The Four Color Media Monitor

The New Statesman spoke with veteran artist Neal Adams, who's going to be appearing at the London Comicon. Highlight is when he brings up the legal representation he gave for Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster when they were trying to regain the credit they deserved for creating Superman:

The issue of Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, earning so little from their iconic creation while DC comics and parent company Warner Brothers became rich, has been angering fans for decades. Even now there are disputes over their treatment, but their fate would have been far worse had it not been for Adams leading the fight in the mid ‘70s. At that time, Shuster was almost blind, living in poverty, and ignored by DC.

“That was a big big fight that took months out of my life,” Adams recalls. “Not only were they not getting credit they weren’t getting any royalties, they weren’t being paid. Jerry was, he had a heart condition, he was approaching seventy, he thought he could recover some of his rights. His lawyers didn’t do their job for him, he was making seven thousand five hundred dollars a year working as a clerk - Joe was legally blind and lived in an apartment in Queens with his brother, [he] slept in a cot at night with a window next to him with tape on it holding it together... and these are the creators of Superman.

“Pretty bad, you know? You hear the story and you kind of go, ‘What can I do?’ Well fortunately I was in a position to do something. And it had gotten very deeply under my skin because these guys helped to create this industry. I mean, you could pay ’em as good as you pay a secretary for Christ’s sake. And so we had a little battle, Warner Brothers and I, and, and we sort of won, and it got taken care of, and it made Warner’s rich! [laughs] They had ambassadors of goodwill for the remaining ten years of their life, everybody was happy, everything was good, we were making money. So you know, I don’t go up against the dragon in order to kill the dragon, I go up against the dragon in order for him to buy a house and have kids and make a lot of money! [laughs]”

He did the right thing to come to Siegel/Shuster's aid, and it's a shame that till this day, a conglomerate that's making loads off of a whole shipload of mediums and machines still shows contempt for their relatives and won't give them the ownership shares they deserve. I'd say the Siegel estate fight for the rights to the Man of Steel should still go on, and Adams, for as long as he still can, should continue to help them.

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