'Disney Legend Jack Kirby'

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Scots Dragon
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'Disney Legend Jack Kirby'

Post by Scots Dragon »

So some backstory.

Back in 2017, Disney awarded Stan Lee and Jack Kirby with a 'Disney Legend' award for their collective Marvel work. All well and good as a bit of cultural recognition on its own.

But this has allowed them to start doing this;

Image

I don't like this. Disney using the wording of a posthumous award to claim some degree of ownership and role in the legacy of a major figure is cynical at best and ghoulish at worst.
Formerly known as Narsil on the ATT and Ronin Army forums.
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JDRook
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Re: 'Disney Legend Jack Kirby'

Post by JDRook »

I'll agree it's wildly misleading, and possibly a backhand at Kirby's kids.

A quick boo at Wikipedia indicates that the closest Kirby ever worked directly with Disney in his lifetime was illustrating a comic based on The Black Hole in the late 70's. However, it also mentions a copyright dispute in 2009, 15 years after Kirby's death, with his children attempting to get control of Silver Age characters owned by Disney. In all honesty I can't even follow the watered-down legal complexity of the article, so I can't be certain it's related or not, but it does add to the disingenuous feeling of that award, given out 3 years after the dust had settled on that case.
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Scots Dragon
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Re: 'Disney Legend Jack Kirby'

Post by Scots Dragon »

It also serves as a dark cloud spread by the Disney Monopoly on any other attempts to adapt Jack Kirby's work outside of his stuff for Marvel, which is a pretty damn vast collection of stuff. This includes a New Gods movie to be directed by Ava DuVernay.

If he's Disney Legend Jack Kirby, then obviously that denotes a sense of exclusivity to him that he doesn't have at other companies.

Obviously the people working on his stuff from other companies such as Etrigan, the New Gods, OMAC, or Kamandi over at DC Comics, or adaptations of his various self-owned projects such as Secret City and Captain Victory, would be the cheap and lame stuff because the 'true' Kirby legacy is the stuff that Disney has ownership over.

Or at least, that's how it's going to appear to some viewers.
Formerly known as Narsil on the ATT and Ronin Army forums.
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