Posted in: Comics, Recent Updates | Tagged: boom, dc, doc savage, marvel, MVL, pixar, toys

Treating Creators Like Royalties

Published Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:00:09 -0600

Last updated Sat, 19 Feb 2011 03:00:59 -0600

Marvel's Tom Brevoort tweeted;

Is it really true that, for the Marvel-generated Doc Savage stories that DC has been collecting, they're not paying the creators anything?

DC has indeed been publishing collections of Doc Savage material, originally published serially by Marvel, as DC now has the Doc Savage comics licence and, it seems, these comics rights came with them. Whatever contractual committment is attached, and whether or not creators will get paid royalties, may well be down to whatever contracts Marvel signed in the seventies.

It's quite possible there will be no furtehr royalties paid, companies have been known to buy reprint rights from other publishers that don't include any royalty commitments. IDW published Speed Racer comics by the likes of Len Strazewski and Jill Thompson without paying them a cent. The people IDW licensed the material from claimed they owned the full rights to the work, even if Len and Jill believed they hadn't signed those kind of rights away.

Did something like that happen here?

But it does feel slightly odd for Tom Brevoort to make this point, a senior employee at Marvel, a company which avoided paying digital royalties for ages, still avoids paying foreign royalties to creators and who, it is believed, hasn't paid Jack Kirby or his estate a penny for all the Fantastic Four reprints and much more besides.

Of course, two wrongs don't make a right.

But something more recent, yesterday Marvel also announced that, with Disney, they were reprinting Boom! Pixar comics – albeit without mentioning Boom! once. Or indeed, letting the creators know. They haven't as yet been officially told that their work was to be reprinted, and don't know if they will get any royalty payments or not.

Tom Brevoort can ensure that happens, at least.

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