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Stolen Artwork

I was reading an article the other day and it was saying Gil Kane stole loads original art pages from Marvel whilst he was working there

Apparently Archie Goodwin was editor in chief and was working late and caught him, he said he was using yhe Kirby and Ditko pages for reference, Marvel told him to return all the pages and he returned 35 but Marvel was sure he stole many many more so he never worked for Marvel again

Does anyone know anything more about this story or if its even true??

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Matthew HuskinsonMJ Comix
Quote from Emperor Biggles on 25 January 2025, 11:39 PM

I was reading an article the other day and it was saying Gil Kane stole loads original art pages from Marvel whilst he was working there

Apparently Archie Goodwin was editor in chief and was working late and caught him, he said he was using yhe Kirby and Ditko pages for reference, Marvel told him to return all the pages and he returned 35 but Marvel was sure he stole many many more so he never worked for Marvel again

Does anyone know anything more about this story or if its even true??

Going to look further into this now. Never heard about this before

Emperor Biggles has reacted to this post.
Emperor Biggles

Found this on the net.

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Matthew HuskinsonEmperor Biggles
Quote from MJ Comix on 26 January 2025, 11:17 AM

Found this on the net.

I'm glad someone else found out something about this, I thought I seen something similar the article I seen didn't have the names changed

Thanks for adding this mate 👍 amazing to think that someone like Gil Kane would do this

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Matthew Huskinson

This topic was discussed on the CGC Boards a few years ago, here’s a link to the discussion if anyone is interested… https://boards.cgccomics.com/topic/424426-question-about-gil-kane/#comments

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Matthew Huskinson
So this is just my opinion based on stuff that I’ve read…
It seems to me that it’s very likely that Kane did take original art on multiple occasions and it seems likely that it was often sold through someone to get some extra money. It also seems likely that he was not the only person to do this though he may have done it more than most.
The big thing to understand is that OA was not highly valued at that time and was often scrapped or given away so he may have seen it as just getting an extra few dollars from something that would’ve been likely to have been destroyed anyway. It is an established fact that on at least one occasion, staff at Marvel were invited to take away as much art as they wanted from a large amount that had been laid out as it was going to be destroyed.
I suspect that a lot of the Marvel staff knew exactly what was happening but most weren’t bothered. I guess maybe even those who had been editor in chief at the time may have turned a blind eye but became uncomfortable with how often it was happening. It doesn’t seem clear whether it was Shooter or his higher ups who made the decision that they would not give Kane any further work but I imagine that they were of the opinion that even if it may not have been anything that was considered valuable at the time, it set the wrong kind of attitude within the work place which I think is understandable.
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Matthew HuskinsonEmperor Biggles

Yea I can understand under paid workers thinking this is a perk rightly or wrongly but what amazed me is he got no more work from Marvel

This must be why at this time he was doing loads work fir Dc wonder if he started on yhe Curt Swan artwork over there