is this awesome? [y/n]
The Siegel family recaptures the origins of Superman.
Siegel and Schuster created maybe the most popular fictional character ever and got dicked out of all the money it made. While they were well-paid for their work on the actual comics, DC (and later Warner Bros.) made hundreds of millions off licensing and merchandising but neither of them saw a dime of that. When the first Christopher Reeve Superman film was coming out, a reporter did some background & found that Siegel was living in a little cramped apartment & Schuster was living in a trailer park. DC was pissed off by that report, because it (accurately) painted a picture of how uncaring they were to their talent. It also shamed them into creating a $40,000/year pension for both men, for the rest of their lives.
Forty grand a year until they died. Not a bad amount for the early '70s, but still... forty grand a year for creating a pop-culture phenomenon. Maybe one-tenth of one percent each, of the total revenue brought in by their creation. That's it.
It burns me up inside when I think of it. I'm not even a Superman fan, but the wrongness of it sticks in my craw. Sad part is, they'd been struggling so long they were probably super-grateful (ha) to even get that.
Schuster never had kids, but Siegel did and they've been fighting legal battles with DC and Warner Bros over the rights to Superman for decades now. Usually a legal brawl between a big corporation vs. a small family has a pre-determined outcome, but due to weird quirks in new copyright laws they've actually been very successful. DC/WB will now have to cough up some cash to Siegel's heirs any time they want to do anything with Superman's origin, since it's now the Siegel family's intellectual property. Stuff that Siegel & Schuster didn't create, like Kryptonite and some of the later super-powers, are still DC's intellectual property. It's an interesting split - and one that should benefit the Siegels financially. More power to them, I say. I only wish Jerry Siegel & Joe Schuster, those two Jewish kids with big ideas from the bad part of Cleveland, had lived to see it.
Siegel and Schuster created maybe the most popular fictional character ever and got dicked out of all the money it made. While they were well-paid for their work on the actual comics, DC (and later Warner Bros.) made hundreds of millions off licensing and merchandising but neither of them saw a dime of that. When the first Christopher Reeve Superman film was coming out, a reporter did some background & found that Siegel was living in a little cramped apartment & Schuster was living in a trailer park. DC was pissed off by that report, because it (accurately) painted a picture of how uncaring they were to their talent. It also shamed them into creating a $40,000/year pension for both men, for the rest of their lives.
Forty grand a year until they died. Not a bad amount for the early '70s, but still... forty grand a year for creating a pop-culture phenomenon. Maybe one-tenth of one percent each, of the total revenue brought in by their creation. That's it.
It burns me up inside when I think of it. I'm not even a Superman fan, but the wrongness of it sticks in my craw. Sad part is, they'd been struggling so long they were probably super-grateful (ha) to even get that.
Schuster never had kids, but Siegel did and they've been fighting legal battles with DC and Warner Bros over the rights to Superman for decades now. Usually a legal brawl between a big corporation vs. a small family has a pre-determined outcome, but due to weird quirks in new copyright laws they've actually been very successful. DC/WB will now have to cough up some cash to Siegel's heirs any time they want to do anything with Superman's origin, since it's now the Siegel family's intellectual property. Stuff that Siegel & Schuster didn't create, like Kryptonite and some of the later super-powers, are still DC's intellectual property. It's an interesting split - and one that should benefit the Siegels financially. More power to them, I say. I only wish Jerry Siegel & Joe Schuster, those two Jewish kids with big ideas from the bad part of Cleveland, had lived to see it.