Talk about going to bed with a beauty and waking up with a beast… Disney has to be feeling a little buyer’s remorse this week after get a letter from the heirs of Jack Kirby. Obviously fueled by the success of the Jerry Siegel heirs and the rights to Superman, the Kirby heirs have served Disney with 45 letters that claim copyright terms will expire in 2014. This includes, The X-Men, Thor, Captain America, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, the Hulk and many more. The major Marvel characters not affected are Spider-Man, Dr. Strange and Wolverine. Seems that the Kirby heirs, to paraphrase Jay & Silent Bob, “gots ta get their mother f-ing movie check.” I still wonder if it was the success of the Siegel heirs or the sale of Marvel to a mega company that plans to pimp the $h!t out of any and all Marvel characters. Stan Lee got his after the Spider-Man movies, so all things being fair, Kirby’s heirs should get theirs too. But don’t be asses about it, get a percentage of the movies and a “created by” byline on every comic. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby TOGETHER created most of the characters that launched Marvel back in the ‘60’s. The “Marvel way of writing” should dictate that both the writer and artist get credit for anything they do together. Stan would plot out an issue (usually just a paragraph and some minor characters descriptions…), Jack would then pencil 22 pages of story that he fleshed out (leaving space for dialogue and making notes in the margins…) and then turn it back over to Stan who would come up with the actual dialogue. Seems like a pretty tight team effort to me. While Jack moved on to DC in the ‘70’s to create the New Gods, Kamandi and others, Stan did stick around longer to shepherd Marvel during its infancy. If Disney/Marvel (Disvel? Misney?) was smart, they would work out a deal and get this put to bed before it gets too ugly…