sfcityduck wrote:
Snappleshacks wrote:
sfcityduck wrote:
No.  Marvel didn't pay for stories.  They paid for pages.  Jack Kirby was paid a page rate not a story rate.  But, when he presented a page to Marvel, Marvel wasn't obligated to pay for it.  This begs the question: Who bore the risk for the work?


I think this is disingenuous. Marvel wasn't hiring Kirby to draw three pages in the middle of a story. They hired artists to draw stories, and those artists were paid on a per-page basis. This isn't any different than paying someone an hour rate with the expectation that they are working the full day.
Except Marvel did hire artists to do three pages in the middle of a story, or to fill in backgrounds, or make corrections, etc., when circumstances warranted it.  And when that happened, they paid a page rate.  Three pages of redrawing netted the artist three pages of payment.  Marvel always paid a page rate, never a story rate.  

An example, DD 1 was inked by Everett, Ditko and Brodsky, because Everett was late in turning it in.    

Doesn't the court care if the circumstances you note above were rare - which they were?  From statements Evanier has made, Kirby had only 1 to 2 percent of his pages rejected (and many of them were actually covers, not story pages), and many of those were re-worked into future stories and eventually bought by Marvel.  I also thought that in the rare instances where Kirby's art was altered at Lee's request, it was either done by Kirby himself, or by someone on staff (Romita), or by anyone who was handy.  I believe Kirby still got paid for the page, and any other parties who pitched in were on salary or contributed the work for free.

Kirby was assigned the number of pages that could be in a story - he couldn't submit 19 or 21 during Marvel's 20-page era - so in essence he was virtually always paid for an assignment or a story, not a page.  I can't think of a single instance where another artist inserted a page into a 1960s Kirby story (I can think of one instance, however, where Kirby completed a Gene Colan Iron Man story).  Would the court honestly favor the technicality of Kirby being paid a page rate over the fact that he was virtually always paid for the exact number of pages that constituted a full story?  Would they really entertain the rejected pages argument even if it didn't apply 98% of the time?