Professions, New York University Steinhardt School of Education.

Bargains galore and mountains of bad taste in the Michael Jackson auction catalogues. The pop superstar’s money problems brought his stash to the brink.

Alas, those of you hoping to walk away with a genuine painting of Michael as 16th century monarch are going to have to wait. Jackson’s managers staved off the sheriff. Still, this website has his worldly goods for your perusing pleasure.

Jackson possesses a disturbing collection of sculptures and paintings of little children. And ephebe youths.

There is no way you could look at all that lladro and not question the man’s…taste.

An undistinguished collection of art. Some of the antiques are nice, but the juxtaposition of Americana, Baroque, Neo-Classical, Victorian, Edwardian, 19th century Chinese, and Disneyana…holy cow.

The only painting I recognized is the 19th century Cleopatra by D. Pauvert. I have the Sotheby’s catalogue in which it was originally offered for sale.

Missing from the auction, conservatively estimated at $1.5 million to $3 million, are two paintings by the highly rated 19th-century French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau, which Jackson bought in New York in 2002 for $1.34 million. Jackson did not pay for them (a spokesman at the time said that the reason was that the paintings “no longer fit” into the pop star’s collection), so Sotheby’s had to file a suit for damages.

There are a few fine genre landscapes and faux Norman Rockwells, inexpensive reproductions of nostalgic paintings of rural children.

Don’t miss this distillation of the weird. This blogger took some snaps of the collection of Michael memorabilia, and if you have never even imagined a monumental triptych of Michael Jackson as a reigning monarch crowning and knighting himself in two separate panels, well, now you don’t have to. Someone painted it for you.

Thanks to Scribbler (Sarah Beach) for the links. Sarah guest blogged about screenwriting and comics here.

And our thanks to Arlnee (Arlene Harris, who guest blogged about the whitewashing of Avatar: The Last Airbender).

She has alerted us to the return of the Russet Noon Lady, the rather forward fan who decided to take it upon herself to write a Stephenie Meyers Twilight sequel. And sell it.

For one brief shining moment, it seemed that the Russet Noon writer had come to her senses, as her book was pulled and her website taken down. But the Lady of the Sparkling Vampire Potato had a change of wank and decided to give it all another go, declaring:

Characters don’t belong to authors. Authors don’t create characters. They merely channel them. Characters are recurring universal archetypes. The only thing that changes is their names and identities, but their essence is always the same.

And then came the sound of Joseph Campbell spinning in his grave.

I’ve met some professional authors who say the same things about characters-and-archetypes-and-everything-is-beautiful to their public.

Because they are pandering.

It makes people feel warm and fuzzy to believe we are part of the Hive Mind, and if we could just learn the secret code, then we too could become best selling authors.

Yet I’ve never met an author who espoused this who wouldn’t sue the shit out of anyone who violated their copyright, or their publisher who didn’t pay the royalties. And I’ve yet to meet a bestselling author who was willing to put that Hive Mind love to the test by letting any of their best selling works go into the public domain.

Hive Mind is all well and good for other people.

When my Hive Mind taps the well, baby, I’m staking my claim to that gusher. There’s no Kumbaya in my copyright.

Massive wank-a-licious follow ups at Fandom Wank, where the Lady of the Sparking Vampire Potato responds to her critics, writes letters of fan martyrdom, engages in sockpuppetry, invoketh the teal deer, and makes with the massive attention whoring, which I am aiding and abetting here because I like to study TEH CRAZY so as to better spot it and avoid in future.

Holy Massive Spud-a-licious-Vampires Batman! Comics scribe Peter David is organizing a POTATO MOON parody project to benefit The Comic Book Legal Defense fund! Count me in!

Would it totally freak people out to know that I have been considering that Edward Cullen would SO make a better boyfriend than Sandman’s Morpheus?

Moving along, Val Trullinger puts the smackdown on some weirdo who shows up at her blog to mark territory with anonymous hate.

I have never seen some of those words in my life.

My guess: the abuser is a woman. What do you all think?

I blogged Debbie Schlussel’s psychological break over Watchmen (still haven’t seen it myself. My car has no engine.)

Over at Acephalous, another look into the dark heart of Schlussel.

Acephalous blogged about Watchmen far more intelligently than I did. He also gets far more interesting trolls. Smart people can be scary, I guess.

But I can’t find the exact links to the weird trolldom, so just read the smart posts about Watchmen, the movie I still haven’t seen.

Have fun.

UPDATED! Oh wait, one more for the road. Rus Wornom points to this: Could The Girls From Planet 5 Be The Best Novel ever? I dunno, but one of those covers looks like it was painted by Frank Kelly Freas. Cooked Timber goes deeper into this glorious tome.

A flying saucer full of beautiful female aliens has landed, wiping out Alexandria, VA by accident. But they are apparently friendly. These seductive Lyru are welcomed in ‘Biddyland’, as the Texans now refer to North America outside of Texas. (They haven’t actually seceded, but they’ve basically severed social and cultural contact with the rest of the country. Oh, and you have to be able to rope a steer in order to vote. It’s sort of Cowship Troopers, that way.) But all is not well …

Wow! Awesome! Must read!

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