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Pascal LISE
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Posted: 02 August 2011 at 4:17pm | IP Logged | 1  


You sure are working hard yourself at waving the same points again and again.

Let's get rid of the Spider-Man one as a start.
Steve Ditko is co-creator of Spider-Man.

About the FF, can you affirm that, before writing a plot, Stan Lee got no input whatsover from Jack Kirby?

Even so, what about all the other major characters?
Did Kirby create or co-create anything at all?

Why did Stan never acnowledge Kirby ESSENTIAL contribution as co-creator?

Did Stan write and conceive everything all by himself?

If so, why didn't he create the M* universe before Jack returned to M*?
Why aren't there any memorable Lee's creations after Kirby quit M* for DC while Jack still cranked out so many great characters by himself?
Why did the stories that Lee produced with other great artistic talents pale so much before what the Kirby (or Ditko) & Lee team produced?

Why did he produce (and fail) with John Buscema the Silver Surfer comic against what Kirby intended for it when this character is the only one he clearly attributed to Jack?

How can he STILL pretend he has no idea why Kirby left?

What would have been the industry you entered in WITHOUT Jack, John?


Edited by Pascal LISE on 03 August 2011 at 5:15am
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Dave Aikins
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Posted: 02 August 2011 at 4:30pm | IP Logged | 2  

"Far to many comicbook movies -- especially the superhero variety..."

TOO TOO TOO TOO TOO TOO TOO TOO TOO TOO TOO TOO TOO TOO TOO TOO TOO TOO TOO TOO TOO TOO TOO TOO TOO TOO TOO TOO TOO TOO!!!
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Dave Phelps
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Posted: 02 August 2011 at 4:48pm | IP Logged | 3  

Brad, "At least in Kirby's day, creators can claim at least one level of ignorance in that probably few, if any, people expected these characters to have the longevity and long-term profitability that resulted."

I'd agree with you about the early days, but by the dawn of the Marvel Universe, you had Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and Archie all going strong for 20+ years, Patsy Walker holding out almost as long (albeit not for much longer), Green Arrow and Aquaman floating around the back pages for decades themselves, etc.  No reason to think lighting would strike again of course, but it wasn't totally outside the realm of possibility. 

Of course, OTOH, that's a small enough number to claim they were flukes given the vast graveyards full of defunct characters...

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Ted Pugliese
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Posted: 02 August 2011 at 5:03pm | IP Logged | 4  

This is a great thread #justsayin
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Pj Perez
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Posted: 02 August 2011 at 5:16pm | IP Logged | 5  

"Look how much creativity was poured into American comics, back in the days when the Publishers owned everything. Compare that to what we have seen in the past few decades, since things got "better" for the creators. In the past thirty years or so, have we seen anything come along that would even begin to approach the characters created in the Golden and SIlver Ages?"

It's crazy that I've made the exact same point to friends multiple times since that summary judgment was announced. Creators "hold back" on introducing new characters or amazing concepts in WFH (aka, most mainstream comics), saving them for their standalone, creator-owned projects.
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Brian Miller
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Posted: 02 August 2011 at 5:20pm | IP Logged | 6  

 Pascal LISE wrote:

 I wrote:

 Pascal LISE wrote:
Goodman had probably nothing to do with the creation process itself which is what's being discussed.

You've never heard how the Fantastic Four came about, have you?


You've never "heard" about a creation process, have you?

So, no, you haven't heard about how the Fantastic Four came about.

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Dave Phelps
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Posted: 02 August 2011 at 5:25pm | IP Logged | 7  

Knut Robert Knutsen: "If Marvel assigned the work to Kirby as work-for-hire, then barring a quality issue, a standards and practices (i.e.  comics code) issue or deviation from an assigned plot that could be produced and compared to the finished work, Kirby should have been paid for that work, even though it was scrapped.

"The fact that he wasn't, is at the very least ethically dubious, and at most, as the Kirby estate seems to argue, it might undermine the issue of work-for-hire, as that requires the company to accept certain financial risks and losses."

I'd certainly agree with ethically dubious, given how Stan and Jack worked, but legally, I don't know.  Implicit in work for hire is that the work needs to be "acceptable."  If the pages were scrapped, for whatever reason, then they weren't acceptable and not necessarily entitled to payment.  The problem with something like "Stan didn't correct miscommunication" is that there's no indication of whether or not Jack tried to clear up any potential issues prior to turning pages in.  (Frankly, given that we're talking about Jack, it was probably a more efficient use of his time to do it his way and fix whatever was needed later.)

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Dave Phelps
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Posted: 02 August 2011 at 5:32pm | IP Logged | 8  

Adam Hutchinson:  "It seems to me the pendulum has swung back away from Stan Lee and in favor of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. For years Jack was the one that Marvel and Stan was the major driving force of the company  and characters. Now popular opinion sees it the other way."

Yeah.  It's a shame so many can't build them all up at the same time.  If all of them weren't at the same place at just the right time, you wouldn't have had Marvel as we knew it.  Simple as that.

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Adam Hutchinson
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Posted: 02 August 2011 at 6:32pm | IP Logged | 9  

Well said.
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Knut Robert Knutsen
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Posted: 02 August 2011 at 11:49pm | IP Logged | 10  

"If the pages were scrapped, for whatever reason, then they weren't acceptable and not necessarily entitled to payment. "

Not "for whatever reason". If Kirby had drawn a storyline that Lee had asked for or approved, which he later changed his mind about without telling Kirby, that would not be an acceptable reason to reject pages and refuse to pay for them.

If Lee expected Kirby to come up with storylines and sub-plots on his own, and submit the completed pages for approval before paying for them, then clearly the content of those pages were not at Lee's instigation and Kirby alone  absorbed the financial risk of producing those pages if that storyline was not used.

