The Corner Box

The Miracle Man Legal Saga on The Corner Box - S3Ep23

• David & John • Season 3 • Episode 23

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 46:15

David is joined by Editor-in-Chief of Fun Time Go, Inc., Chase Marotz, for a free-dive into the wild world of comics, from their weekend adventures with snare drums, cold beers, and tall stacks of comics, to the wild world of comic book publishing rights and the decades-long saga of Miracleman, one of the industry’s most infamous legal nightmares.

Then, Chase steps into the ring to do the unthinkable: defend The Clone Saga. Love it or hate it, this polarizing Spider-Man storyline gets its day in court as Chase makes a case for its redemption.

Timestamp Segments

  • [00:56] David’s exciting weekend.
  • [01:53] Timing a big reveal.
  • [05:48] The Clone Saga.
  • [07:26] Ghost Machine comics.
  • [09:29] Why Spider-Girl is canceled.
  • [11:20] Den.
  • [13:03] How to get into Savage Dragon.
  • [15:02] Malibu Comics.
  • [17:24] How great is Breed?
  • [21:20] Chase is ensnared.
  • [22:30] Chase’s three beers.
  • [23:15] The Miracleman legal drama.
  • [31:18] The story of Miracleman.
  • [36:31] The predatory world of publishing rights.
  • [41:20] Alan Moore vs Grant Morrison.

Notable Quotes

  • “You should never assume that you’re going to get an Issue #3.”
  • “When the lettering is great, it shouldn’t stand out, at all.”
  • “Nobody goes into comic books to make money.”

Relevant Links

TheCornerBox.Club

Books Mentioned

Welcome to The Corner Box with David Hedgecock and John Barber. With decades of experience in all aspects of comic book production, David, John, and their guests will give you an in-depth, and insightful look at the past, present, and future of the most exciting medium on the planet—comics—and everything related to it.


[00:24] David Hedgecock: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Corner Box. I'm your regular host, David Hedgecock, and with me this week, the one, the only, the editor-in-chief of FunTimeGo


[00:33] Chase Marotz: Chase Marotz.


[00:34] David: Chase Marotz. It's like I haven't seen you in at least 30 minutes.


[00:38] Chase: It's been a dog's age.


[00:39] David: I'm equal parts happy and sad that you're on the show today. I'm really excited that you're here, and happy that you're here, but I'm sad, because John Barber is not with us this week. I think it's some secret mission. I don't know. He mentioned Martians. I'm not really sure what's going on, but I'm not sure I want to know.


[00:54] Chase: I think it's best to just not ask questions.


[00:56] David: Man, I had the most exciting weekend I think I've had in--I don't even know how long.


[01:01] Chase: Why?


[01:02] David: Because I read about 75 comic books over the weekend, Chase. That's why.


[01:05] Chase: That's so many comic books.


[01:07] David: I don't even know the last time I sat down and read that many books, when it wasn't for work, in a two-day span. I know that I've done that for work, because, dear God, I edited a lot of books, all at the same time, at one point in my career, but it was really fun. The listeners may remember that I bought all three of the compendiums for Invincible--basically three giant phone books worth of comic books--and I had read the first 20 or so issues of the first compendium, and then I finished that off over the weekend. So, that was a big chunk of it right there. It was 27 issues worth of material, and it's […] pretty good. It gets better. It's crazy to see Kirkman not being Robert Kirkman yet, and then watching him write his way into being Robert Kirkman.

I heard an interesting interview. It must have been Rob Liefeld, because I listen to the Liefeld Podcast all the time, and he was interviewing Jim Valentino, and Valentino was the publisher for Image Comics when Invincible got picked up, and apparently, according to Valentino, Invincible was on the chopping block. It was not going to make it, and Valentino was like, “hey, man. I don't know what heat or sauce you’ve got, but if you've got anything that you're holding back, you need to get it in there, because you're not going to make it,” and Kirkman was like, “well, I’ve got this thing for Issue #25, a big reveal for Issue #25,” and they were on Issue #5, and Valentino was like, “you need to get it in there now, because you're not going to make it to #25.”

