Stuff to chew on this weekend: Kirby family sues Marvel…

The fallout to the recent Jerry Siegel case, which awarded his family the rights of key parts of Superman’s origin story back to one of the character’s co-creators, is starting to have major ramifications.  Indeed, this could go on for years, or decades, and cause both DC and Marvel countless headaches.

In sum, the family of artist Jack “The King” Kirby, the co-creator with Stan Lee of nearly every classic Marvel superhero and villain characters from the early days (and co-creator of Captain American way back in the ’40s),  is suing Marvel and their new owner Disney to regain rights to the characters, or at least get the right to demand monies whenever they are used in, oh, just for instance, in major motion pictures.

This sort of thing has never flown in the past, but after the Siegal case, who knows?  Marvel boasts that it has something like 5,000 characters; imagine if every creator of them was able to re-assert full or even partial ownership of them?  And how will you apportion the ownership of the writer as opposed to the artist, and what about characters who were minor when they were created but became huge later on under a new, discrete creative team.  Like Wolverine for instance, who became a sensation under the pens of writer Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne.

Stan Lee and (I think) Wally Wood created Daredevil, but the movie followed a storyline created by writer/artist Frank Miller.  So how would that break down?  And although Miller was a one man show there, his art benefit greatly during that period from the inking of Klaus Jansen.  So would he get a piece?

Man, this could potentially become quite crazy.   And don’t forget, Disney’s famously shark-like lawyers are involved now too. (Which, in this case, might not be a bad thing.) We’ll see how far the courts let this get.

  • Bruce William Probst

    I must be missing something. I thought that was the whole point of the “work-for-hire” contract: the company says “thanks for creating this stuff for us, and by signing this contract you agree that you have no claim of ownership on it any more, ever”. Are the US courts now saying that those contracts have no validity? If that’s the case, then everything Marvel and DC have done for the last, say, fifty years becomes open season. It would have to radically change the way they do business as comics companies.

    I’m not saying that it’s necessarily a bad thing. Both companies have previously made arrangements for not-work-for-hire deals with writers and artists who had sufficient clout. If they have to do that for everyone, though, they probably will have to rethink their overall approach to the management of their properties.

  • fish eye no miko

    “…is suing Marvel and their new owners Disney…”

    I know I’m kinda cynical, but the timing on this is… suspicious.

  • David Fullam

    This will be interesting. No one denies that Siegel and Shuster created Superman, but just what Jack did is a little murkier. I was always raised to believe that basically it went like this, Stan created the basic characters and concepts, then handed it off to the artists to draw. Have no idea if this was true or not, but that was the history that I was taught. Who knows what the truth is? But a serious can of worms has been opened here.

  • tbyrne@berryfamlaw.com.au

    This annoys me for two basic reasons :

    (1) The whole principle of ‘work-for-hire’ is that the mployer bears the risk – if the comic / character you created is a complete bomb, and loses the company scads of money – you still get paid. For creators to put their handsout AFTER the property has turned a huge profit essentially means a demand of reward without risk.

    This is even more the case in the movie field, where many movies lose zillions of dollars precisley because actors, directors etc are paid regardless of a companies profitability.

    (2) is the area of length of copyright and ownership. i firmly beieve in a strict and reasonable time limit for private ownership of intellectal property, after which it enters the public domain. An example is Sherlock Holmes, which is now public domain. Given the time from within which many DC characters were created, and the fact that the creators have long passed, i see no reason for either the companies or the ‘heirs’ of creators to consider that their ownership rights continue ad infinitum. Something that has bugged me intensely about Disney is their constant lobbying of Congress to extend the date for which they maintain ownership of their cash-cow characters such as Mickey and Donald.

  • In the early days of comics, the work-made-for-hire contracts amounted to a sentence on the back of a check, which modern courts have ruled is not sufficient. Modern wmfh contracts are not as vulnerable to challenge.

    Note that in Europe for one, work-made-for-hire is not treated the same, and the creator(s) always have some rights which they cannot sell.

  • which is why, no doubt, we have the current massive influx of European comics into the United States.

  • Terrahawk

    I cry for none of them. Everyone’s greed is the result of this. Family’s want paid for things they never had anything to do with and companies want eternal rights.

  • It’s probably none of my business, but now I’m wondering whether Call of Cthulhu was work-made-for-hire. Or those levels you did for Id Software.

    (This is the Carl who took you out for Pizza when you came to I-CON and later allllmost cowrote the fourth edition of RuneQuest, BTW.)

  • BeckoningChasm

    Well, what they seem to be ensuring is that movies will not be made with Marel characters, if it means thousands of people suddenly have their hands out.

    BTW, I think it was Bill Everette who created Daredevil (he also created the Sub-Mariner).

  • Aussiesmurf

    The other issue is : what is ‘creation’?

    For many of these ongoing characters, the simple concept of a character is at best only marginally connected to their future success. Sure, with characters like FF and Spider-Man, they were insanely successful from day dot, and this is attributed (rightly) in great part to their creators. But as someone said, what about Wolverine? He was only ‘created’ as a marginal one-off character, but became a licence to print money only because of how he was developed as a character by later writers.

    Imagine if the comic book Watchmen had proceeded along the originally anticipated lines of using the old Charlton characters (the Question and so forth). WOuld anyone have seriously been able to argue that the creators of those characters had a significant entitlement to Watchmen related profits?