Comic Book Contracts

We have all heard how it was in the old days when musicians and authors signed contracts that stripped them of their rights of ownership of their songs and their characters. In the comic book industry, things were no different.

In one of the more infamous cases, the creators of Super Man, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, signed a contract that turned over the character to the publisher. This was in 1938, and the pair had little choice. The corporations like Marvel and DC that ran the show simply would not sign a contract any other way, so artists who wanted to make a living of some sort had to pay the price. Musicians suffered similar fates, often writing songs that have made income for decades, but the artist got only a small, flat fee.

Many other artists and writers of the period suffered similar fates.

It all began to change during the 1960s and 1970s, as Robert Harvey explains in The Art of the Comic Book, when frustrated and angered young artists started publishing their own underground comics, dubbed comix. They were often college students. Rather than sign away their work they took all of the risks and garnered what profits they could. A few of the smaller publishing houses began to offer better contract terms, offering a flat fee for the work, plus royalties if it sold well. In the earlier days, only the flat fee had been offered. Artists also retained the rights to their characters.

It is a sad thing to contemplate, when artists can no longer control how their work is presented. A good example of this is Paul McCartney of the Beatles. In the early days the Beatles signed a contract that took control of their work. The pay remained the same for years, and then, as McCartney has said in many television interviews, including on the David Letterman show recently, Michael Jackson bought the rights, at auction, to the songs, out bidding McCartney.

Soon we all began hearing Beatles songs selling various products on TV, and this went directly against the desires of the Beatles, who never wanted the songs used in this way.

Robert Harvey describes, in his 1996 book The Art of the Comic Book, how the creators of Super Man tried to fight this system. After losing the rights to the character, they worked for years writing and drawing the comic. Finally fed up with the low pay, they went to court, but because they had signed the well drawn contract, they lost. Naturally, they lost their jobs.

Rebellious at heart, they penned various parodies of Super Man, to little effect, but shortly before the first Super Man film was to be made, they got enough publicity and support from other artists to pressure the company to give them pensions. A spokesperson for the corporation admitted that while they had no legal obligation to pay the artists like this, they did have a moral one.

Nowadays, artists are generally offered better contracts, but they still have to be careful.

Paul McCartney Interview on David Letterman

Harvey, Robert C. The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History, 1996.