So, they bumped the big reveal--spoilers everybody--that Invincible's dad was basically the bad guy who kills his version of the Justice League. They bumped that all the way up to Issue #8 or #9, or whatever it was, and apparently that was the thing that skyrocketed Invincible into notoriety, and allowed them to keep going for a good, long time--as long as they wanted to--but it's interesting to read those first 20 issues, in particular, because Kirkman's not that good. His pacing is off. You can see that the concepts are there. There's ideas there, but when you read a Robert Kirkman book now--I'm reading Transformers and I'm reading Skinbreaker, and those books are so wildly better written than the first 15-20 issues of Invincible. It's like a different person wrote them, but after getting into Issue #47 of Invincible, by the time you finish that first compendium, man, he's starting to really dial it in, and really starting to figure out how to keep people entertained and bring people back every month. It was a fun journey this weekend, just to see that happening in the course of a day, basically. This was probably two years of Kirkman's life, but watching it roll out in a day, that was really cool, and you could just see it happening.


[03:51] Chase: I think, broadly, moving the twist up is always a good idea. I took a class, when I was in grad school, from Will Dennis, who was at Vertigo forever. He used to freelance editing. He freelance edited the comic where we all got to see Batman's penis. In addition to showing us Batman's penis, which ruled, Will Dennis's big piece of advice, which he used Scalped as an example. Spoiler alert, if you haven't read Scalped, but I don't feel bad, because that book's 10 or 15 years old, at this time. He wanted to save the reveal that the main character was an FBI agent for Issue #3, and Will Dennis said, “you can't do it. It has to be the end of Issue #1, because you should never assume that you're going to get an Issue #3. If you've got a card that's your hook, lay it on the table early, because customers are fickle and attention spans are light.”


[04:33] David: Yeah, no truer words have ever been spoken. I think that's totally true. As a writer, I think you get into this weird headspace where you--I don't know. For me, it's like, “once I let out my big secret, A, then what do I do? That's my one good idea. I'm not going to have another one, and then B, once you let that go, and if people don't respond to it, oh man, then that's it. You're dead in the water. That's the end of it.” A, most comic book writers, myself included, there's a million ideas. You can't get to all of them, and actually letting that one big reveal go frees your mind up to get on to the next 30 different things that maybe that story is going to have in it, or that's the end of that story. Either way, you're good.


[05:14] Chase: You're absolutely right. You need to trust yourself that you'll find the next idea by getting the story implications and the big secret out. I feel like I read comics where it's clear that the writer is teeing up some kind of twist, but because they're trying to stretch it out, a lot of the pacing can feel like treading water, and it doesn't do the overall series any favors.


[05:33] David: Yeah, and the second part of that is, if you let that big reveal out and then people don't like it, that's scary, but it's good information to have. If you think your big idea is hot, and nobody else agrees with you, then good. You got that out of your system, and you can move on to the next thing, whatever that is.


[05:48] Chase: Big reveals that don't land were the rightest, most braving storytelling move, like making Peter Parker a clone from the 70s until the 90s, and realizing that all the adventures we had with Spider-Man were actually a lie. Did it bankrupt Marvel because people hated it? Yes, it did, but was it brave and should have stayed? I think, yes. I think them reversing The Clone Saga was a mistake, but what do I know?


[06:13] David: I could not disagree with you more. That was a stupid idea, and never should that have been allowed to even start down that path. You cannot invalidate 25 years of reading history for your core fan base. That is going to kill you, and it did, because that was not a smart move. You can tease that maybe the clone is the real one, but you have to eventually pull that back to Peter Parker that you know and love is the Peter Parker that you know and love, and the other guy was the clone, or whatever that is. There's a million different ways that you can resolve that storyline, keep it fun and entertaining, without sacrificing the real Peter Parker and all the readers that come along with that. I'm not with you on that one. I don't know. I think there's more people that came into comics during the Clone Saga. That was their jam. That was their Spider-Man.


[07:10] Chase: I also like Reilly's Spider-Man suit better than the original suit.


[07:14] David: You like Ben Reilly's suit better than the original?


[07:16] Chase: Yeah, dude, with the big spider on it.


[07:19] David: Yeah. Man, there's been so many iterations of the Spider-Man costume, at this point, that I can't even keep up anymore. What else did I read this weekend? I read a big grip of Ghost Machine comics. Have you read any of that stuff? Do you know what I'm talking about?


[07:31] Chase: No, I'm not familiar.


