I don’t think I understood that the drawings on the page were drawings on the page; to me, they were another reality, magically arrived at, more imaginative and exciting, and in some ineffable way more real, than my own. The idea that a man created the world and images that captivated me by sweating over a drawing board and engaging my imagination in the act of creation never crossed my mind. But, although it’s impossible to reconstruct this vanished reality in anything more than fragments, I vividly recall a single perception that irritated me, which was that sometimes the characters didn’t look right, the (then) intimate world of Marvel’s universe didn’t quite cohere. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was my crude way of distinguishing between artists and their interpretations of characters. There was only one interpretation that was “right”; the rest were “wrong.” During this period of my life there were only two comic-book artists: Jack Kirby and everybody else.

Kirby’s place in the history of comics is infinitely debatable. I know some people who see him as the greatest artist who worked in comics. I see him as the kind of touchstone through which art must progress in order to find itself, just as film progressed through Griffith and DeMille, and without whom one cannot imagine the form progressing as it did.

Strictly speaking, none of these memories should matter. You don’t need to have grown up reading Jack Kirby’s work to recognize that Marvel Comics’ treatment of him is criminal, to see their contempt and ingratitude toward a man who practically single-handedly erected their company. But, upon reflection, it does matter, and should matter, because my understanding of what Kirby contributed to the lives of a generation of young people , and to the comics medium itself, adds a greater, more private and concrete, dimension to the injustice being perpetrated against a man who has given so much of himself to the public good. A degree of passion is a necessary moral ingredient; without it, we are tempted to confuse right action with legal abstractions, as the letter accompanying this editorial clearly demonstrates. Aristotle put it nicely: “Whereas the law is passionless, passion must ever sway the heart of man.” This issue is dedicated to swaying Marvel’s heart, if indeed the corporation has one.

The only letter we received defending Marvel’s position was from one Patrick Daniel O’Neill, who asserts that Kirby doesn’t deserve any sympathy because when he co-created the Fantastic Four, the first of many characters that Marvel continues to exploit today, he in effect knew he was a victim of economic injustice, and therefore has no reason to complain about it. “After some 20 years in the comic-book business, Kirby knew how the industry operated” — in other words, comic-book publishers traditionally treated artists like chattel, the very existence and perpetuation of such economic deprivation being its own moral justification. (I’m giving O’Neill the benefit of the doubt by assuming his defense of Marvel’s position is based on moral grounds, as morally wrongheaded as I think his apologia is; otherwise, we can dismiss his argument a priori as being dishonorable.) The idea that Marvel’s economic exploitation of Kirby is morally justifiable is a typically American inversion of moral responsibility: the publisher is morally sanctioned to take advantage of the creator as long as he can get away with it, whereas the full burden to avoid being cheated is placed on the creator. But, on the contrary, publishers do not have a moral prerogative to keep artists in slavish economic subservience merely because artificial economic circumstances favor their ability to dictate such conditions.

Historically, comics publishing has always been a real snakepit, populated by racketeers, cheap grafters, and opportunists, who regarded artists as cheap laborers and treated them accordingly. Artists often worked in sweatshops at subsistence wages, gave editors and publishers kickbacks merely to get work, and frequently never got paid by the fly-by-nighters for whom they had the misfortune to work. As a matter of course, publishers appropriated their work and all rights to it in exchange for a pittance, and turned works of the imagination into merchandiseable property, which they could continue to exploit with complete indifference to the creator’s material well-being. Artists were assumed to have no rights whatsoever; the few creators who own a fraction of their creations had to be particularly shrewd businessmen in order to deal with the creeps for whom they worked. This is the amoral climate in which the comics industry flourished, and from which the work-for-hire provision is a natural extension.

So while the question of who owns characters Kirby created is irrelevant, a smokescreeen to hide the central issue of Marvel withholding original artwork that it doesn’t own, let’s make no mistake that the conditions under which artists worked in comics through the ’60s and into the ’70s were abominable, and merely because the artists labored under a system of institutionalized immorality doesn’t make it any less abominable. O’Neill asks, rhetorically, why Kirby won’t sign an Agreement acknowledging Marvel’s ownership and trademark of characters he created. The question should be inverted: if Marvel already has such a legally binding Agreement between itself and Kirby, why are they trying to extort from Kirby another copy of an Agreement they already have? And if Marvel does not have such an Agreement, the ownership is open to dispute, and such disputes are not settled among civilized parties by extortion. If Marvel does not have such a signed agreement assigning all rights to Kirby’s creations to themselves, then they are trying to force Kirby to sign an ex post facto Agreement by holding his own property for ransom.

The argument that if Marvel actually owns the copyright of Kirby’s work, Kirby shouldn’t feel offended by being forced to sign an Agreement supporting that contention reduces principle to an expedient; Kirby’s refusal to sign the agreement is based upon the principle that he will not accept the thuggish proposition that he pay a ransom for the return of his property.