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| Cerebus #274 (January 2002) Art by Dave Sim & Gerhard |
(from Poisoned Chalice Part 13 at The Beat, 12 May 2013)
...Considering that Todd McFarlane was claiming that he owned Miracleman
free and clear, he seemed to have been very shy of actually just going
ahead and publishing a comic with a clearly identified Miracleman
character in it. In fact, he seemed to be acting in exactly the opposite
manner to how you’d expect someone who was sure they owned something
would: If he really owned Miracleman, as he continually claimed, surely
he would have met Gaiman's legal challenge to his publishing Hellspawn
#13 - which was to feature the return of Miracleman - head on, instead
of giving in to it. He was, after all, no stranger to the inside of a
courtroom at this stage. And he would have started calling the unnamed
character he used in the Image 10th Anniversary Book
Miracleman, if he owned the rights to the character, instead of having
to evolve a completely different name and origin for it after being
warned away by Gaiman. As to why McFarlane kept pursuing a course that was pretty
obviously colossally stupid, who knows? Perhaps he thought that, in the
same way that Dez Skinn had said he wished to do when he first published Marvelman in Warrior
in 1982, he could establish rights in the character by the act of
publishing it. Or perhaps he was hoping to provoke Gaiman into taking a
case against him directly about the ownership of the character...
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| Cerebus #274 (January 2002) Art by Dave Sim & Gerhard |
Pádraig Ó Méalóid explores the convoluted history of Marvelman/Miracleman's ownership in an ongoing series of 'Poisoned Chalice' posts at The Beat.
1 comment:
Wow. By the time this sequence came out I was paying absolutely no attention to the mainstream comics "bidness" and so I had absolutely no idea what was being parodied. I knew who McFarlane and "Spawn" were, of course, but other than that I was totally at sea. In particuar I was completely mystified by McFarlane's wearing of a Miracleman shirt. Well, as my college buddies used to say to each other back in the 80s, "Kimota, baby."
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