But -- and this is very, very, very important -- IT WAS NOT A SECRET.

When I set about getting a career in comics, I understood full well that I would not own anything I created. One of the people who explained that to me, in great detail, was Marv Wolfman, would would regret it later!

One of the advantages comics used to have -- and this is going to sound staggeringly naive, I know -- is that many of us got into the job for LOVE, not for MONEY. Until the very early Eighties, there were no royalties, no percentage deals, no acknowledgments of ownership, but we knew it going in, and all we wanted to do was MAKE COMICS.

This was not the case, so much, in the early days, when comics were a haven for people who did not have the chops to make it in the strips. There it was about MONEY to at least some degree -- but it was about making a living, not making a fortune.

Things have changed a lot, and, typically, with the changes has come a kind of amnesia. People forget that the Past was DIFFERENT. Like Todd McFarlane chiding me for not starting something like Image when I was "hot" -- in 1975! Chiding Ditko and Kirby in the same way. Oblivious to Kirby's failed attempt to do just that. Oblivious to the state of the industry before things got better.

"Better" in the sense of more money. But I look at some of the people MAKING all that money, these days, and I wonder Where's the LOVE?

If you create Spider-Man, you're obviously going to make vastly more money even if you only get a few percent of the merchandising. If you "perform" well enough the character gets a cartoon and you get money from that. Isn't that basically how it works now? You don't have to figure out what a character might do in the future if a fair system is in place from the start.

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But nobody did this then. Why should a select few, who were content with the deals they had back then, get to come back now, 40-50 years later and say, "You should've paid me back then! I want my money!"?

I'm not saying the deal back then wasn't bad. I'm just echoing what JB's saying. These guys all knew the score going into the deal. There was no guarantee ANYTHING these guys created was going to have the success of Spider-Man or the X-Men, so why does everyone want to change things now for the past?

Minimum wage is now, at the national level, $7.25 per hour. When I first entered the workplace it was $1.85 per hour. Should I now sue my former bosses for that extra $5.40 I didn't make back then?

I would love to see Jack Kirby recognized the way Stan Lee is.  I remember Stan getting ambushed by some reporter about why there wasn't a credit for Jack in the Avengers even though there was. The creator's rights crowd seems to want to make their point that Marvel screwed Jack Kirby that they're willing to make stuff up to make Marvel and Stan the bad guys. I'd love to see Marvel do more to acknowlege the King but is it possible under this regime? Joe Q doesn't seem to acknowledge that there was such a thing as Marvel prior to his becoming EIC.

Who say's they were "content"? They liked comics and wanted to work and weren't able to alter reality on a whim. 

As far as you or any of us getting the money back, that would only work if prices were the same as they are now, wouldn't it? How much was gas then, as an example? Also, most of us aren't in the business of actually creating concepts and new things like artists are, so I have never been able to view artists in the same way as I do non-artists when it comes to stuff like this. You might physically build a car or a lightbulb, but you didn't conceive of said car or lightbulb. To be perfectly blunt, comic/entertainment companies are a dime a dozen. It takes little comparable talent to run one or to get material out, particularly if the infrastructure is there. This can be fabricated and immitated. A Jack Kirby, and his creative genius, can't.

With an art, for me, it's a different beast. I do believe in retroactive compensation. If the law changes, and the creators are still alive, they should indeed benefit from all they would have gotten. If someone get's put in prison for a crime, and then later it's stricken from the books and is no longer considered a crime, should the person in question be forced to remain in prison? Should Native American's and other minorities still be denied certain rights because of the unethical laws of the past? Of course not. 

It's not about them or the company not knowing this or that. How many creations go nowhere and wouldn't cost the company much of anything as far as royalties go? It's only when we get to the Kirby's that the companies don't want to budge. These the ones they REALLY care about, because those are the creators that created things that build entire industries. 

Constantly pointing out that "that's the way things used to work" is a dangerous mindset that gives a pass on unethical behavior. I really believe that the way companies, and the law, still treats "talent" to this very day will one day be seen as almost as disgusting as institutionalized racism does to us now.