[07:32] David: Geoff Johns and basically the top five or six DC artists from about 8 years ago all got together and formed a company. It's an imprint underneath the Image banner, called Ghost Machine, and they've been releasing a bunch of comic books under that imprint. So, you would know. Rook: Exodus, Geiger, Redcoat.


[07:54] Chase: Okay.


[07:54] David: The Rocketfellers. They're all really well written, for Geoff Johns, and the art is incredible.


[08:01] Chase: I like that you had to add that “for Geoff Johns.”


[08:03] David: Here's the thing about Geoff Johns. He's fine. I rarely read a Geoff Johns book and go, “man, that was a waste of time,” but I rarely read a Geoff Johns book and go, “that was amazing.” He's a solid B guy, B-plus guy, for most of his career.


[08:21] Chase: Some people f*cking love Geoff Johns.


[08:23] David: He took a really incredible Alan Moore concept and fleshed it out into three years’ worth of storytelling. That was quite good. There's no denying that. The Green Lantern saga that he put together with Ivan Reis was really well done and well executed, and I submit that Ivan Reis is a very large part of that, but Geoff Johns, he did the job, and he did it well, and that's how I feel about him. He does the job, and he does it pretty well, and that's it, but he knows how to pair himself with some incredible guys, like Jason Fabok, and Bryan Hitch, Francis Manapul. So, these books from Ghost Machine, they're all incredibly good-looking books, man. Bryan Hitch is just top of his game right now. Jason Fabok is probably my favorite interior artist in all of comic books right now.


[09:11] Chase: He's really good. As much as I really hated the writing of the Three Jokers, his art really shined in that.


[09:19] David: You can just tell he's putting his heart and soul into the Rook: Exodus book. So, I read the second four or five issues of that Rook series, and then I got on my digital Marvel app, and I read three or four issues, caught up on Spider-Girl, and I now know why that book is getting canceled with Issue #7. I hate to talk bad, but they also made her a mutant in Issue #6. It's just like, “oh, come on. Really? All right. I guess. Whatever.” The thing about Spider-Girl, the writing's okay, but the last couple issues of art have been, I feel, amateurish, at best. It's very subpar art, and I don't think that's just a stylistic preference that I'm not attuned to. I think it's just a very poor, low quality art, and I hate to say that, and I'm sure that whoever the artist is--I don't even remember the name, and I probably shouldn't say it, because I don't want to discourage people--I'm sure they're going to be good, at some point, but they're not ready, and the editorial team, they need to step back and look at who they're putting on these books. That artist is not ready for that book, and that's why it got canceled with Issue #7. It drove them into the ground very quickly. So, it's disappointing.

I was really bummed, because I was enjoying the whole Spider-Boy and Spider-Girl mythos that was being developed, but the core concept of the Spider-Boy and Spider-Girl is that their focus is not about beating up people and stopping bad guys from doing things. Their focus is helping people, which is a really heroic thing. You think, “of course,” but that is the focus. It's not like, “let's stop this guy.” It's “let's help these people,” and that's an interesting flip for me, and it's not one that I think you see a lot of focus on in superhero comics. So, it's this core concept that's obvious, but not one that's being used. So, I really love that core concept of it. Dan Slott really brought it in with Spider-Boy, but Spider-Girl was leaning into that as well, but it just has fallen apart, for me.


[11:14] Chase: That's a shame.


[11:15] David: And I read a ton of other stuff. I read Richard Corben.


[11:19] Chase: Oh, nice. I like that.


[11:20] David: I read the first hardcover of Den by Richard Corben. So, this is the original material from the early 70s, where he was basically adapting his own animated movie, that he made, into comic book form, and it's incredible to, over the course of two hours, watch five years of his development as an artist, because man, that guy is just trying any old technique. You could tell, he's grabbing a brush, and then he's grabbing paint, and he's doing airbrush, and then he's doing photo collage and photo manipulation, and he's just all over the place. He's doing crazy techniques that today, with all the computer advancements and technology that we have, would still be hard to pull off, and he was doing it without any of that. I think it's all just mixed media. I don't know how he's doing it. I literally don't know how he's doing some of the stuff he was doing, but it's some incredible stuff. Really cool. Richard Corben, amazing.

