Missed It: Stepped-Up Ugliness In Superman Proceedings

* Robot 6 has a clear-headed update on a specific legal matter in the sprawling battle between Warner Brothers and the families of co-creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Because attorney Marc Toberoff turned over material related to his arrangements with those families to a grand jury after that material was stolen, Warner Brothers attorney may be able to seize and use them in their counter-suit against Toberoff. Basically what they're claiming is that Toberoff has insinuated himself with the families in a way that hampers their pursuit of a fair and final outcome. The suit against the attorney seems to be the withered arm in the slightly dessicated whole figure that is the various legal battles involving a corporation desperate to keep as much of the valuable Superman property under their control as possible, having lost a 2008 ruling concerning the 1976 copyright act favoring the family of Jerry Siegel, with a similar Shuster family claim on deck.

* Brendan Wright was recently stopped short by a note in an anniversary issue of Action Comics that put the notion of "support" squarely on the table. If buying a comic is to be seen as "support," Wright wonders, then maybe some thought should be given as to what supporting DC Comics actually means, especially considering they're engaged in the kind of legal tussle described above. I agree with an underlying contention that begins to form here that DC/Warners really hasn't bothered to make any kind of moral claim in their fight to keep the character, and that this can be troublesome on any number of levels. Some fans have used a "greedy family members who didn't create the thing themselves" construction to indict the Siegel and Shuster families, but that never seems to hold outside of the really musty halls of old-school fandom for dozens of reasons, starting with but certainly not limited to the fact that a giant corporation has even less of a claim to proximity to the act of creation than family members. It seems that DC/Warners are stuck in a position where their claim is that they are legally justified in keeping all the rights now being contested, and that the legal decisions involved will eventually support their claims over these claims made by the family -- not exactly the kind of stance one might take burnishing the American flag and sporting an eagle on one's arm.
 
posted 8:30 am PST | Permalink
 

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