Yeah, everybody seems to be in agreement that shit went south fast once Levitz was ousted.
Or, more accurately, Levitz was ousted so that shit could go south fast. (He was the guy who prevented Before Watchmen from happening for thirty years.)
I've heard, in fact, that even before he was publisher, he was doing stuff like insisting that Len Wein accept equity in Lucius Fox (a deal which has resulted in Wein making more money as the co-creator of Lucius Fox than as the co-creator of Wolverine) and bringing Kirby back in to redesign the New Gods under an equity deal so that he could profit from spinoff media like Superfriends.
Now, I'll grant that creator credits for characters like the Flash can get thorny (because the Barry Allen Flash was created by Carmine Infantino and Robert Kanigher, but he's also derivative of the Jay Garrick Flash created by Gardner Fox and Harry Lampert -- that's the same reason that a pitch to have the DC superheroes become new New Gods got scuttled, because if Superman (created by Siegel and Shuster) becomes Lightray (created by Kirby), how do you credit that, let alone split the equity payments?). But that's still no excuse for the kind of crap they're doing.
Incidentally, awhile back I read a
Chris Sims article stating that a minor Batman character named Kirigi was appearing in Arkham Origins DLC. Sims is good about crediting creators, and he noted that Kirigi was created by Jim Aparo and Jim Owsley. And because of the noise Conway's been making about equity, I realized hey, somebody should really tell Jim Owsley -- who's going by Christopher Priest these days, and hasn't been involved much in comics for the past 15 years. (Aparo is no longer with us.)
So I poked around Priest's website until I found his E-Mail and dropped him a line letting him know, with a link to the equity paperwork he could send. I don't know if he ever got around to filling it out and sending it in (he's acknowledged he's pretty bad at staying on top of stuff like that, which is why he and Bright never got around to invoking the reversion clause and getting the rights to Quantum and Woody), but at least he had the opportunity, thanks to me giving him a heads-up, which I wouldn't have done if Sims hadn't credited him or if Conway hadn't started a campaign to raise awareness of the DC equity agreements.
It occurs to me that this should be really easy to crowdsource and automate. Nerds
love making lists of characters' appearances. You better
believe fans know more about these characters than their creators do. (Priest's response to my E-Mail was, "Who's Kirigi?") And the second some obscure-ass character shows up for half a second on Arrow, there's somebody firing up a laptop to update the wiki page.
It seems like you could have a spider that regularly trawls, say, all the "List of Appearances" pages on dc.wikia.com, and every time one of them is updated, it looks up the creators' E-Mail addresses and lets them know. (This would be vulnerable to trolling and spam, but I think regular wiki protection procedures would apply -- if, say, people start erroneously flagging a bunch of John Byrne-created characters as appearing in new TV shows and movies, you lock John Byrne-created characters' entries.)
Which doesn't help with the "derivative character created by no one" situation that Conway's describing. But man, somebody should really try doing that.
(Incidentally, he's wrong about one thing -- DC
does compensate the Siegel heirs for Superboy, as a separate entity from Superman, as a result of the original 1940's case. At least, the original, young Clark Kent version. They're probably even obligated to compensate the Siegels for the Conner Kent version, since he shares the name. But I bet they're totally stiffing Kesel and Grummett.)
Anyway. I am confident that, in the wake of this story making headlines, comments sections everywhere are awash in fanboys insisting that DC is totally right and Gates and Santacruz don't deserve shit, because it's not like Caitlin Snow is THAT original.
It's depressing as fuck, is what it is. Having gone through my referrals last night and found an old thread of Sonic fanboys ranting about how they've become their own kind of Freedom Fighters by trying to "save" the Sonic comics from Archie having to give money to Ken Penders, I've probably got a blog post in me about the kind of person who obsesses over stories about scrappy bands of misfits fighting evil empires and then completely fails to recognize which side is which when presented with a real-life example. It's not an original observation, but Jesus fuck there's a
reason people keep making it over and over again.