ewburnham wrote:
Kirby was paid by the page. Marvel sold the books at 12 cents a pop and made their bucks. This was pretty all that anyone expected to make at the time by producing comics in them thar' days.

Anything else later is gravy. So ok, so pass the gravy.
Exactly. Who could have forseen the growth of licensing and ancillary revenue over time? or heck, even the growth of reprinting those slim, disposable bits of pop detritus fifty years later?

My understanding is that laws are designed to protect Americans not exploit them. In this case, it would appear to be a case of the law doing the latter, not the former. Personally, again with NO legal knowledge, I think it's a bit silly for the Kirby family (or for that matter, Kirby himself) to claim that they should own part of these characters. Even at the time, Kirby was essentially exchanging the work he did on those characters for the opportunity to have them published and distributed on a massive scale--that seems a clear exchange of opportunity for content. 

However, when it comes to revenues generated by those creations over time, especially revenue never predicted by the original agreement or its signers, it seems absolutely fair and just to award compensation not just to the corporation that published all those comics, but to the creatives who put their own work and time and energy into the content for those comics. 

Compensation deals for movies and TV change all the time, as I understand it; part of the arguments each time a new deal is to be struck between the unions and the studios seem to focus on fair compensation for new avenues of distribution. In a sense, Kirby's creations are moving into their own "new avenues of distribution," in concept if not in precise replication of content. So alter the deal and, as said above, pass the gravy.


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