Dark Horse put it together with Mike Richardson. You can tell, it must be his baby, because it's very well put together. They re-shot the whole thing from the original art, and then they had the whole thing re-lettered very closely to the style of the original, but cleaner, clearer, more easily understood, and wow, what a package, and there's four more volumes of it. So, I picked up the second volume. I'm excited to jump into it again.


[12:44] Chase: Nice.


[12:44] David: So, I recommend that Den, for sure, and I definitely am recommending Invincible too. If you haven't picked up those compendiums, you can find them for pretty cheap on eBay.


[12:52] Chase: Yeah, I've never read Invincible. I watched the first season of the cartoon, which I thought was fine. I apparently didn't like it enough to watch the second season of the cartoon, but I recall liking that cartoon quite a bit.


[13:03] David: How do you feel about Savage Dragon?


[13:04] Chase: I've never read Savage Dragon.


[13:06] David: What?


[13:07] Chase: I just somehow missed it. I feel like, by the time it was on my radar, I was too deep into it. I never went back and restarted.


[13:13] David: I thought that you had to be reading Savage Dragon the whole time, but you absolutely don't. You can jump in any time you want, and Erik Larsen is a really great superhero artist. He leans into his superhero-ness really well. That's a fun story. I jumped back in around the mid-250s, and he's in the 270s now. So, I jumped back in a year and a half, two years ago, at some point. I think the last time I read it was in the 110s or 120s. So, I missed at least 100 issues, and I just jumped right back in. It's easy to catch up. You can jump in any time. At least that's how it was for me.


[13:51] Chase: I do like Erik Larsen. Again, I don't know. It just was one of those things that's a blind spot for me. That, Invincible, I never got into.


[13:58] David: Larsen is also now putting together big, thick compendiums. They're hardcover, but there's giant chunks of reading for $30. You can get them for cheap. So, that's another one that you definitely should jump in on. There's two out, and the third one's, I think, going to come out in a couple months. I just saw on social media that Erik Larsen hurt his thumb though, and he can't draw right now.


[14:19] Chase: That sucks, dude.


[14:20] David: There might be less Savage Dragon. He was about to roll into another eight or nine issues worth of material. He took a break to write some Spider-Man Noir thing, over at Marvel. That's a scary thing, man. This guy's been doing this for 40 years. He's been making his living this way for 40 years, and now he can't draw. He can't work. That is a scary thing. So, the last thing that I jumped into this weekend, I was super excited for it, and then once I got into it, I was less so. This is an all bad mouth episode. I'm going to blame this on you, Chase. You're bringing out the negativity in me.


[14:51] Chase: I am sort of a hater.


[14:52] David: I picked up off Kickstarter a little bit ago, Breed by Jim Starlin. So, Breed was eventually from the Bravura line that Malibu Comics put out. In the late 80s, early 90s, Malibu Comics was a publisher, and the thing that Malibu Comics did, that most people should thank them for, and that they would probably be most remembered for, is they were the original publishers for the Image founders. So, Image was actually an imprint of Malibu Publishing in the first year or two of their publishing history. So, Malibu Comics was publishing Image, and then Image moved away from Malibu and became their own publisher. Malibu was instrumental in getting those guys off the ground. I think they were rewarded handsomely for their efforts, because after Image made millions and millions of dollars for the creators, I think it also made a decent chunk of change for Malibu, because right after that, they started doing some really cool stuff. They started the Ultraverse line. I don't know if you remember that. That had stuff like Prime and Sludge, Mantra, stuff like that. The artist for Prime was Norm Breyfogle. He was just coming off of Batman. That Prime artwork is some of Breyfogle’s best stuff, in my opinion.


[16:04] Chase: One of my quintessential Batman artists, I think.


[16:06] David: Norm Breyfogle was my Batman. A close second would be Kelley Jones, but Breyfogle beats him out, in my standing. Once Breyfogle got on the Batman book, I did not miss that book, when he was drawing it.


[16:17] Chase: I also love Kelley Jones’ Batman. He just does whatever he wants with the cape, dude. Panel-to-panel, that thing is just all over the place.


