Daniel Best has a great post on a
1970's theft of DC art, including some of Joe Simon's work.
300 pages appeared on the market in 1997; the dealer originally claimed that Simon had gifted those pages to his father, and then, when Simon disputed that, claimed that Simon's daughter had sold them to him for $100.
Simon sicced the FBI on the dealer, but eventually settled for 55% of the proceeds from auction. Toward the end, he acknowledged that it was POSSIBLE his daughter had sold the art, but it's unclear why he would; if this art was stolen from DC, then neither he nor his daughter would have had it in the first place, and even if his daughter was estranged from him and desperate for money, she would have known those pages were worth far more than $100.
Best has covered
the theft of Kirby's artwork from Marvel before; Greg Theakston has a
rundown as part of a pretty extensive series called Jack Magic.
Shooter has his own take, which I believe he believes to be true but which I consider highly suspect; the comments there are more interesting than the post itself (and have some less-than-friendly back-and-forth with Best).
It violates Hanlon's Razor, but I personally believe that somebody at Marvel deliberately put the box of Kirby's art in a spot where it was likely to get up and walk away, not merely so that they would be off the hook for returning it to him but also because there was unpublished work in there that Kirby was never paid for -- in other words, evidence that he worked on spec, not for-hire, at least some of the time.
I'll grant that nobody's produced any hard evidence of this -- they can't; that's kind of the point -- but I'm not the first person to suggest it. Indeed, the Theakston post makes much the same argument (though he doesn't mention the spec issue):
A lot of what follows is speculation so please indulge me. There is no proof or evidence I can offer, only conjecture. Seems that the week of the theft, one of Marvels editors had been fired and decided he wanted an unannounced severance package and moved it out on the weekend. His name was uttered by more than one dealer as the root source for the pages.
The editor was rehired shortly thereafter.
There has been some rumor that the editor was in league with Marvel and Cadence in an effort to keep Kirby from ever getting those pages back. Ensuring that he would have no leverage in that department: they wouldn’t have to return what they no longer had.
And, as the copyrights to the characters were about to come up for renewal this was a good thing for management. The return of the pages might have been misconstrued in court as an admission that Kirby owned a part of the characters. Stuck between a rock and a hard legal place, the lawyers might well have conceived a plan to avert this.
But this is all just speculation.
A little too much innuendo and "I won't say who, but everybody knows who I'm talking about" for my tastes. (I don't have my early-1980's Marvel editors straight, so I'm not sure who he's referring to.) But at any rate, that art theft certainly seems to have worked to Marvel's advantage.
