A COMICS CONTROVERSY - CARE TO COMMENT?



Superman's first issue of his own comicbook

 Consider, if you will, the following scenario. A person buys an ornament for £2 from a charity shop. Later, upon reflection, they decide that they don't really like it so they put it out in their garden shed. A couple of years later, someone collecting for a jumble sale chaps their door and the ornament is recovered from the shed and freely handed over in order to raise funds to repair some church's leaky roof.

Ten years later, the first person is watching ANTIQUES ROADSHOW and sees "their" ornament declared as being worth £20,000. Do they have a moral or legal claim on any of that money if the current owner decides to sell?

Now consider this. Someone asks an artist to paint a picture of their house and gardens. He charges them £300 and is extremely pleased at the amount he has secured for himself. Five years later, a visitor to the purchaser's house is so enamoured of the painting that he offers them £5,000 for it. Over the years, it changes hands for increased amounts until it is worth £50,000. Does the artist have any moral or legal claim on any of the money it has changed hands for over the years?

The answer is surely "no" - isn't it?

So - what's the difference between those two examples and what happened to SIEGEL and SCHUSTER over SUPERMAN, or JACK KIRBY and the many characters he created or co-created for MARVEL or DC COMICS? Or the work LEO BAXENDALE (or any artist you care to name) did for D.C. THOMSON or FLEETWAY/IPC? I would suggest none at all. If you consent to sell something outright for an agreed fee, then it's really nothing to do with you what the purchaser does with his purchase or how much he profits from it in the years to come. If you buy a house for £80,000 and then sell it for £100,000, the previous owner (even if he built the house) is neither legally nor morally entitled to a share of your profit. And, back in the day, that's the way it was done in the world of comics.



Batman's first issue of his own comicbook

Which is not to say that I have anything against present-day creators' rights, profit sharing, copyright ownership, return of artwork, or anything like that - because that's the way things are done nowadays. However, back in the 1930s (until relatively recently - late '70s, early '80s), comics were - in the main - just a job to the writers and artists working on them, and it was the publishers who were taking the financial risk in launching a new comicbook - so why shouldn't their share of the profits proportionately reflect that risk? When a publisher bought a character, they bought it outright - if it was a success, they made money, if it was a failure, they didn't. It's a safe bet that there were a lot more failures than successes in those days. That was just the way the cookie crumbled.

Anyone got any thoughts on the matter? Let's hear them.