"Sour Grapes": The 1986 Stick Figure Auction Piece

Fan Art
Title:	Sour Grapes
Artist:	Pamela Rose
Date(s):	1986
First Published:
Medium:
Genre/Style:
Fandom:	most likely The Professionals
External Links:
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Sour Grapes is the name of a 1986 meta drawing by Pamela Rose.

It was created as a pushback to comments regarding discussions about why it was okay for fans to sell fanart for profit but not fanfic. Rose submitted the drawing as a piece to the 1986 IDICon fanart auction.

Ultimately, this drawing was the what inspired the 1992 novel Arabian Nights.

From the Author's Introduction to "Arabian Nights"

Okay, I'll try to explain how this story came about. I suppose it's a lesson on the pitfalls of being a smartass. A long time ago (the spring of 1986), at IDICon in Houston, I thought it would be cute and clever to put a piece of art in the artshow. My artistic abilities are nonexistent, so this seemed an amusing way to make a point about inequity in fandom. So I drew two stick figures on a piece of typing paper, matted and entered it in the artshow under the title "Sour Grapes." Attached was a little note explaining that, as a writer, I could not legally sell my fan stories outright, but if anyone saw the deep, underlying passion and romance in the above illo, I might feel compelled to write them a short story. To my total amazement and mortification, it received enough bids to go up for auction. I may be the only person to receive $125 for two stick figures on typing paper. I wonder if Picasso started out this way? In any case, guilt had kicked in big time by that point, so I was more than willing to do anything the purchaser wanted. This is where I learned payback is a bitch. The story request? "I want to see Bodie as a sheik and Doyle as his captive. Kind of like the movie 'Sahara' with Brooke Shields. And I want them to make love on a horse.

Fan Comments

1993

From a fan in 1993 (seven years after the art auction, and the year "Arabian Nights" was published):

As a non-artist, non-writer, I have no personal investment in either side of the debate, but as an (unbiased?) observer, it seems that most writers get as little or less financial return for their loving work — my understanding of the original point of the 'stick figure auction piece' was that at least the artist has the OPTION of selling her product, whereas the writer, unless she is self-publishing, gets a copy of the zine and that's IT. The artist has a greater investment in equipment and materials, which certainly deserves compensation, but as far as time goes, I'm sure writing requires as much time and effort as does visual art.

[snipped]

... I don't really know about the costs of publishing — I always assumed that the cost of a zine included 'front money' to enable the publisher to pay in advance for the next publication, etc., and that usually a print run would not sell completely all at once, hence the investment does not 'turn over' right away and stacks of zines must be safely stored — so that the publisher is at least somewhat justified in charging more that 'at cost' for her product. Perhaps I've been naive — I didn't think anyone was making a living publishing zines — seems like most people I've heard about have to work at mundane jobs to SUPPORT their publishing activities, not the other way around.

There's a story behind this story. Now gather round children and Grandma [S] will tell you about it. Once upon a time Pam Rose got tired of artists making big bucks and authors getting a free copy of a zine for all their work. So at one of the Idicons (as *I've* established the mind is gone and dates with it) she entered a stick figure drawing in the art show with the promise that the buyer could command the story she wanted. Well the buyer got the drawing for $125, and as she had just seen The Shiek with Brook Shields and whoever else (it was a small budget movie, folks, but the sheik looked good in black and rode well) commanded Pam to write Bodie as a shiek and Doyle as Brook Shields. Her only specification was that there must be sex-on-a-horse.

That's the tale of the Arabian Nights.

I love the way Pam Rose managed to get bucks for her writing (putting a stick figure in an art show & promising to write whatever story the highest bidder wanted)--way to go, Pam!

1996

There are people who know this story better than I (Lezlie?), but basically, Pam Rose, fed up with exactly the market forces we've been discussing, put a stick figure up in an art auction, with the comment that she'd write a story for the winner. The story (many years later...) turned out to be the zine Arabian Nights. I don't remember how much she got for the stick figure...