The estate of Jack "The King" Kirby, the man who co-created nearly every iconic Marvel character you can think of and helped build Western comics as both an industry and an art form into what it is today, has no legal right to royalties from Marvel. As I understand it, this means that Kirby nor, now that he passed away, his family have ever seen a penny of the incalculable number of comics, toys, movies, and dozens of other types of products produced using characters he created.
Recently, the Kirby estate lost a legal battle to Marvel's lawyers as his heirs attempted to reverse this situation.
As a result, Steve Bissette, co-creator of Swamp Thing and John Constantine, comics sage extraordinaire, and one of my mentors at the Center for Cartoon Studies, is calling for a boycott of Kirby-created Marvel products.
The boycott would include products featuring Captain America, Black Panther, Doctor Doom, the Fantastic Four, Galactus, the Hulk, Iron Man, Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D., the Silver Surfer, Thor and associated interpretations of the Norse gods, and the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, including Magneto, all of whom are characters created or co-created by Jack Kirby. Since the bulk of the most iconic members of the team is made up of some of these characters, the Avengers would also be affected.
Steve Bissette is a really smart guy with a strong sense of morality, and he's seen and studied a lot of comics history. Believe me when I say that when he weighs in on the important issues in pop media, you should be listening. If enough people contributed, the boycott would absolutely cripple Marvel's sales -- besides Spider-Man, all of their most famous and popular characters were created by Kirby, and the company has been milking those characters for over 40 years.
The point isn't so much to get Kirby's family the royalties they and he deserve(d). It's to try to change things. As I understand, freelancers and employees of Marvel are required to give up considerable rights to all pronouns and work created for the company. One of the first things I learned about the industry was, "Don't work for Marvel or DC," because they're known for trying to take as much recognition from creators as possible -- that way, if some character makes it big, the revenue from that character's popularity goes into the company's pocket, not the creator's.
Frankly, Steve is much more knowledgeable and articulate than I, and if you care about the rights of artists and writers in ANY medium, you should read the article on his blog. Some selections:
S.R.Bissette wrote:I put it to you, ladies and gentlemen, that San Diego Comicon 2012 should be the least comfortable event Marvel or any fleeting participant in any product, movie, videogame, or anything derived from Jack Kirby’s Marvel legacy, should ever attend in the history of comicbook conventions—if you make sure it is.
But there’s a lot to do—or rather, not do—between now and then.
After all, given the biggest news in the comics industry this week, in a vertebrate world, pros would cease working for Marvel and any Marvel product that involved Jack Kirby’s co-creations or derivations of Jack Kirby’s co-creations.
Fandom would cease buying/supporting any Marvel product, including its movies, in Jack’s memory.
Then again, we live in an invertebrate world; in a vertebrate world, Marvel/Disney would not have so easily prevailed over Jack Kirby’s heirs in seeking justice for Jack Kirby’s legacy. Read it and weep; Stan Lee is damned.
I direct those of you who care to Catherine L. Fisk’s excellent “Authors at Work: The Origin of the Work-for-Hire Doctrine,” from the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, Vol. 15:1, linked here.
Fisk writes in her introduction:
“One of the claims I make in this article is that the legal fiction of corporate authorship does what Lon Fuller suggested legal fictions always do. That is, it persuades lawyers that the corporate employer has a legitimate right to the copyright—the moral and legal entitlement that flows from the exalted status of being an author—without the necessity of explaining why. …it works as what Lon Fuller called an “intellectual shortcut” to persuade when a statement of the actual reasons for the ruling are difficult to explain.” [Fisk, pg. 5; the reference to Fuller is citing Lon L. Fuller, Legal Fictions 9-19 (1967).]
The whole lockstep with Marvel policies reveals systematic presumptions and assumptions proffered as legal reality and legal precedent—though it is obvious to one and all that what Kirby did at Marvel was and remains, over half-a-century later, in and of itself exceptional, in that it goes far beyond what ANYONE other than Stan Lee did at Marvel, sans the nepotistic position Stan maintained.
That is what makes Jack’s contribution/work for Marvel extraordinary, and above and beyond what Thomas, Romita, Byrne, or any other creator ever did before or after for Marvel.
I don’t question the legal logic Marvel’s attorneys made, and the court decision reflects. However, nothing is being said about the conditions under which Kirby signed, and was pressured to sign, the contracts presented. I don’t think “extortion” is too unfair a word to use, particularly in the very public case of the Marvel artwork “return” contracts.
That is a moral issue here, and Marvel’s pattern of decades of effectively slandering, maligning, and dimissing Kirby and his legacy is, too.
He makes a lot more points over on his blog, so check it out, if you care to.If, in the 1970s, Neal Adams and Jerry Robinson hadn’t rallied around Siegel & Shuster, who had multiple signed settlement contracts with National Periodicals to wield against them, agreements they had signed over their lifetimes (agreements they and their legal reps—like Albert Zugsmith—had negotiated), nothing would have changed.
Adams and Robinson brought to the public the moral case, the moral outrage, over the treatment of the creators of Superman.
At that time, the legal matters were considered “settled.”
C’mon, folks: Jack changed a century, the medium, the industry, our lives, and Marvel.
Let’s change how the rest of this onfolding story goes.