Ha. I think he mostly just doesn't name the people he doesn't like. (Aside from Jerry Lewis, Joan Rivers, and Mickey Rooney.)

True. And ultimately we're talking about contractual agreements on characters who, legally, were created by a company and not by human beings. It's a weird situation all around.

It can be two things!
https://comicvine.gamespot….

I just told you why. He doesn't just have Jay's powers and name, he has a costume that copies elements of Jay's, and his first appearance explicitly referenced his inspiration from a Flash comic.

Sure, if you're telling a story where Barry Allen never puts on a costume and nobody ever refers to him as the Flash (hey, it worked for Superboy). But once you start calling him the Flash and giving him a red suit with a yellow lightning bolt and wings on his head, it doesn't seem fair to omit Fox and Lampert.

Maybe, but the reason Marvel decided to give superheroes another shot in the first place was the success of the Justice League. And Batman's popularity in the 1960s was bound to buoy the superhero genre in general and DC in particular, even without Marvel's (seminal, don't get me wrong) output. I think superheroes…

That statement seems meaningless to me, though. *Every* popular corporate-owned character has benefited from the corporate owner wanting to use them.

Yes and no. While Fantastic Four certainly launched Marvel as we know it, I don't think it's fair to ignore Golden Age Timely / Atlas. FF itself featured both a legacy hero (the Human Torch) and a Golden Age character as an early and frequent antagonist (Namor), and Captain America joined the Avengers four issues in.

Nah. Development is not creation. Wally Wood and Frank Miller are responsible for all the most recognizable elements of Daredevil, but they didn't create him (and Miller would certainly never claim that he did). Similar with Claremont and Magneto, Ostrander and Deadshot, etc.

Yeah, Everett deserves the co-creator credit and I certainly don't begrudge it. But a lot of people believe Kirby was responsible for the original design (much as he was for Iron Man, another example where he drew the first cover but not the interior). You're right about Amazing Fantasy, of course.

I dunno, I'd probably rank "designed Indiana Jones" above "slapped Bob Kane."

Fair.

But every single time another creator has (or his heirs have) tried to get a better deal, Lee has toed the company line. He's told outright falsehoods under oath, including claiming that artists were paid for spec work (a claim that everybody else deposed in Marvel v Kirby disputed). He's complicit.

Sure, but on the other hand he claims credit for ideas that weren't his (read his deposition in Marvel v Kirby; I swear to God, Stan Lee says that making Thor the son of Odin was his idea, which tends to color who I believe when, say, he claims that the rubble scene in Spider-Man was his idea and Ditko says the two of…

Or they could do one about the time Kevin Conroy and Robin Williams were roommates at Julliard, and call it Batman and Robin.

Yes, he is well-known among the subset of the population that has read about Batman's creation.

Which, to a large extent, was his own decision. Robinson was one of the greatest champions for giving Finger proper credit and recognition; he founded the Bill Finger Awards.

Eh — I read it more as "Big Two writers are a bunch of fanboys." They didn't like what Morrison did with Magneto, they thought "that's not what Magneto would do," so they retconned it.

I've seen no real evidence of licensing issues and lawsuit threats; I'm not just going to assume those things are true without evidence.

That's fine by me, though; as much fun as it would be to see other writers play with Morrison's toys in theory, in practice it's worth remembering that the very first thing they did when he left was say "by the way, that wasn't really Magneto."