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The History of Comics: The Loss of Ownership (3 Points)

 One trend that I felt was interesting, albeit upsetting, was that with the incentive of making money by creating comics, the lines of ownership of the artist's creation seem to blur. Of course, other factors lead to the uncertainty of giving credit where credit is due, such as having multiple people working towards one comic. However, I feel that when comics became more mainstream, companies valued the income that comics made over the treatment of the artist that created them. In particular, on pages 109 and 110 of The Comic Book History of Comics that Marvel allowed for the continuation of Stan Lee as the sole credit of their comics for quite some time, leaving artists like Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby unhappy with their lack of recognition. Marvel (and Stan Lee) made profit off of Stan Lee's rise to fame, practically letting people believe he was a genius for creating such works by himself. In actuality, talented artists were drawing and plotting the comics while Stan sometimes would only work on the dialogue. For the sake of profit, Marvel turned a blind eye on the artists so that Stan could become a strong identity for the company. 

Later in Jack Kirby's life, we see him struggling again to regain ownership of his comics that he drew during his time at Marvel. Once again, Marvel had decided to abuse their power as a company by deciding how to best use old original copies of comics for gain rather than giving them back to the original artists. Whether they were giving them away as benefits to people that Marvel worked with or gave the comics back to the artists under conditions that exploited the artist, Marvel was always looking to make some sort of profit for themselves. Jack Kirby, however, broke this streak by standing by his beliefs that his art was his own, and he was able to retrieve many (but not all) of his comics under negotiated conditions. As an artist going into a world where my art will be owned by companies that I work for, this stood out to me. 

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