thebombbag:

James Sturm (The Golem’s Mighty Swing, Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow) has an article up on Slate that serves as a pretty good primer on the Jack Kirby/Jack Kirby’s Estate/Marvel/Disney saga. Marvel’s history of sucking creators dry for little compensation (except Stan Lee, of course) is well-documented and never disputed and no story captures the overall sense of unfairness as Jack Kirby’s. Jack created Marvel comics, for the most part, giving life to almost the entire stable of Silver-aged Marvel characters with the exception of Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, and Daredevil (the former two co-created by the equally tragic Steve Ditko). Kirby had to sign over the copyrights to all of his creations just to get a fraction of the 8000+ pages he created for Marvel back. Upon his death and prompted by the Disney sale, his estate has been trying to regain control of several of Kirby’s creations and have been blocked every step along the way. I don’t think anyone expects the estate to gain control of the copyrights, whatever Jack Kirby signed was likely airtight, but some people are at least expecting Marvel/Disney to do the ethical thing for the Kirby Estate in light of their $4-billion Disney purchase. Sturm (and Steve Bissette, before him) is calling for a boycott of the Avenger’s movie in order to send Marvel/Disney a message.

I think the idea is admirable, for sure, but I also think a boycott will ultimately prove to be fruitless. The general feeling amongst 95% of the comic fans who would actually read this article (who represent probably about 10% of comic fans, who represent about 0.0005% of the Avengers movie-going audience) seem to have the opinion, “Kirby’s estate are just money-hungry assholes,” without really trying to understand the issue. The irony that we’re all being fed this line that, “anti-piracy laws protect creators,” from corporations who aren’t fairly compensating creators - this is a real thing and a real argument to counter many of these anti-piracy claims. 

I do, however, think a signal boost OUTSIDE of the comic world will help, even a little bit. That’s why this Slate article is great and why I’m trying to boost the signal and why I hope other people will do the same. Because whereas Kirby’s Estate will likely never see a dime from Marvel/Disney, we can do our part to protect artists going forward, and to help people understand that only the smallest possible portion that you hand over to these corporations go to the artists, but everything you take does, in fact, get taken out of the artists’ compensations. 

That’s why piracy and copyright is a tricky thing. A company will do everything it can to increase its bottom-line. If you buy their product, they’ll put it into profit. if you steal their product, they’ll reduce their cost. And one of their biggest “costs” are the artists doing the creating.

Read the article - pass it around. Broaden the narrative to corporations and copyrights as a whole. Fight a good fight but fight it right.