Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities "KIRBY AT MARVEL" by Michael Hill

Sunday morning... and I did something I never do. I started reading the book AGAIN.

"the Kirby family applied for copyright reversions on a number of Kirby's characters and Marvel sued them to prevent it"

2 things. The army of L** Lunatics ALL as one insisted the Kirby family sued Marvel. B***S***.

But more. Over time, I've thought about this, and here's how I feel about it. The 1976 Copyright Revision, which was ALLEGEDLY designed to ALLOW this, was a CON JOB.

If it's wrong for companies to force artists to sign over their copyrights in the first place, then it's even more wrong to pretend that this revision was the way to fix that.

Artists are forced to WAIT for a period of 56 years (?), before then having a 5-year period (?) in which they OR THEIR HEIRS may legally apply for "reversion". That's WAY too long. 99% of the time, an artist has passed away, and/or his family/heirs/estate are too busy / unaware / uncertain when or how to proceed.

And then, EVEN when they do, LOOK what happens.

It's B***S***.

If companies continue to be able to force artists to sign over their copyrights in the first place, then any proper "reversion" should be AUTOMATIC, and after NO MORE than 10 YEARS maximum.

In this case, that would have meant the FF should have been back in Kirby's hands at the time he was working on NEW GODS.

"Fans" all like to cry and complain, "But, how would we continue to keep getting NEW STORIES??? We LOVE the CHARACTERS!!!!" They never realize that the characters they love are no longer the characters they loved, when they're being MUTILATED by editors and writers who had nothing to do with their creation, and OFTEN, harbor deep resentments against those characters, since with the stranglehold "the big two" have over the industry, if they want make a living, they usually HAVE to work on those characters that they didn't create.

"The true believers continue to echo the mantra that Kirby couldn't write, but for those weened on L**'s kiddie fare, Kirby's writing is simply over their heads."

This includes an army of what I call "over-aged adolescents". these are people who became professionals and got successful too young, too soon, and so never had to grow up and mature intellectually and emotionally, and so, NEVER DID. And this includes an awful lot of comics professionals, writers and editors.

Apart from CHAMBER OF DARKNESS #5, my first big exposure to Kirby's writing was his return to Marvel in 1976. Those first 5 issues of CAPTAIN AMERICA just blew me away. Then things started to go astray. They didn't on THE ETERNALS!

What I had no idea of was how both the art and dialogue on CAP was being messed with. Some in the office were actually changing Kirby's dialogue behind his back.

And meanwhile, Frank Giacoia was having his usual psychological "deadline" problems again, and getting his friend Mike Esposito to fill in-- UNCREDITED-- at the exact point where SPIDER-MAN editor Len Wein criticized Esposito as needing to "spend more time at his drawing board and less time at the race track" (as told by Dave Cockrum, who witnessed the conversation).

Joe Giella talked about Giacoia's ongoing recurring deadline problems in an interview in ALTER EGO. It opened my eyes to a lot. I could suddenly see, right in front of me, how many CAP episodes in TALES OF SUSPENSE had two completely-different hands (Giacoia & Giella) doing the inks, often on the same pages. I later saw the same thing, even more blatently, in an issue of SUB-MARINER (Giacoia & Giella-- and Giella's work was much better!). There's a whole stretch of ASM where Espo was murdering Ross Andru's art. It never occured to me for decades, until I was able to connect the dots, that this was happeneing at the exact same time that "Frank Giacoia" was on Kirby's CAP issues. But the result was, Marvel fans to this day complained Kirby was "losing it" already by the mid-late 70s.

When Mike Royer took over, the art problems vanished.