Right. When he’d been perfectly willing to do the story with the Charlton characters, where there’d have been no question that DC would own it lock stock and barrel, and DC asked him (and Dave) to change it up a bit, and granted them additional rights for it, Moore should have walked away.

He and Dave got a pretty good deal, particularly for a project they went into expecting it to be a standard WFH deal.

It didn’t work out exactly as either side expected, but that doesn’t mean DC’s been venomous and scorpion-like about it. After all, another aspect of it staying in print for decades is that it’s paid royalties for decades.

Alan would rather it go out of print than stay in DC’s hands, Dave seems to like the income just fine. So it goes.

But if we’re looking for examples of comics publishers being abusive to creators, there are much better ones — this is one where the deal worked out well for everyone by normal standards. Alan has somewhat different standards, to be sure. But that doesn’t make the normal standards somehow evil.