On the question of risk: Marvel is taking the most risk because what if Jack came in with 20 blank pages? From the business standpoint, Marvel has scheduled an entire product on those pages being delivered, and has the most to lose if they are not delivered. Kirby loses his page rate, but Marvel's scheduled product is disrupted and all sort of related production costs are incurred -- plus huge franchise risk.

Let's say Jack made $100/page in 1968. So a book would cost Marvel $2,000 in Kirby wages. But say they sold 500,000 copies at a net proft of 5 cents: that's $25 grand profit they are out. Of course that never happened because they could run a reprint or an inventory story - but if they had to skip a month - that was the cost - and it's far higher. The math may be fuzzy, but publishing something is far more expensive than drawing something when all of the other commitments are factored in.

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But I'll go back to something I argued before which wasn't actually part of the case, but should be:

If Kirby was ripped off by the 60's Marvel deal and he really owns all of those characters - why would he return to Marvel in the 70's and create a huge roster of new characters under the very same arangement? (Arnim Zola is in the Cap movie for all you Bronze Age Kirby haters)

If that was the case, Kirby would have returned to Marvel only under the condition he work on existing properties, right?

But he pointedly did exactly the opposite.

Can anything say "Case Closed" more than that?