Getting Screwed, by Mike Gold
We’re all familiar with the story of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. They created Superman but nobody would buy it so it sat in a drawer for a few years until an editor remembered seeing the submission and thought it would fill out the first issue of a new title that was lacking a lead story. Siegel and Shuster signed away their rights for something slightly in excess of a hundred bucks, although over the next decade they earned hundreds of thousands off of the property. The trouble is, the publisher was making millions.
Siegel and Shuster were getting screwed. They raised a stink about it and found themselves out of jobs. Later, after several publishing failures Siegel limped back to the offending publisher to work-for-hire for page-rate; Shuster was blind and couldn’t work for anybody.
Batman co-creator Bob Kane saw what was going on and offered to negotiate a contract that would: a) cover himself financially, b) somehow guarantee him sole creator credit, and c) screw the people who made Batman truly unique, people like co-creator Bill Finger and artists such as Jerry Robinson and Dick Sprang. This scenario was repeated by a number of creators who became publishers or intellectual property owners years and years later.
So the moral standard is rather flexible. That’s business. That’s human nature – most businessmen aren’t all that different from Al Capone, who, in fact, was generally more appreciative of his end-users than he was of his competitors. Now, everybody cooperates benignly, being careful to operate out of a sense of mutual self-interest instead of an actual conspiracy that might constitute anti-trust. We’ve just endured eight years of a government that was totally dedicated to this concept. (more…)
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