By now you know that the children of Jack Kirby filed to reclaim the rights of 45 characters from Marvel. Characters that include the X-Men, Fantastic Four, Thor and the Hulk.

Under copyright law, creators and co-creators can seek to regain copyrights they previously assigned to a company 56 years after first publication and can give notice of their intentions to do so up to 10 years before that.

Kirby’s children would be eligible to claim their father’s share of the copyright of the Fantastic Four in 2017, while the Hulk would come up in 2018 and X-Men in 2019. The copyrights would then run for 39 more years before expiring, after which the characters would enter the public domain under current law.

What you may not know is these creator’s rights struggles are decades in the making. Just ask Steve Ditko or the Superman heirs.

The Comics Journal speaks on this in excellent detail:
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