That’s not entirely true. D.C. always fully owned Wonder Woman but It came at a cost where they had to keep her in print for a certain amount of time otherwise the rights of the character would go to the family. Wonder Woman was never bought buy DC. It makes no sense. She was done on work for hire.
what happened is that in
In an October 25, 1940, interview with the Family Circle magazine, William Moulton Marston discussed the unfulfilled potential of the comic book medium.This article caught the attention of comics publisher Max Gaines,who hired Marston as an educational consultant for DC. One of the editors told William to make a hero. Marston went back home to his wife and said that he wanted to create a superhero. The wife said it should be a woman since there were too many superheroes. William agreed and his exacts word to create Wonder Woman were
Wonder Woman was created to essentially be a female superman. That’s literally what he said it was done on work for hire. But then there was contract that he made with dc that at the same time was understandable and not understandable lol.
Who gets hired by a company and then that very same company tells you to make a character FOR THEM but then after a few years before you unexpectedly die you make a contract which essentially threatens the company’s ownership of a character that you created FOR THEM. It makes no sense. Who does that?
the contract was this:
“Negotiated before his death in 1947, his heirs retain small royalties from all Wonder Woman related creations and merchandise. Also there is a reversion of rights clause that states if DC Comics does not publish for one month any Wonder Woman comic book, the rights to the Wonder Woman character and related merchandise, past, current, and future revert to his family. Effectively, this means that if DC Comics became so poor that they could only publish one comic book a month, it would have to be Wonder Woman, or else they would lose her to Marston's family.”
So no DC always owned Wonder Woman they never bought her. That makes no sense she was literally done on work for hire. They ended the contract which threatened their ownership of her. They’ve owned her from day one since her creation because I mean she was literally a WORK-FOR-HIRE. Work for hires are corporate owned. I mean her name wasn’t even originally Wonder Woman. It was “Suprema the Wonder Woman” but then max Gaines told Marston to shorten it to “Wonder Woman.