Wolfman has likewise not provided the court with sufficient evidence to show that he developed Blade and Deacon Frost prior to the publication of “The Tomb of Dracula” issue number ten.

In Siegel, the plaintiffs completely developed several Superman comic strips prior to the plaintiffs sale of their work to Detective Comics. There, the court found that the strips were ready or nearly ready for publication.

Here, Wolfman merely had a nascent idea for a character and story. Even assuming that Wolfman produced a half-page write up of the character’s background and look, Wolfman had not completely developed the characters of Blade and Deacon Frost as the plaintiffs had in Siegel. Wolfman’s Siegel argument does not account for the transition from a story idea to a story ready for publication.

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In part, tho I think the single biggest nail in Wolfman's coffin was pounded in when Marvel produced an interview in which Marv said, in so many words, that he had created Blade for the issue of TOMB OF DRACULA in which the character first appeared. That was the point at which I found myself thinking Why are we even here?

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Not only did he say that, he said he had told people who worked under his tenure as EiC that they owned everything they created. Oddly enough, he was not able to produce a single witness to support this claim.

T'would not have made any difference, anyway. The checks kept going out with those mini work-for-hire contracts stamped on the back.

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For the most part, not at all.

A fairly classic example: One day a friend called me up to tell me the "good news" that Marvel was contemplating getting rid of royalties in favor of a direct profit sharing system. I actually had to point out to him that under that system every time he got a raise in his page rate, Marvel's "profits" would shrink, and so would his "share".

Why would any creator favor "profit-sharing" over royalties? Royalties are fixed, based on percentage of retail price for copies sold past a certain point. So it's based on the grosses that a company makes on the book. Profit sharing is about getting a piece of the net, whatever is left after the accountants get through with it.

In "The Comic Book Makers", Joe Simon discussed what a sucker deal that was. When he created Captain America and took the property to Martin Goodman, the deal was that Goodman would share the profits of the book with Simon and Kirby. But Goodman transferred overhead costs for the rest of the company into the accounts for Captain America, meaning that on paper there were no profits to speak of. (Whereas other books, without a profit participation deal, less sales figures and lower sell-through miraculously became more profitable.)

In Hollywood this is so prevalent it's known as "Hollywood accounting" and it's why every star asks for percentages of the gross (which is a rough equivalent to the royalties system) and percentages of the net (profit sharing) is considered a sucker-deal.

I recall reading an interview in (I think) Cinescape Magazine that came out a few months before the Blade movie was released where Wolfman said that the ownership of Blade was never clearly defined or in question (or something like that) and that comic book companies handled the business of copyright very sloppily back in the 70's. After reading that interview I had a strong feeling that Wolfman might try to sue Marvel for the ownership of Blade if the movie was a hit, and I apparently was right.

"what continuing characters appeared in the Simon & Kirby line that were not the creations of Simon & Kirby?  So far as I know, there were none."

Work for hire doesn't just cover the creation of comic-book characters. It covers every contribution to the printed product. If he didn't fall under the heading of work-for-hire, even the guy in the production department who glued in the indicia at the bottom of the spladh-page could claim a piece of the copyright.

This, after all, has been the reason Alan Moore was able to prevent his Marvel UK Captain Britain stories from being reprinted: he didn't do them as work-for-hire and as a consequence he retained copyrights to his work. Even though all the characters were owned by Marvel.