By all accounts I've heard so far, Marvel intends to use Epic's creator-ownership possibilities primarily as a reward for its own creators, specifically those who've diligently provided the company with new characters and concepts on the work-for-hire plan. Creator-ownership could also be useful in luring popular writers and artists who'd otherwise take their more heartfelt work elsewhere. Used judiciously, Epic could conceivably prove competitive in cutting into other companies' base of creators. Whether they will, however, is another matter.

In the end, the thinking behind Tsunami and Epic may come at a price for the company's publishing division. Work-for-hire is all well and good for conducting business in the Direct Market, but bookstore distribution works by an entirely different set of standards. There, the conditions under which Marvel is used to doing business simply don't exist, and the company's "own-it-all, grab-it-all" philosophy may prove to be more of a liability than an advantage.

A short history lesson is in order here. Up until the 1960s, the financial investment required to produce and distribute comics meant that comic-book publishers wound up setting the terms of debate when dealing with the talent. Work-for-hire — the practice of demanding that creators sign away all rights to their work, essentially making the company the creator — was the order of the day, and the few attempts to unionize writers and artists in a concerted effort to demand copyright-ownership and better contracts invariably went nowhere.

Galvanized by the egalitarian spirit of the 1960s and '70s, the underground-comix movement produced the first real market where cartoonists were able to maintain ownership of the comics they produced. When the headshops which by and large sold their works began to fade, so did underground comix — but the seeds of "creators rights" for cartoonists had been planted. With the creation of the Direct Market, the subject came to the forefront, as independent publishers like Pacific, Eclipse and underground-holdover Kitchen Sink used the lure of creator ownership and editorial independence to attract talent that might otherwise have gone to the major companies. During the heydays of the 1980s and early '90s, Marvel and DC began implementing more favorable contracts for its top creators in an effort to stem the tide, and for a brief moment it seemed like comic books were finally about to shake off their sweatshop past.

Things didn't work out that way. The movement suffered a setback during the second speculators' bust and subsequent Distributor Wars of the 1990s, which allowed Marvel to safely shut down its Epic division without worrying about how it was going to attract major talent. As the market contracted, only the top four or five companies could really promise their writers and artists a living wage, thus winnowing the effective competition and putting all the chips back into the hands of the likes of Marvel and DC. Back in a position to demand that its creators bite the bullet and take what they could get, Marvel in particular proceeded to do just that.