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