Fin Fang Foom wrote:
As is often the case, I like Tom Spurgeon's take on this...

"Fourth, this case should never have been filed. It’s pathetic that it had to come to this. Marvel should have used a decade’s worth of mega-cash to settle honorably with the Kirby family a long, long time ago, using their current relationship with Stan Lee — which itself had to be haggled out in court — as a model. Marvel doesn’t even match its closest rival’s efforts in terms of compensating creators for use of their characters in movies, and at some point, no matter how well they treat their current crop of creators, no matter how many entertaining comics they make, no matter how many weekends are won by their movies, this easily correctable series of +##@*% policies should matter to people."



It won't matter to most people outside of the few, aging die hard comic fans of the era.

To piss some fans off even more the many Stan Lee appearances in the Marvel movies like Alfred Hitchcock did and his many public media appearances over the years has much of the general public seeing him as the creator with Jack Kirby little more than footnotes in some of the movie credits. I know a great deal of people over the past decade who watch those Marvel movies and assume Stan lee is their sole source of creation. Maybe not fair but it seems to be unlikely to change as Kirby fans get older.

DC may very well have treated its creators better at times with compensation but the Superman case since the 1970's has been nothing but a fight with DC/WB only giving in when they had to. It's not a pretty sight these days...