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Aaron Robinson

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Poisoned Chalice: The Extremely Long and Incredibly Complex History of Marvelman

As it says on the link, it's a long, long read and the legal history behind the character is a bloody nightmare. No one is sure what exactly Marvel actually owns now and I'm willing to bet good money that we'll never see a proper reprint of the Moore and Gaiman collections, let alone a continuation of them.

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Marvel's had ownership for the last four years though and only published Anglo's original work which was, frankly, not very good. I know that Gaiman has said that if he's going to finish it anywhere it would be Marvel, but I imagine Gary Leach's ownership of the Warpsmiths is going to be a major hurdle given how involved they are with the story. I know that Moore's happy to let them go ahead so long as they take his name off it and don't try to involve him but the whole thing is a murky nightmare. Personally, if they can't get this sorted in the next five years, i think that everyone should just give up their claims and let the whole thing go into the public domain. At this point there's a bigger gap between the Warrior stories and the present that there was between the Warrior stories and the original Marvelman stories.

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The whole Marvelman thing is fruitless to me just because was was special wasn't the character, it was the writing and what was done with it. The background and world was deliberately generic. You could argue that it's a huge deal of a book because of that writing but the only people in the last 20 years who have read it have done so illegally. It's a big deal in the inside of the industry, but it's not a project that is worth so much time and investment freeing up just so you can write more. If you've got Gaiman and you're paying him why not just get him to write something fresh? Why not just use the Sandman method, have him pick an under-appreciated Marvel character and do something interesting with it.

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Right Marvelman was derivative. He was created so that L Miller & Sons could keep publishing comics featuring a superhero who was changed just enough so they couldn't get sued. Moore worked his magic (though not literally as this was a decade before he declared himself a wizard) and found new avenues to explore and new depths to the work that just weren't in the original work, themes that he really expanded on and completed with Watchmen.

Moore's run works as a complete story and provides an interesting dichotomy with the ending of V For Vendetta. Olympus ends with an ostensible utopia littered with the seeds of doom whereas V ends with a chaotic dystopia that has the seeds of hope sown into it. I see Gaiman's run like I see Firefly, fantastic for the small amount we got but I wish we'd gotten more at the time rather than seeing a resurrection years or decades later. I don't want Firefly to come back and I'm not sure I want Gaiman's Marvelman at this stage either with an extra two decades of heightened expectation and a culture that's moved on.

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Okay, reread the final part and it does seem like a Marvel publication might be coming soon. I think through all of this Alan Davis has been the most screwed, first by Moore's temper tantrums with Marvel, then by Eclipse just using his work and ignoring his wish to enforce his copyright. Todd McFarlane is the least sympathetic person in comics, and I have a little schadenfreude over the fact that he seems to have lost the greater part of his fortune. It seemed like he went to court every so often to get the fact that he's a complete prick put on public record. I'm now a lot more sympathetic to Dez Skinn than I was a few years ago even though he did cause a whole lot of this mess by assuming that Marvelman was public domain. He seemed to be trying to balance the pragmatism needed for a publisher at the mercy of a major distributor, who was quite prurient, with his own desires to push the medium further.

I was also surprised by how much of an asshole Erik Larsen was about the McFarlane-Gaiman lawsuit. I wasn't likely to buy any of his stuff any way but his comments implying that the jury in the case was thinking with their ladybits rather than looking at the facts of the case was appalling.

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Confirmed

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Story

I imagine, with a limit of 1000 copies and the prestige format it's going to sell out very quickly.

Edit: Hmmm, curious silence by Morrison on this one and a fair amount of weasel wording regarding his involvement. I don't think that Rebellion would publish this unless they were certain there was no legal risk which would imply that the lawsuit has ended and the court found in Rebellion's favour and therefore Fleetway's lackadaisical approach to paper work doesn't mean that Grant still owns Zenith. Really hoping this one clears up soon.

Edit the second: Been informed by Laura Sneddon that the lawsuit never reached the courts. Safe to assume that Morrison is not happy with this being published. Yeowell is though as he's doing a lot of interviews about the new collection.

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Ok, so every Marvel and DC event now is about trying to justify an alternate set of costumes for the heroes. Age of Ultron has not just one alternate look for everyone, but TWO. Ultron just shows up and instantly we get the battle-hardened version, and then they go back to alter history and get the alternate history version as a result. Sorry, when it's this transparent a marketing technique you've totally lost me.

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