Missed It: Al Plastino’s Disappointment In Seeing Certain JFK-Related Superman Pages For Sale This New York Post article made the rounds last week and I either ignored it or made cursory note. The article features the artist Al Plastino expressing disappointment at pages from the famous John Kennedy/Superman story he drew making it to market. Plastino believes he was promised this work would be donated to the Kennedy holdings at Harvard, an appropriate place for a culturally significant expression of pop culture. I mention it here because of the way it underlines how poorly a lot of freelancers have been treated over the years in a way that may not have been damaging to anyone's life, but seems unnecessarily contemptuous and indicative of how people at these companies sometimes conducted business. When the Kirby Family had a hearing petition denied last week, the way that Marvel handled Kirby's artwork -- losing so much of it, not being able to track it, demanding recompense in the form of legal assurances for the pitiful amount it could return -- came to mind as an indication this kind of thing is more heavily embedded in the comics culture than we sometimes admit, and the pushback we occasionally see now has never been solely a matter of people looking to score vs. companies shoring up legal concerns that were at the time casually understood.
