Just because it’s in a contract doesn’t make it right Ta-Nehisi Coates But these are creators that Marvel needs to keep happy things can go very differently if nobody cares when you complain.īestselling author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who wrote a run of Marvel’s Black Panther and followed Brubaker and Epting’s Captain America run with his own a few years later, says that he believes Marvel has moral obligations to its artists and writers that go beyond contracts. Prolific Marvel writer Roy Thomas got his name added to the credits of Disney+ series Loki after his agent made a fuss. “The squeaky wheel gets the grease,” Jim Starlin, who created Thanos, recently told the Hollywood Reporter Starlin negotiated a bigger payout after arguing that Marvel had underpaid him for its use of Thanos as the big bad of the MCU. Creator Jim Starlin successfully negotiated a bigger payout from Marvel after arguing it had underpaid him for use of the villain. Josh Brolin as Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War (2018). But the use of these contracts is at these companies’ discretion and the promised money can fall by the wayside. A DC spokesman did not return multiple requests for comment. Marvel’s contracts are similar, according to two sources with knowledge of them, but harder to find some Marvel creators did not know they existed.Ī Marvel spokesman said there was no restrictions on when creators could approach the company about contracts, and said that they are having ongoing conversations with writers and artists pertaining to both recent and past work. DC has a boilerplate internal contract, which the Guardian has seen, which guarantees payments to creators when their characters are used. For some creators, work they did decades ago is providing vital income now as films bring their comics to a bigger audience they reason – and the companies seem to agree – it’s only fair to pay them more. But Marvel and DC also incentivise popular creators to stay on with the promise of steady work and what they call “equity”: a tiny share of the profits, should a character they create or a storyline they write become fodder for films, shows or merch. ”)Ĭomic creators are “work-for-hire”, so the companies they work for owe them nothing beyond a flat fee and royalty payments. “But I also can’t deny feeling a bit sick to my stomach sometimes when my inbox fills up with people wanting comments on the show.” (Marvel told the Guardian it had to “decline to comment out of respect for the privacy of personal conversations. “I have a great life as a writer and much of it is because of Cap and the Winter Soldier bringing so many readers to my other work,” he added. “For the most part, all Steve and I have got for creating the Winter Soldier and his storyline is a ‘thanks’ here or there, and over the years that’s become harder and harder to live with,” Brubaker recently wrote in a newsletter. Not well, according to Brubaker who, with Steve Epting, revived Captain America’s sidekick Bucky Barnes to create the Winter Soldier, portrayed by Sebastian Stan in Marvel’s films and shows. But how much of, say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s (MCU) $20bn-plus box office gross went to those who created the stories and characters in it? How are the unknown faces behind their biggest successes being treated? The “big two” comic companies – Marvel and DC - may pretend they’ve tapped into some timeless part of the human psyche with characters such as Superman and the Incredible Hulk, but the truth is that their most popular stories have been carefully stewarded through the decades by individual artists and writers. Scenes storyboarded directly from Batman comics by Frank Miller character arcs out of Thor comics by Walt Simonson entire franchises, such as the Avengers films or Disney+ spinoff The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, that couldn’t exist without the likes of Kurt Busiek or Ed Brubaker. But deep, deep in the credits scroll, you will also see “special thanks” to a long roster of comic book talent, most of them still alive, whose work forms the skeleton and musculature of the movie you just watched. Watch any superhero movie and you will see a credit along the lines of “based on the comic book created by”, usually with the name of a beloved and/or long-dead writer or artist.
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