I'm talking about corporate ownership of properties specifically. Whatever his problems, Cervantes didn't have Don Quixote taken away from him by a huge conglomeration that then forbade him from working on his own characters.

You can be the smartest guy in the world and have no leverage against a gigantic corporation. Your options tend to be "sign this deal that we're giving you which we have spent decades perfecting in order to give us maximum profitability and reduce your agency over your own creations, or there's the door." For the…

I'm reeeeeally leery of the "they knew what they were getting into" argument. The fact is that in situations like this, the huge corporation holds all the cards. A young creator can't expect to have his entire career, complete with the future of the business, figured out right from the moment he signs his first…

As I said below, this highlights the problem with the assembly-line process for creating comics (even as I think it's cool that people can continue to develop characters beyond their original conception. Hey, remember when The Punisher was a priest?)

Not surprising, really. We've been moving that way for a while, and comics have been in the vanguard. It's shitty whenever it happens, it's just that for most of human existence we actually valued creative people enough not to let it happen.

Yeah, funny how your hardcore unionist stance only appeared when your "BUT OTHER PEOPLE ARE SUFFERING!" argument fell apart. And how your pro-union arguments are actually defending corporations.

If Mantlo is indeed getting money from this movie, that's very good news. I'm talking about the issue in general, which has left (for instance) the heirs of Jack Kirby, a man without whom there would be no Marvel comics, with nary a dime of the billions his creations have earned. There's an unfortunate tendency among…

You keep screaming UNIONS UNIONS UNIONS as a reason to blow off the very reasons why unions exist in the first place, i.e. the mistreatment of employees. You are tacitly taking Capital's side. You clearly don't actually give a shit about the depredations of big corporations, against Unions or anyone else. You're a…

Why are you taking the corporation's side?

You're not even reading my posts at this point, are you?

This is the kind of non-logic that led many people to stand against social progress by saying things like "I fought in WWII, I didn't do it for a bunch of commie unions!" Saying X group suffered worse than Y group and therefore Y group should be dismissed has always been one of the things that divided people and…

Well, clearly we should take the corporation's side then.

You're deflecting like a motherfucker. Again, you keep saying they "matter more" than other people, which I certainly haven't said. If I'm banging this drum it's because it's an issue I'm particularly close to. You have to pick your battles, and some people have chosen this one. "BUT OTHER INJUSTICES EXIST!" isn't…

Jesus. They are a special case, actually. No other medium has as vast a ratio between how much profit creatives earn for the company and how they've historically been treated. But even if that weren't so, an injustice is an injustice. If you hear about it a lot it's probably because you're within the comics fan…

Of course I agree they should have unionized. They didn't "refuse" to do so, they were fought at every turn just as so many other industries were. THOSE LAZY WAL-MART EMPLOYEES DIDN'T UNIONIZE! NO SYMPATHY! NO SYMPATHY!!!

I don't shop at Wal-Mart or buy goods made in China. I also care about the way Marvel and DC—and by extension, all corporations—treat creative talent. I don't see why the two are mutually exclusive. Dismissing injustices as trivial is an excellent way to make sure they continue.

Here's the thing: comics has always been an industry with a certain, as Alan Moore put it, "gangster" edge to it (not the cool kind of gangster, either). Comics were seen as disposable crap for a looooong time, and it's never completely shaken the "low culture" stigma. The reason the medium has even marginally…

There were numerous attempts to unionize, starting with Siegel and Shuster on Superman in the 40s. Guess what? The corporations used their leverage to prevent that from happening. They could always sack the creators and bring in new ones, because the MO of comics was to put all the emphasis on the creators, not the…

Putting aside the fact that retail and restaurant employees don't single-handedly create characters and ideas that the corporations make billions from, this is still a deflection. Children are starving in Africa, THEREFORE we shouldn't get upset about, say, minimum wage workers in America, because it's not as great an…

This just highlights the problem with DC and Marvel (and some other companies') comics: the fact that they've deliberately chosen to make them into an assembly line. That didn't just happen, it was a methodology that the comics companies embraced, and which they've managed to ingrain in the fan's heads via the idea…