[16:25] David: I'm so excited that in 2026, we're getting giant chunks of Kelley Jones interior art again. Those Dracula books that he's putting together with Matt Wagner, those things are gorgeous. Anyway, digressing from my digressing, where was I? Ultraverse. Prime. Norm Breyfogle. So, anyway, they did this thing called Ultraverse, which is a company-owned superhero universe, and that did okay for a couple of years. I think it's one of the reasons why Marvel ended up buying Malibu Comics, is that they had that Ultraverse line. The other thing that they did, though, was a line called Bravura. They brought in guys like Howard Chaykin, Walt Simonson, and Jim Starlin, and a couple others, I think. I can't remember. Chaykin did Power & Glory, I think, and Simonson, I think, came back to do some more Star Slammers stuff on the Bravura line, and Jim Starlin did something called Breed. So, he did two six-issue miniseries under the Bravura imprint, and then he did a final seven-issue miniseries that I believe Image Comics published.

So, I was excited to jump into it, because, man, I don't remember that book at all, but I'm a big fan of Jim Starlin. He never disappoints. His writing's really good, and I like his art. He's at the height of his powers a little bit, at this point. Well, maybe he's a little just past it, but he's still well within the range of being in his prime. Sat down, and super excited, I started reading. Oh, my God, dude. It was a mess. So, first of all, he inks himself, and he says he was very proud of the inking that he did in it, but I thought it was poor quality of ink line, and I've definitely seen way better from him. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't Jim Starlin. Jim Starlin's Dreadstar is really good, man. It's really well drawn, and this just wasn't that. It was rough around the edges. It just looked a little unfinished, and he lettered it himself, and for a guy who had, at that point, been working in comic books for at least 20 years, I’ve got to think, I've never seen more atrocious lettering in my life.


[18:20] Chase: Everybody thinks they can letter, but letterers deserve more credit. It's just such a shame, because when the art is flashy, it's the first thing you notice. When the lettering is great, it shouldn't stand out at all. It should feel totally natural and at home with the story. The less you overtly notice the lettering of a book, the better that lettering is.


[18:38] David: Yeah, I agree. Lettering should not be noticed. Well, it is very noticeable in Breed. Let's say there's roughly 20 words on an average word balloon. That's crammed into a word balloon that's probably got at least three or four lines, to make 20 words into a balloon, and give it somewhat of a circular shape. Well, it's two sentences, and they're one stacked on top of the other one, and the word balloon is just wrapped around it, covering half the panel horizontally. It's not even like you would do a caption. Jim Starlin is just like, “no, f*ck you, return. I am not going to hit you. I am not going to use the return on this.” It is insane. It's insane, Chase, that this guy's been doing this for so long, at this point, and I'm like, “how are you not seeing this?” And then the final piece of it, which is really funny, because in his intro, he calls out the fact that he is trying to start a coloring house, because digital coloring was just becoming a thing, in this moment, and he and a buddy started trying to hire themselves out as a coloring house, and the colors on this thing are atrocious. He's mixing Christmas green and reds just right up next to each other, boldly going where no colorist has ever gone before. It's out there, man.

Anyways, I started to read it, because I was going to be entertained. I was looking forward to being entertained by a creative talent who is clearly one of the best in the game, and now I'm reading it, because it's just like, “how is this trainwreck going to go further off the rails?” But I couldn't read too much of it. I could only read the first two issues. I was like, “I’ve got to take a break, because there's a lot happening here, and I can't stomach it. I have to take a little break.” So, I'm hoping it's going to get better, but I'm bummed, man, and I remember reading the original, and not thinking that. So, I don't know. Maybe I'm just being snooty with my art.


[20:38] Chase: It happens. I feel like I had a similar reaction to Batman: Odyssey, and continuing to read it, because Neal Adams had gone completely off his rocker, and you couldn't believe, with each subsequent page, that DC had actually seen this and then decided to let him keep moving with it.


[20:52] David: I love that book. Odyssey is so good. I think the more John Barber talks smack about that book, the more I love it.


[20:59] Chase: Absolutely. When John's back from his secret mission, […] episode.


[21:04] David: All right, we're doing a deep dive on Batman: Odyssey. That's me in a nutshell. That's what I did this week. I read a ton of books. How about you, man? What have you been up to? What's on your mind? What do you feel like talking about?


