Today the judge in the Siegel case is holding a status conference to set the “FINAL and DEFINITIVE schedule” for the trial. The judge’s all-caps emphasis may seem a bit unusual for a routine scheduling order, but it’s a visceral reaction to the twists and turns the case has taken since the calendar was originally set back in April.
A lot of it is legal wrangling that we’ll set aside for another time, but one issue is particularly relevant to readers of this site — because that issue arose from one of our most recent posts.
The post in question was from late August, and it revealed previously unknown artwork and scripts from the 1934 collaboration between Jerry Siegel and Russell Keaton. As Siegel lawyer Marc Toberoff explains in a court filing:
3. On or about September 13, 2008, I read a blog entry on the Internet site “Newsarama.” Therein, an individual named Denis Kitchen claimed to possess additional continuities written by Siegel and submitted to Keaton. This blog entry is available at http://blog.newsarama.com/2008/08/20/russell-keaton-supermans-fifth-beatle/#comment-448958.
4. I thereafter contacted Mr. Kitchen and on September 19, 2008, I obtained a copy from Mr. Kitchen of a Superman continuity/story together with a cover letter from Siegel to Keaton dated November 13, 1934 enclosing (and dating) the story. . . .
5. The story is the Superman “football story” mentioned in Siegel’s 1934 preview of future Superman comics and subsequently published by Detective Comics in Action Comics No. 4.
The discovery of this new material set off a heated legal exchange. DC’s lawyers challenged the Kitchen documents on several fronts, prompting Toberoff to defend Joanne Siegel’s ability to verify her husband’s signature and Denis Kitchen’s trustworthiness. DC claimed that the new material was filed too late to be considered at this point in the proceedings; the Siegels argued that DC had made a series of its own “rogue filings” with “unauthenticated evidence.”
The reason why the Siegel/Keaton material has received so much attention lies in one of the hottest issues in the comics business today: work for hire. A creator cannot use termination rights to regain ownership of material created as work made for hire, since the creator did not own the material in the first place. However, the Siegel heirs were able to regain half of the copyright in the Superman material in Action Comics #1 in part because Jerry Siegel had co-authored it before entering into the September 22, 1938 employment agreement with Detective Comics.
According to Toberoff, the script he discovered due to the Newsarama post provides conclusive proof that other Superman material by Jerry Siegel should not be considered work for hire. The football story in Action #4 “was unquestionably recaptured” by the Siegels, he concludes, and it “gives rise to a strong inference” that the material in Action Comics #2-6 was also written earlier. Moreover, based on other evidence, Toberoff argues that the court should award the Siegels co-ownership of other Superman material published during a five-year termination window that ends on April 16, 1943, including the Superman dailies, Action Comics #7-61 and Superman #1-23.
DC, of course, disagrees.
How the court will resolve this dispute is uncertain, but at least one thing is clear: Whatever one might say about the comments here at Newsarama, they’re now part of legal history!
October 6th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
“Denis Kitchen’s trustworthiness”
Now there’s a thing I’ve never heard being questioned before.
October 6th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
That’s…wow.
October 9th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
This does not prove that the stories for Action Comics 2 to 6 were done before issue 4 so i cant see how that proves anything other than issue 4 was at least partly done before. Without seeing a copy of the story (and the actual copy of issue 4) we dont know how close it is to issue 4 as well. i would think the images/actual story were probably updated when issue 4 came out.
if you start saying the work in question was done ahead of time you might as well give the rights to all characters to their creator because odds are the creator had likely toyed with a lot of their creations when they were younger.
this is like taking a rough story i made when i was 5…going to do work for hire when i’m 18 and using the character in a comic and saying i own the rights to the character or at least 50% of the charater
worst of it is the relationship of these guys to the actual creator….they are just trying to get “rich” quick when they don’t deserve a single penny to begin with. If you think they way they do i have a great grand mother on both sides of my family who are natives. between all of the descendents of natives we should own 50% of North America.
I wont be holding my breath