I’m going try and discuss a delicate
topic in the comic book community. Namely, I want to talk about the ownership
of Superman. Over the years, my thoughts on this topic have shifted back and forth,
between being outraged at Siegel and Shuster’s lack of compensation for their
creation to thinking DC really didn’t do much wrong. To this day, I’m still not
sure exactly where I stand. About a decade ago, I thought it was appalling how DC treated Superman’s creators and the sad financial state they were
reduced to in their later years. I was even inspired to write an article
calling for changes to copyright law to prevent an injustice like this from
happening again. Fortunately, the paper was never published. It was written
well, but I later realized I had a fundamental, factual error in it that
would’ve been a major embarrassment. (This topic on changing copyright law
might be revisited at a later date.) These days, I think I fall somewhere in-between
feeling pity for Siegel and Shuster and anger at DC. Both sides have reasons
why they are in the right and why they are in the wrong, and at this point,
there is not really an outcome fair to either side. But, let’s start at the
beginning before we come to our final analysis.
Most
people who’ve been around comics long enough know the story. Jerry Siegel came
up with the basic idea of the Superman story in 1933, and he and Joseph Shuster
created several weeks’ worth of material for a possible comic strip.[1] They
shopped the story for a number of years without finding a publisher.[2]
Eventually, they started working on some comic strips for Detective Comics,
and, in 1938 it decided to finally publish Siegel and Shuster’s Superman story
in its new book, Action Comics.[3]
The two had already signed employment agreements stating DC owned all rights to
the creations they made during their term of employment. On March 1, 1938, DC
also had them execute an agreement giving all rights in the Superman strips to
DC.[4] For
the assignment of their rights to Superman, Siegel and Shuster received $130 as
compensation from DC.[5]
In
September 1938, they again executed another employment agreement with DC.[6]
The agreement was to run for five years, and they were to be paid $10 per page
for their work on Superman, in addition to being paid for their work on other
comic strips at a lower rate.[7] It
also reiterated that DC was the owner of all rights in the Superman strips, and
it gave DC a right of first refusal to future creations from Siegel and
Shuster.[8] By
1947, Siegel and Shuster’s total compensation for the Superman strip was
greater than $400,000.[9]
In
the next post, I’ll discuss the first lawsuit over the rights to Superman.
[1] Siegel
v. Time Warner, Inc., 496 F.Supp.2d 1111, 1113 (C.D. Cal. 2007).
[2] Id.
[3] Id. at
1114.
[4] Id.
[5] Id.
[6] Id.
[7] Id.
[8] Id.
[9] Siegel
v. National Periodical Publications, Inc., 508 F.2d 909, 911 (2nd Cir. 1974).
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