In a blow in the ongoing battle between the little guy and the corporate machine, a judge in New York has ruled that the heir of comic book artist Jack Kirby had no copyright over the characters he helped create for Marvel comics in the 1960s. We’re talking about The Fantastic Four, The Hulk, Thor… the characters that are raking in big bucks for Marvel both in print and on film.

The judgement – all fifty pages of it – makes it clear that what was at stake wasn’t the long-disputed claims about who, Kirby or Stan Lee, is the real creator of these characters, or how fairly artists were treated by publishers back then, but simply whether or not Kirby was an ‘artist for hire’. It was ruled that he was, and so Marvel own the copyright.

It’s probably a correct legal decision – no matter how much Kirby put into those characters, he was doing so as a Marvel employee, and at their demand. But this is still a blow to anyone who was paid a pittance for work that is now a huge money spinner. Having said that, I’d be more sympathetic if the claimant was Kirby himself, rather than family members who had no involvement in the work and so perhaps shouldn’t really expect an ongoing payday from it.

This decision may impact on the similar legal action by Jerry Siegels’s heirs over Superman.