Having made a few snarky remarks on Twitter about the state of comics contracts last week, Superman: Birthright scribe Mark Waid found those words appropriated in articles and on social media yesterday, with some saying that he seemed to be publicly staking a claim to content in Man of Steel.And while there are some lines, images and story beats in Man of Steel that seem to come from Waid’s Birthright, the writer clarified on his Thrillbent.com blog yesterday that he doesn’t feel entitled to anything, regardless of how you might read between the lines of a couple of his comments.”The confusion about extra-media compensation arises in that [Paul] Levitz, while he was DC’s publisher, made it a policy to cut respectable bonus checks to writers and artists, regardless of legal obligation, if elements from any of their stories (even work-for-hire ones) made it into outside media adaptations movies or TV shows,” Waid wrote, explaining that contractually such payments were never required of DC. “Did you like the scene in Batman Begins where young Bruce Wayne climbs a Himalayan mountain holding a blue flower? Christopher Priest got paid for having come up with that. Or the scene where Bruce Wayne picks out a potential Batmobile from among his own holdings? That was lifted from a Chuck Dixon-written comic, and Paul sent Dixon a check to acknowledge that. Same with dozens of similar moments in cartoons, DVDs, and so forth and so on. It wasn’t legally necessary, it was totally at Paul’s discretion and only Paul knows what math he used to determine what he felt would be fair, but it was a goodwill gesture from an exec sympathetic to the creative community. And most critically, it wasn’t a written policy or guarantee. It was a courtesy.”
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