Sorry, there was no contract. There wasn’t even a discussion.

What there was was an interview in which George laid out what his conditions would be. And those conditions are pretty well unworkable, in that I can perhaps guarantee what the current Marvel will do, but not what the Marvel that will exist after I am gone will do.

You speak about financial gain and story purposes as though they are two separate and distinct things. That is simply not the truth. Our bedrock belief is that good, engaging, accessible stories will always sell better than poor, confused, muddled stories. In other words good stories = good sales. So when we do whatever retcons we do, we do it with the intention of creating a story that makes people sit up and take notice. And for every such story we do, there are people that like it and people that don’t. I’d be willing to bet that there are retcon stories that you like (possibly because you weren’t reading much before them, so they set your expectation of the characters in question.)