We're talking about chunks of 4-5 pages at a time. For most artists that would be a week's salary down the drain because Lee didn't want to spend more than an hour "writing" a plot (i.e. discussing it with no witnesses or paper trail) .

Allegedly  this was an ongoing thing. The responsible thing to do in a work for hire situation would have been to create a record, maybe only a few lines on paper, as easy reference for both Kirby and Lee, so that if there was an issue of whether to accept pages, it could be settled from the paperwork whether they were assigned or not.

Lee allegedly didn't do that.

But again: barring direct testimony from Kirby that could be challenged under cross-examination and that a jury could compare to Lee's testimony so as to make a judgement as to whose version of events was more credible, there is no case.

The problem in this case is the absence of a paper trail. Do you think it's a coincidence that Kirby later refused to work with writers (including Lee) from a verbal plot? That he wanted it all in writing?

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John Byrne
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Posted: 03 August 2011 at 4:48am | IP Logged | 11  

It's a shame so many can't build them all up at the same time. If all of them weren't at the same place at just the right time, you wouldn't have had Marvel as we knew it. Simple as that.

••

When I look at the way some comic fans seem to think, I feel in many ways that we in the Industry must take responsibility. After all, we have spent decades "training" fans to look for subplots, ulterior motives, hidden plans, surprising twists and all kinds of things that are, thankfully, a lot less prevalent in real life.

But it creates for some an inability to look at any situation without breaking it down into black and white Good Guys vs Bad Guys.

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Dave Phelps
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Posted: 03 August 2011 at 5:55am | IP Logged | 12  

Disclaimer in advance – I’ve already ceded the “moral” argument.  Strictly going off legalities here.

Knut:  “Not "for whatever reason". If Kirby had drawn a storyline that Lee had asked for or approved, which he later changed his mind about without telling Kirby, that would not be an acceptable reason to reject pages and refuse to pay for them. “

Work for hire doesn’t mean you’re no longer subject to editing.  Quite the opposite, actually.  Everyone agrees that Stan stopped providing detailed plots early on.  They’d cover the broad strokes in a story meeting (or whatever) and Jack would go home and turn it into a comic story for Stan to script.  So there could be a chance that Jack would turn in a sequence as part of that story that Stan felt didn’t convey the intended story properly.  Hence the page wasn’t acceptable.

“If Lee expected Kirby to come up with storylines and sub-plots on his own, and submit the completed pages for approval before paying for them, then clearly the content of those pages were not at Lee's instigation and Kirby alone  absorbed the financial risk of producing those pages if that storyline was not used.”

That doesn’t make sense.  For one thing, I don’t think you can separate work for hire on a page by page basis.  Beyond that, the vast majority of Jack’s input was on extant continuing series.  Stan says “Jack, it’s time to start a new issue of the Fantastic Four.  Have them fight God.”  That’s Stan instigating the work.  He could just as easily have said “Jack, on second thought, I want you to drop FF and do Avengers for awhile.  Have them fight God, instead.”  And Jack would have gone home and worked on Avengers instead.

If Jack drew a long shot where Stan felt a close-up would do better (or whatever; aside from the occasional rejected cover, I haven’t seen too many reworked pages, so I don’t know what kinds of changes we’re talking about) and sent the page back for reworking, that doesn’t negate the fact that Jack only drew that page in the first place because Stan asked/hired him to.

For new series, unfortunately, we only have Stan’s recollections to work off of.  As he tells it, new series were generally kicked off when he had a germ of an idea (maybe more) and he worked with Jack (at least at first) to turn it into a concept/character ready for a series, to varying levels.  I think Kirby “only” designed the original Iron Man outfit; whereas on X-Men he designed all of the characters, drew the early issues, co-plotted the book, etc.  So that would be Stan’s (Marvel’s) instigation.  Now if Jack came to him with a series idea, that would be different, but there are no 1955 sketches of, say, the Hulk floating out there, so that makes it hard to prove.

As far as expense goes, Jack was subject to the same risk as any independent contractor – the customer may not like the work.  I don’t think that meets the intent of the “expense” aspect, because once the work was accepted, his financial risk was gone.  If Marvel wasted money paying all creative types, printing the books, marketing the books, etc., then Jack wasn’t directly affected negatively.  (I say directly, because a book tanking could adversely affect his ability to garner future work, but those kinds of intangibles aren’t covered.)

 “We're talking about chunks of 4-5 pages at a time.”

Are we?  Not being snarky, I’ve never seen numbers.  The only thing I’ve heard as far as that went was that Stan would occasionally tell Jack to change something.  (Not including something like FF #108, where Stan scrapped the entire issue.  But that’s the only time I’ve heard of that happening.)  Is there a record or interview or anything of how often this happened and to what extent?    

“The responsible thing to do in a work for hire situation would have been to create a record, maybe only a few lines on paper, as easy reference for both Kirby and Lee, so that if there was an issue of whether to accept pages, it could be settled from the paperwork whether they were assigned or not.”

It doesn’t sound like “a few lines on paper” would have helped.  It’s not like Stan would hire Jack to do a story with the FF vs. Tyrannus, forget and then reject the story because Jack didn't use the Mole Man.  The only way to avoid what we’re talking about would be detailed plots.  

 Do you think it's a coincidence that Kirby later refused to work with writers (including Lee) from a verbal plot? That he wanted it all in writing?”

 

As I’ve heard it, it’s more because he got tired of Stan getting all of the credit for the plots in the stories they collaborated on.  So he either wanted a plotting credit for when he did the heavy lifting or an actual plot to work off of.

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