>>83187621>Would Moore have been explicitly disrespecting the original creators if he'd gotten to use Charlton characters like he wanted?Watchmen arose out of his work on Miracleman, a forgotten character he'd revamped. Because of that revamp, the property was considered to have a value again and a protracted series of legal problems eventually arose.
As a result of a separate case involving Neil Gaiman and Todd McFarlane - who, over the character Angela, tried to rely on the "work for hire" argument beloved of publishers since the 1930s, but which has rarely stood up to scrutiny in the courts - Gaiman discovered that in fact another copyright McFarlane claimed to own, Miracleman, was in fact never the property of the people who he thought he'd bought it from. He therefore did not own it; it was, and had always been since the dissolving of L. Miller & Son Ltd., the property of creator Mick Anglo.
On learning this Moore immediately dropped his objections to Marvel Comics or any other party buying the Marvelman/Miracleman rights that he held (as creator of later works) on condition that all moneys from the sale be paid to Mick Anglo, and to his estate after his death. This was two years before Mick Anglo died and we can only assume that, had arguments like
>>83187874 been examined with appropriate scrutiny decades before - as McFarlane should have had done before "buying" the rights - Anglo would have been rather better off in his final decades.
Creator-owned doesn't mean shit even at Image. It never did. The only way you get recognition is if you sue for it, which Moore has stated he doesn't feel the need to do over Watchmen - but it seems probable that he could indeed shut down DC's Watchmen over that breach of contract.
You're talking about a guy who'd rather smoke a big fat joint in his comfortable home than go to court and talk to assholes about shit he signed half a lifetime ago. Wouldn't we all? He doesn't need the money or the hassle.
