Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [143]
While Adams worked on the comic book organizations, Robinson contacted board members and artists in the National Cartoonists Society as well as members of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, Writers Guild of America, the Screen Cartoonists Guild, and the Overseas Press Club. He even managed to secure the involvement of Kurt Vonnegut and Norman Mailer, two of his Cape Cod summer home neighbors. Warner Communications felt the pressure but also believed that the company faced a problematic legal bind: If it agreed to the terms of the Siegel and Shuster case, it might be up against other legal turmoil.
As Robinson remembered, the battle took its toll on the two artists.
“It was terrible, the state they were in,” he said. “They had no self-confidence. Their identity was lost. Imagine creating one of the biggest properties of the twentieth century and not having your name on it. My argument was you didn’t take the author’s name off Sherlock Holmes because Arthur Conan Doyle died. Or Shakespeare. It was a tenuous negotiation. The big sticking point was getting their name restored to the property as creators. That was the last thing we had to settle.
“The night before we settled, I got a phone call from Jerry [Siegel]. He was in bad health at the time. He had already had a heart attack. He called and said we had to settle the next day because he was worried he wouldn’t survive the negotiations, and if he didn’t, he wouldn’t have anything to leave to his wife. So I knew we had to settle the next day.”
The two sides did reach an agreement the next day, on December 19, 1975. Siegel and Shuster would receive $20,000 annually, with cost-of-living allowances added. Their heirs would also receive benefits. Their names would be attached to all Superman products—comic books and books, television programs, and motion pictures—but not toys.
Robinson lauded it as a landmark decision. “It established the protocol of restoring the creators’ names,” he said.
All this had happened in the 1970s, before neoconservatism, when unions were still strong, strikes and work stoppages could bring a company to its knees, and the residual effects of the 1960s kept people suspicious of “the Man,” of big corporations that would screw the daylights out of the little guy if there was a dollar to be earned or quietly stolen. Evening network news programs still wielded tremendous clout, and a news item such as the television and newspaper reports on the Siegel/Shuster battles over Superman could trigger a wave of activity. But now, in the 1980s, a scene like the one in the Illinois comic book store, while perhaps not encouraged by the public in the same way comic book burning had been several decades earlier, was tolerated or overlooked.
Eisner supported efforts to help comic book creators with their rights, but as a businessman he also felt a conflict. After all, he’d run a comic book studio not all that different from the others of the time. Granted, he’d created almost all the characters originating from the Eisner & Iger shop, but it was his name, or a generic nom de plume, that was affixed to the comics, and his shop maintained