It occurs to me in thinking about how America was so successful in exporting its popular entertainment (and here I'm thinking of both the Hollywood movie industry, as well as comics) worldwide, was in applying Henry Ford factory-production methods to entertainment. In effect, subordinating creativity and authorial privilege to marketability, elevating the character or product itself over the author of the work. What was most important was to insure the regular unimpeded flow of product to potential consumers waiting to relinquish their monies in exchange for it. That frequently meant obscuring the creators by hiding their work under "house names" owned by the publishers. Instead of waiting until a creator was ready to deliver his work to consumers, it became paramount to make sure the product went on sale in a regular, timely fashion -- to train consumers to expect to part with their money on a regular schedule.
If the stewardship of an intellectual property is left to its original author, said author will frequently not exploit said property with maximum commercial efficiency. The creator's need to produce wealth for himself is balanced against his personal ability or desire to expend effort to satiate consumer demand. One man can do (or is only willing to do) only so much by himself, or even with the help of a small crew of hand-picked assistants. Publishers (or film studios), on the other hand, can employ as many hands as possible in a factory-system of entertainment production, and steadily ramp up production to meet demand. In fact, they become experts in creating conditions designed to stimulate that consumer demand.
In America, the person most responsible for creating the comics industry wasn't himself a creator. He was William Randolph Hearst, the publisher who founded what would become King Features Syndicate -- in retrospect, the very first comic publisher. In many respects a reprehensible individual, nevertheless he loved his comics and worked tirelessly to promote them, market them, and build an empire based on an ever-growing assortment of comics characters. Heart was a true robber-baron, and a model to emulate for later U.S. comic publishers like Harry Donenfeld (the man behind DC Comics) and Martin Goodman (the man behind Marvel Comics). Hearst had an eye for talent, and when he could create synergy around promoting the talent behind the characters, he used that to his advantage. At the same time, when subordinating the individuals responsible for producing the product to the product itself worked to his advantage to increase his empire, he used that. He learned early that it was important to own the things others created, either at his specific direction, or what he was able to discover himself by instinct when looking through submissions.
A true creator who is interesting to look at in contrast to a figure like Hearst was Edgar Rice Burroughs. Burroughs created a number of entertainment franchises all by himself, out of whole cloth. Barsoom, Tarzan, Pellucidar, The Land That Time Forgot, Carson of Venus, etc. He was a good enough businessman to maintain and promote the copyrighted franchises for his own benefit, and was the first popular fiction writer to incorporate himself. He was adept at creating synergies with other media like film and comics, to extend his franchises into new markets. Yet in some ways, he fell far short of exploiting his creations' maximum potential for generating wealth. Companies to which Burroughs licensed his intellectual properties frequently accrued far more profit from his creations than Burroughs himself did, even though Burroughs was able to maintain and control ownership of his characters. Eventually, Burroughs became publisher of his own books, although it took him a while to work himself up to that stage.
Recognition and demand for product for the Tarzan franchise was great, yet Burroughs produced less than 30 Tarzan books himself. Compare that to something like The Shadow, which was owned by publishers Street & Smith, and also appeared in other media like radio, film and comics. Unlike Tarzan however, on just the prose fiction publishing end of things, The Shadow appeared in over 300 published novels over the course of two decades -- at its peak The Shadow magazine appeared every two weeks with a fresh novel for more than a decade. The vast majority of the Shadow novels were written by Walter Gibson, but his name never appeared on the stories. Instead they were credited to Maxwell Grant, a house name Street & Smith maintained so that they could easily purchase Shadow novels from several authors to meet consumer demand. Gibson turned out to be amazingly prolific, so in actuality the need to employ additional authors was curtailed by S&S. The fact that most of the Shadow novels were actually by the same author gave the character a cohesiveness that other pulp heroes like The Phantom Detective (a competing magazine directly inspired by the success of The Shadow, whose publisher employed over a dozen different writers working under the house name Robert Wallace) never had. But despite being of inferior quality, The Phantom Detective managed to appear in 170 issues of his own magazine, which outlasted the better-selling Shadow magazine by four years, proving that there's a lot of wealth to be generated in the entertainment industry by using the Henry Ford assembly-line method of factory production.
And then there's Superman. It's hard to imagine that the character could have been any more successful if he had been owned and controlled by his creators, Siegel & Shuster. Obviously THEY would have wound up far wealthier for their efforts in creating him, but would Superman ultimately have been as successful overall? My instinct says no. The profits that ought to have accrued to Siegel and Shuster mostly went to Donenfeld and his publishing company, later known as DC Comics, because Donenfeld employed factory-production methods, and knew both how to create, exploit, and meet consumer demand for Superman as a product. It's the same model used by William Randolph Hearst, the same model used by the big Hollywood studios, and the same model (even though the "product" was not entertainment) employed by Henry Ford.
