Will Eisner's IP is now for sale, and it's a mistake doing so

The New York Times (archive link) says the creations of cartoonist Will Eisner are now being sold by his family/estate:

When Will Eisner’s “A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories” hit shelves in 1978, it attracted literary attention to comics and helped popularize the term “graphic novel.” Now it’s on sale, along with rights to the rest of Eisner’s intellectual property.

Up for grabs are Eisner’s graphic novels, children’s books and instruction manuals for creating comics. Also included in the sale are the many characters he created, most notably the Spirit, the influential masked crime fighter who debuted in 1940 and featured in stories that are noteworthy for their moral realism, mature themes, genre fluidity and inventive page design.

Eisner’s last work featuring the Spirit, a 72-page story from 1996 called “The Spirit Returns,” was never published. It, too, is up for sale.

Eisner died in 2005, followed by his wife, Ann Weingarten Eisner, in 2020. Since then, Carl Gropper, Ann’s nephew, and his wife, Nancy Gropper, have run the estate. Now in their 70s, they hope to find a buyer eager to keep Eisner’s work, especially the Spirit, in the public eye.

“We expect either a movie or an animated feature, we hope, in the future,” Mr. Gropper said.

The family is aware that the Spirit’s 2008 sojourn to the big screen did not fare well despite its comics world star power. “The Spirit,” written and directed by a fellow comics innovator, Frank Miller, had an estimated budget of $60 million but earned less than $40 million worldwide.

It's already old news for realists who keep track of the medium that Miller's an otherwise overrated writer/artist, so that he could botch the production as badly as he did is probably no surprise. And that's not the only failed adaptation of Eisner's work. In 1984, there was a film adaptation of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, another of Eisner's early creations from 1938 that didn't fare well either, and I think there was a made-for-TV adaptation of the Spirit 3 years later that fared no better as television fare. Eisner's comics may make great pastimes, but they haven't amounted to good movies or TV programs, unfortunately.

Regardless of that, his family/estate owners are making a sad mistake to sell off his stuff, because in this woke age, who knows how badly it'd be desecrated if it ends up being sold to a conglomerate? On which note, DC published comics based on the Spirit nearly 2 decades ago, which were nowhere as good as what came before, and are tainted by having the disgraced Justiniano as an artist on several issues. What if whatever's still under Eisner's estate is sold to DC/WB in their current leftist form? So long as DC's output is corporately owned, it's clear it won't be good.

Surely most telling is that Eisner's relatives may be trying to sell off his IPs now for the sake of movie and cartoon adaptations. Well that's insulting to the intellect, and if it's all they care about, then it'd be better if his IPs became public domain, and of course there's publishers who could always ensure they'll continue to see publication. That said, it's not hard to guess there's quite a few leftists today who don't respect Eisner's work, not even the award ceremony named after him, considering what kind of stuff they choose for giving prizes too nowadays, and that's one more reason why it's a terrible shame such a fine artist not only had his work slighted, it's bound to continue getting worse if his relatives don't at the very least sell wisely.