Joe Simon, 94, Appearing At New York Comic Con

“'Living legend' is how Joe Simon is categorized on the list of special guests appearing at the New York Comic Con at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center this weekend. Mr. Simon, 94, has a different take on it. 'I call it the old-geezer table,' he said during a recent interview at his Midtown Manhattan apartment.

Mr. Simon will take part in the 'Legends Behind the Comic Books' panel at 3 p.m. on Friday, one of numerous events planned at the convention, a three-day celebration of all things comics.

Mr. Simon earned the 'legend' title with his partner Jack Kirby by creating Captain America, the superhero who arrived in December 1940, just in time to play a patriotic foil to the Axis powers. The cover of the first issue even has the good captain socking Hitler in the jaw.

For Mr. Simon and Mr. Kirby, though, the biggest blow came when they were dismissed from the series, which had been selling a million copies a month, in a dispute over royalties. The team moved to Detective Comics (today DC Comics), but Captain America stayed with Timely, the forerunner of Marvel Comics.

It’s a tale worthy of its own comic (and one of many inspirations for Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay'): On the frontier of a new industry, writers and artists creating scores of characters, but publishers profiting from them."

To read the rest of George Gene Gustine's New York Times article, click here.

Copyright Law Under Siege

"As an artist, you have to read this article or you could lose everything you've ever created!

An Orphaned Work is any creative work of art where the artist or copyright owner has released their copyright, whether on purpose, by passage of time, or by lack of proper registration. In the same way that an orphaned child loses the protection of his or her parents, your creative work can become an orphan for others to use without your permission.

Currently, you don't have to register your artwork to own the copyright. You own a copyright as soon as you create something. International law also supports this. Right now, registration allows you to sue for damages, in addition to fair value.

What makes me so MAD about this new legislation is that it legalizes THEFT! The only people who benefit from this are those who want to make use of our creative works without paying for them and large companies who will run the new private copyright registries.

These registries are companies that you would be forced to pay in order to register every single image, photo, sketch or creative work.

It is currently against international law to coerce people to register their work for copyright because there are so many inherent problems with it. But because big business can push through laws in the United States, our country is about to break with the rest of the world, again, and take your rights away.

With the tens of millions of photos and pieces of artwork created each year, the bounty for forcing everyone to pay a registration fee would be enormous. We lose our rights and our creations, and someone else makes money at our expense.

This includes every sketch, painting, photo, sculpture, drawing, video, song and every other type of creative endeavor. All of it is at risk!"

To find out more, read the rest of Mark Simon's AWN article here.

Illustration by Jon Hofferman.

UPDATE: It's worth double-checking, but I've heard that this is old news - that the bill has been voted down already. Can anyone confirm that?