Superman sold for $130…
Given the thorny issues surrounding creator’s rights and AI, I wanted to look at some historical examples of artists getting screwed by people - not machines- over the years in this industry. The examples are generally known but, in an age where artists are increasingly scrambling for work, worth revisiting, especially given the proliferation of AI slop in the world.
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In March 1938, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster signed a contract transferring the rights of their character Superman to Detective Comics, Inc. In return, they received $130 - split between them, so $65 each.
Superman went on to become one of the most lucrative fictional characters in history, and Siegel, by the mid-1970s, was working as a typist in the mailroom of the Los Angeles Public Utilities Commission and living in a 1-room flat.
This is not an edge case. This is a foundational story of how American comics worked for the first four decades of its existence.. and, in some cases, considerably longer than that.
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The work-for-hire model was not unique to comics. Newspapers used it, pulp magazines used it, advertising used it. You produce the work, you get paid for the work, the company owns the work. Clean, simple, and - when the work in question was a piece of graphic design - entirely reasonable.
The problem was that comics turned out to be a medium capable of producing cultural icons worth billions of dollars. The people who produced those icons, however, had signed away all rights to them, in perpetuity, often long before anyone knew that was what they were doing.
Siegel and Shuster and Superman. The $130 check is a real object. It was auctioned in 2012, and you can look at it - Superman's name, in faded 1930s typewriting, next to the number that transferred him forever. For decades, the courts interpreted the payment as legally clean. The men had signed. The rights transferred. That was the deal.
What the courts didn't weigh, and what eventually forced the issue, was a moral argument that had nothing to do with contract law: two men who had created one of the most recognisable characters on earth had spent their professional lives in poverty, uncredited, while the company that owned their creation built an empire on it. By the mid-1970s, with a Superman film in production, the disparity had become impossible to ignore. Neal Adams led a public campaign on Siegel and Shuster's behalf. The industry piled in. DC, facing a publicity disaster ahead of a major film release, eventually granted both men a yearly pension of $35,000 and restored their creator credits to Superman comics. Not ownership. Not royalties from the film. A pension.
Joe Shuster died in 1992, legally blind and largely alone. Jerry Siegel died in 1996. His heirs spent the next decade in further litigation.
Jack Kirby and the Marvel Universe. If Siegel and Shuster are the founding tragedy of creator rights in American comics, Jack Kirby is the longest chapter.
Kirby co-created Captain America with Joe Simon in 1940. He co-created the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Avengers, the Hulk, Thor (in his Marvel incarnation), Black Panther, and the New Gods with Stan Lee and others in the 1960s and 70s. He is, by any reasonable measure, the single most creatively important figure in the history of Marvel Comics. The shared universe that the MCU has built into a multi-billion dollar franchise runs on characters that Jack Kirby drew into existence.
Kirby received no royalties from any of this. When he eventually left Marvel in the 1970s, he asked for the return of his original artwork - thousands of pages of pencilled originals that the industry standard at the time was to return to artists. Marvel, by that point, had lost, destroyed, or given away a significant portion of it. The remainder was returned, eventually, in a dispute that lasted years and was resolved only through a confidential settlement that reportedly required Kirby to sign away any future claims.
What changed - and what didn't. The shift began with a group of Marvel artists and writers who had watched what happened to Kirby and decided to do something about it. In 1992, Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Marc Silvestri, Erik Larsen, Jim Valentino, and Whilce Portacio walked away from Marvel and founded Image Comics on a single principle: creators own what they create.
Image changed the industry. Not completely, not immediately, but the existence of a major publisher built around creator ownership forced Marvel and DC to improve their terms. Royalty payments - previously non-existent - became standard. Creator-owned deals at the major publishers became possible, though not the norm.
The Siegel and Shuster pensions were an early crack. Image was the fissure. The conversation is still ongoing - as of 2025, the heirs of Steve Ditko, Gene Colan, and Don Heck have filed copyright termination notices against Marvel over characters including Iron Man, Thor, and Black Widow. Marvel has contested every one.
Why this matters now. The creator rights story isn't historical. It's active. Every time a character who was created under a work-for-hire contract in the 1940s, 50s, or 60s appears in a billion-dollar film, the question of what the creator's heirs are owed resurfaces. The legal frameworks are genuinely complex - work-for-hire doctrine, copyright termination rights, the difference between owning a character and being credited for one - but underneath the legal complexity is a simpler moral question that the industry has never quite answered satisfactorily.
Jack Kirby drew the Marvel universe. The people who own Marvel didn't. Whether that matters, legally or morally, remains - five decades later - an open argument.
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