Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [142]
“Okay, let me put it one more way,” an increasingly frustrated Adams told Infantino. “If another piece of artwork gets cut up, I’m going to be leaving here. I’m not going to work for DC.”
This caught Infantino’s attention. Adams was a huge presence at DC. Comic book readers bought certain titles just because Adams was illustrating them. Losing him would be disastrous.
Infantino, still sympathetic to Adams’s cause, told Adams to hang on until he’d talked to DC’s powers-that-be. He conferred with the company officials and, a half hour later, returned with the verdict. The company would store the art and quit destroying it.
This, however, only solved part of the problem.
“What about the idea of returning it to the artists?” Adams wondered.
“They’ll get back to us on that,” Infantino replied.
Seven years passed with no further movement. Adams would inquire about it on occasion, with nothing to show for his efforts. DC higher-ups, not entirely convinced that Adams was correct when he argued that the artwork had monetary value, decided to test the theory by auctioning one of Adams’s covers at a Detroit convention. The artwork, they determined, was worth money—a lot of money—which only created a new set of problems. They obviously couldn’t toss out valuable work, but could they return it to the artists, knowing that they, and not the company, would be benefiting from sale of the art?
This provided Adams with his game-winning strategy. The company had paid for a service, for the right to reproduce the art, not for the artwork itself. If DC had purchased the artwork, the company would have been required to pay a sales tax, and given the company’s decades-old policy of operating the way it had, there was no telling how much it would owe in back taxes if, say, a disgruntled employee contacted the tax people in Albany and briefed them on the situation. A few weeks after hearing Adams’s argument, DC decided to return the artwork to the artists. Not coincidentally, Marvel began doing the same, probably more out of fear of losing their artists to DC than out of the sudden realization that it was the upstanding thing to do.
“It was a little bit of a game,” Adams said of his back-and-forth with DC. “I tried to keep it light as much as possible. I wasn’t aggravating, and I wasn’t angry or yelling at them. I tried to be sensible and logical and practical. I said, ‘Look, if the artwork is returned to the artist and he discovers, God forbid, that it’s worth something if he could sell it, isn’t he going to put more effort into making a piece of artwork? Isn’t it in his behalf to do that for you? Doesn’t it then fall to you to profit by this sincere effort to do a better piece of artwork?’ Sometimes it’s very hard to convince people that things are in their best interests, which is shocking to me, but in the end, we did it.”
His work as an advocate was even tougher when he tried to help get Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster their due for the creation of Superman. The two former kids from Cleveland had grown older, much older, and had been on the outs with DC, National Periodical, and most recently Warner Communications for longer than either cared to remember. Much of their misfortune had been their own doing. They’d voluntarily signed away ownership rights to Superman shortly after they’d created the character, and later, they’d really buried themselves when they sued for money they felt they had coming to them for having created arguably the biggest character in comics history. Their advancing years weren’t being kind. Shuster was nearly blind and living with his brother in a small New York apartment, while Siegel, living with his wife in Southern California, was in declining health. Neither had any money to speak of.
Adams and Jerry Robinson, a Golden Age artist responsible for the creation of the Robin and Joker characters in Batman, mobilized the comic book community, distributed petitions, gave television and radio interviews,