Quote from: SAGG on September 04, 2017, 04:20:33 AM
Interesting points, DR. DeCarlo was the only one who "fought" ACP, and paid a price for it. Goldberg and Schwartz "got in line". Bolling? I suppose he did as well...
And when you think about it, it was probably something he'd thought about ever since the whole Kirby vs. Marvel thing became common knowledge in the industry, and even just a few years earlier, when Sabrina became a hugely successful live action TV series, it must have started gnawing at him. He was the only one at ACP who could have done it, because he was the only one left alive who could claim to have actually created something of value. Well, him and George Gladir, who co-created Sabrina with Dan. Who knows if Dan ever had a conversation with Frank Doyle about Josie while Frank was still alive -- but even then, Dan could still claim primacy of creation in that instance, because HE brought the idea for Josie to Archie Comics, and he had documented proof (sample newspaper strips he'd done prior to 1963) of having a prototype version of Josie before ACP (and Doyle) was ever involved. With Sabrina, it was just a script he got from Gladir, so if the two of them didn't agree to go up against ACP together, then there was no way one of them could have fought that battle alone -- so maybe Gladir didn't want to risk his one source of work in the industry. It was a risky thing for Dan to go up against Archie Comics as the creator of Josie, because if he won, then where else could he have taken the property? Marvel and DC weren't publishing anything like that in 2000. I think he was just looking to establish his authorship of the characters, and to ensure his family would have a continuing source of income from a percentage of profits from Josie. Schwartz didn't create Jughead, as valuable as he was to the company for that character, and Bolling... well, even if there HAD ever been any merchandising or licensing profits from Little Archie, what could Bolling have claimed to have created? A little kid version of a previously-existing character owned by the company? That was never going to fly in a courtroom.
The funny thing about the Kirby vs. Marvel thing is that it did not start out as Jack Kirby trying to reclaim some share of ownership or profits of the many major characters he created or co-created while working at Marvel. He just wanted his pages of original artwork back. In the 1980s, Marvel had a huge warehouse full of original artwork filed away going back decades, and they decided they didn't need the expense of maintaining that warehouse. Once the artwork had been photographed and turned into transparencies, it took up much less space and was easier to file -- that's where they created all their reprints from. So they just decided to empty this huge warehouse, and give the artists back all of their original artwork (which by that time, had become a valuable source of income for the artists themselves when sold to collectors). So Marvel started sending all the artists packages containing pages and pages of their work. And Jack got a package, containing some few hundred pages. A few hundred? Kirby had drawn thousands of pages for Marvel, and he wanted that back, so his family could benefit from selling it. And when Kirby pursued it, all of a sudden he was being sent all sorts of crazy documents to sign off on from Marvel's lawyers, before they would release those art pages to him... stuff basically signing away all claims of ever having created anything, stuff which would have been a legal document that he couldn't contest, saying that the company was the actual creator/author of the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Captain America, Thor, the Hulk, the Silver Surfer, Iron Man, Ant-Man, the Inhumans, the Avengers, etc. etc. etc. and Kirby and his heirs hereby renounced all future claims of any stake in ownership in any of those characters. Basically Marvel was withholding his original artwork as a lever to blackmail him, so THEY were the ones who turned it into a battle over who created what.