Long Live the King

This has been on my to-do pile for a while now, ever since I started covering the films leading up to Avengers. It's an issue that's been ripe for discussion in the comic book community, both because it relates directly to Marvel's big blockbuster trump card for 2012, and because it ties into the very thorny issue of comic creator rights. It's been addressed elsewhere on many other blogs and websites, but I suspect my readership (yes, all five of you) have never heard of this, so I think it's fair to bring it to your attention.

The gentleman in the middle there with the cigar is Jack Kirby. Most of you probably don't know who he is, but he was one of the most influential and innovative comic creators the industry has ever seen. He is also the man responsible, along with Stan Lee, for the Avengers.

Born Jacob Kurtzberg in New York City, Kirby spent his entire life drawing. He worked for newspapers in his teens and later animation studios, but what really defined his career was comics. Kirby has drawn and written in sci-fi comics, monster comics, westerns, romance comics and war comics - it was this latter genre that, with Joe Simon on writing duties, led to the creation of Captain America, a comic that would outsell Time Magazine during WWII and of course featured that amazingly awesome cover.

However, to this day, Kirby's best and best-known work remains in superheroes. The deluge started with Fantastic Four, Marvel's flagship superhero team. You probably know them from those two terrible films, but when they first graced comics, it was a revolution. The Fantastic Four were superheroes who behaved like regular humans - they quarrelled, they fought, they made up. They were a family. They were relatable, and helped ground Kirby's love of high concept science fiction. In the pages of Fantastic Four, we got Galactus, Devourer of Worlds, and his angelic herald the Silver Surfer. The Inhumans, a race of alien-human hybrids who set up a kingdom on the Moon. Adam Warlock, an artificial human who would later gain godlike power. Kirby came up with more ideas in a few issues than most writers have in their entire lives.

Even if his sense of fashion was...

...a little out there.

Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, the Black Panther - comics' first black superhero - and even the modern idea of Captain America as a man out of time; all guided along by Kirby. There was a reason why Marvel was called the House of Ideas. But here's where things start to go sour. The "Marvel Method" of scripting comics, pioneered by Lee, went roughly like this:

1. The writer and artist would come up with a concept.
2. The writer would leave the outline to the artist, who plots and paces specific scenes, in addition to pencilling it.
3. The writer looks it over, and once satisfied, adds dialogue, captions and sound effects, and gets sole writer's credit.
4. Wait what?

You can see the problem Kirby had here. Despite his guiding hand in the process, as far as the readership, good old Smilin' Stan was the only writer credited. Not just Kirby, either; how many other of Lee's contributing artists didn't get credit if they helped this much with the plotting? In fairness, this Method came about because Lee was stretched on so many titles and couldn't plot them all out, but this wasn't the worst. Oh no.

Speaking as a comics fan, someone who buys comics weekly and who loves the medium, the comics industry has absolutely shit ethics, and Kirby has unfortunately become a prime example of this. As a result of the Copyright Law of 1976, Marvel needed to formalise their relationships with their writers and artists so that they would own the rights to the characters, and not the creators. To wit: Marvel would write up contracts for their employees to sign forcing them to relinquish all rights to anything they created or else they would not get paid. It would be phrased something like this:

“SUPPLIER [i.e. creators] expressly grants to MARVEL forever all rights of any kind and nature in and to the Work, the rights to use SUPPLIER’s name in connection therewith and agrees that MARVEL is the sole and exclusive copyright proprietor thereof having all rights of ownership therein.”

Artists were given one-page contracts like these that effectively them "Say that your hard work belongs to us lock stock and barrel, or you don't get this paycheck, and you and your family eat cardboard for every meal." Shameful behaviour, I'm sure you'll agree. Artists could get the original art back, but they had to sign an additional form giving Marvel full copyright (which they had no right to anyway). Stan Lee signed a similar contract, but a very cushty one - in exchange for giving up all rights to his creations, he gets $1,000,000 a year for life, and the title of Chairman Emeritus at Marvel - basically, getting kicked upstairs, as he has no say in how Marvel's run. He was the public face of Marvel, after all.

Kirby? He got a four-page contract, which would have deemed all his work at Marvel as simply "work-for-hire", that he would have no right to challenge their copyright, he couldn't object to anything they did with his work, and allowed him to get 88 pages worth of original art back. Just to clarify, Kirby drew on average about fifteen pages a week for Marvel. That's thousands of pages worth of material, and he only gets a fraction, which he couldn't even sell or give away. Worse, he only gets the page rate; any royalties generated by, say, a Fantastic Four movie, a Hulk movie or, oh I don't know, an Avengers movie, would go straight to Marvel. He and his heirs wouldn't see a dime.

Hey, the guy at Marvel who wrote this contract?

Kirby refused to sign it, and this took Marvel's reputation as the House of Ideas down several notches. Eventually, Marvel presented him with a revised single-page contract, and returned something like two thousand pages to him, but to this day, Kirby's estate won't see any money raised from his work. This includes the films based on his work: Thor, The Incredible Hulk, Captain America and, yes, The Avengers. Legally, Marvel are in the right; but there's a big difference between legally right and morally right.

So where does this leave us? I imagine most of you have seen Avengers by now (and also have read my review, hint hint), and I don't mean to detract your enjoyment of the final product by telling you this. Hell, I willingly went to see Avengers on opening day with this in mind. Does this make me a hypocrite? Maybe, but I always try and focus on the art, which should stand up by itself. Plus, I'd like to imagine that Kirby would be chuffed at the thought that characters he created are entertaining a whole new generation.

If I can get just one person reading this interested enough in Jack "The King" Kirby to check out some of his work, it will all be worth it. Not just his run on Marvel, but all the other work he's done, like the Eternals, brought back to life not too long ago by Neil Gaiman, and his very eventful life - he fought in WWII, survived frostbite, and personally forced out a mafioso from Marvel's office who was demanding protection money. And his work for DC! OMAC, the One-Man Army Corps. Etrigan, the Demon Knight. The Fourth World, his epic remake of the Bible starring cosmic god-warriors battling in fire and thunder. All of these brilliant stories with burning hearts tell a simple, overwhelmingly humanistic message: good can never be defeated by evil. I'm almost jealous that you get to experience this anew.

And he also created Devil Dinosaur. Who doesn't love Devil Dinosaur?

If you still feel guilty about Avengers, here's a suggestion by Jon Morris: match the price of your ticket with a donation to http://www.heroinitiative.org/. The Hero Initiative is a charity that provides financial safety to comic book professionals who've fallen on hard times. These professionals often work, or worked freelance,  so they had no job security - no health insurance, unemployment benefits or retirement plans. The Hero Initiative is there to help. I made a donation of $9.70 to THI - that roughly equates to about £6.10, the cost of my Avengers ticket. Obviously I'm not forcing you all to donate, and I can understand money is scarce, but if everyone who went to see Avengers donated even $1 to THI, that's a lot of money raised for charity. Possibly over $1 billion by the time Avengers ends its theatrical run.

Makes you feel like a superhero, doesn't it?

Long Live the King.