In 2014, Sony will release The Amazing Spider-Man 2, the fifth feature film centered on everyone’s favorite wall-crawler. While Spider-Man and Peter Parker have become household names, such is not really the case with the men who originally created the character for Marvel Comics in 1962. Creator credit in comic books has always been a gray area, most especially from the Golden Age up through the 1970s. The situation gets even murkier once you extrapolate the classic stories to big screen blockbusters. The Spider-Man franchise is certainly not the only one to miss creditor its creators, it has recently come into the spotlight through a blog post we reference below.
When it comes to comic book characters and stories, there are all kinds of arguments to be made as far as work-for-hire contracts, being a salaried employee and what rights are held by the creator versus the company. On the one hand, most of these characters were created with at least some knowledge that the copyright and licensing exploitation rights would be held by the company they were created for, unless some sort of contractual stipulation was signed granting the writer or artist specific rights. Basically, the argument is that the creators knew what they were getting into and were happy to do it at the time.
On the other hand, super-hero films are making hundreds of millions of dollars in profits with scripts that are based in whole or in part on stories that were originally written by one writer or, more and more frequently, by a specific writer and artist. Further adventures of Spidey and his friends have also been used for scripts over the last few years, adding even more writers and artists to the mix. Certainly the visual styles of all super-heroes were created by one or more artists. Why would you not at least acknowledge the person or persons who built the foundation of your success? Isn’t there some sort of moral obligation to provide a stipend for those who created what you are re-purposing?
Indeed, it would appear that Stan Lee seems to certainly be the exception to the rule as his name is associated very prominently along with Spider-Man, The X-Men, Iron Man and the Avengers, all of which he keeps being billed in news reports as being the creator of. However, while it seems that usually the writer gets widely credited as the one who came up with all the clever stories and characters, it is certainly disingenuous to tout Stan The Man as the sole creator of all of Marvel’s cinematic heroes and villains. As pointed out by guest blogger Richard Gagnon over on Steve Bissette’s site:
As Marvel became more successful, Stan‘s time decreased and his top artists might only get a one-sentence plot idea that they would have to create an entire story from. There were times that Stan had no input to the comic till the artist delivered pages for a story that they created completely on their own. Creative disagreements between Stan and Steve left them not communicating for two years such that Steve Ditko plotted the entire course of that period’s comics, creating villains and supporting characters–all without any input from Stan Lee. Stan was then left with looking at the art and Steve‘s notes and having to create a script on the fly. Steve Ditko quit Marvel when promised royalties were never paid as Spider-Man‘s popularity was starting to show up as merchandised toys in stores and a forthcoming Saturday morning cartoon announced.
The day Steve quit was the last day that he ever earned a penny from his four years of creating and defining the world of Spider-Man. His entire monetary income for all his work on Spider-Man probably earned him less money than the costume designer for the Spider-Man movies made when they slightly tweaked the costume for the character onscreen. Stan Lee‘s long association with Marvel has left him quite well-to-do as the company’s best known spokesman even though he likewise never directly got royalties from his co-creation of Spider-Man.
Steve Ditko, on the other hand, has favored creative freedom over money and consequently has done considerably less well. He is now 85 years old and still works on his own small-press comics. I would imagine that his social security income is unimpressive since he hasn’t worked on any top comics since Spider-Man. When he worked on Spider-Man, Marvel had some of the lowest page rates in the industry, so he didn’t do well there. Meanwhile, Marvel was bought by Disney for $4 billion for its intellectual property and none of the writers and artists that created those properties saw a penny from that massive sale.
Of course there is all manner of legal mumbo jumbo and maneuvering by lawyers and decisions by the courts to resolve things in favor of the comic book companies and their current regimes. We all know that any given company is out to make a profit and continue as an ongoing concern by making money. But the point here isn’t a legal one nor a business one. It’s about doing what’s right and standing by a set of principles. There was a time when a handshake and spoken word were binding and a conscience and desire to do right by others were what kept one beholden to that. Obviously those were much simpler times, but it seems like there could be a way to still be the biggest comic book company on the planet while simultaneously taking care of those who have made you great. Steve Ditko, Carl Burgos, Jack Kirby, Jim Steranko, Roy Thomas, Gene Colan, Barry Smith, Neal Adams, John Buscema, Gil Kane, Tom Palmer, Dan Adkins, Wally Wood, John Romita, Don Heck and many, many others should be celebrated right alongside Stan Lee in big, bold letters at the beginning of each and every Marvel film that bears their blood, sweat and tears. I, for one, would cheer loudly if The Amazing Spider-Man 2 proudly owned that it was “Based On Characters Originally Created By Steve Ditko and Stan Lee!” just before Spidey swung across the screen at the beginning of the film. That should be embraced by Marvel, Sony and the filmmakers, not something that needs to be tirelessly, and probably fruitlessly, fought for. After all, doing the right thing is what Peter Parker has always taught us to do, as told to us by Stan and Steve.