[21:18] Chase: I had a pretty massive weekend. Actually, I'm just going to digress into non-comic weekend stuff, just really quickly, because everyone should be checking this guy out. I saw Ryosuke Kiyasu, who is a snare drummer from Japan. Dude, this guy is the best drummer I've ever seen in my life. He’s this lone dude, comes out, it was in this performing arts space--and he's on Instagram. You can find him--but he comes out, and he's just got this snare drum, and he sets this snare drum on a folding table, and he starts light with these little brushes, just doing the solo on the snare drum. He picks up different sticks, and he's banging on the table, and eventually, by the end of it, he's just writhing on the floor, just screaming into the drum itself, the table’s flying around. He was humping the table, at one point. It almost flew into a guy. It was out of control.


[22:03] David: That sounds pretty […].


[22:04] Chase: part of what I did this weekend. It was definitely a highlight.


[22:06] David: You saw this guy live, or you find it on?


[22:09] Chase: Oh, […] Instagram forever, dude. His Instagram is Dr Kiyasu. He's on his United States tour right now, and it is a trip, and actually, if you look at a lot of the Portland videos, if there are any still up on his Instagram, I was right up at the front. I'm just focusing on that drumming, dude. I'm just zeroed in. I was just hanging open. I couldn't believe what I was seeing.


[22:28] David: Fantastic.


[22:29] Chase: Just taking into comic stuff.


[22:30] David: Before we get into that, how was that beer, the Pliny the Younger?


[22:34] Chase: The Pliny the Younger was very good. I had three of them, which they let me do at the Tiny Bubble Room, because I spend a lot of money there, and they should have probably cut me off at two, but I met a constitutional law professor who was there, killing time, waiting for his son to be done with a drum lesson, and we had a lively talk on originalism. It was probably mostly just me listening, because I'd had three Pliny the Youngers, but he seemed like the smartest dude I'd ever met in my life after that third beer.


[23:01] David: Cool. That sounds great. Not many people get that, Chase.


[23:03] Chase: No, I was very excited about it.


[23:05] David: All right. So, we're caught up on that. I know that our listeners were anxious to hear how the beer was, and I'm sure many are jealous, because not everybody gets three.


[23:14] Chase: I don't want to leave our listeners hanging. On that idea of public domain and creator ownership, and what that means for things, it got me thinking about Miracleman and the strange odyssey of that character, and the legal limbo that kept it out of publication forever before Marvel started reprinting it. I thought we could just ruminate on some of the Miracleman nonsense.


[23:34] David: Let's do it. I only came to Miracleman just recently. I've sat down and read Miracleman for the first time in just the last year or two. It's always been so problematic, and I don't know where to start, or anything, but now it's been collected. Did Marvel collect it? I think Marvel collected it.


[23:47] Chase: Marvel recolored it and put out new volumes of the story.


[23:50] David: And then they actually put out new material as well, I believe. Yeah, Silver Age, and oh, my God, Silver Age is gorgeous. Man, that book is so beautifully drawn. Holy moly, it looks so good. Wow, that book was a revelation, in terms of the art. I've been talking a lot about Bilquis Evely recently. Her art style and her drawing ability is just next level. I've really been digging her, and I feel like Buckingham on Miracleman Silver Age was reminiscent of her work, or maybe her work is reminiscent of his in that.


[24:24] Chase: Reminiscent of him because, I mean, that Miracleman Golden Age that […] did was in the 80s, right?


[24:30] David: Yeah. I just felt like the Silver Age stuff though, which is the more recent stuff, was head and shoulders above any of the other stuff he had contributed.


[24:37] Chase: I think, yeah, it was just you talking about Kirkman becoming Kirkman earlier. It's wild to see a very early in his career Mark Buckingham, and then taking a multi-decade long break, and returning to chapter two of a story, after he'd done so much and come so far as an artist. Yeah, it's an interesting comparison.


[24:54] David: There's all kinds of legal issues around Miracleman, though. Do you want to frame it for us and […]?


[25:01] Chase: We can start with just a 101 of even what it is, just for our listeners who might not be familiar with the property. Miracleman itself, or Marvelman as he was known initially, was created as an answer to another sticky legal problem. They were licensing Captain Marvel to publish in England, and then when DC sued Captain Marvel over copyright infringement on Superman, it cocked up their publishing plan. So, they brought in Mick Anglo to create an adjacent, yet different, character that was called Marvelman, so they could keep publishing their superhero comics. So, the character itself was created in response to a different legal issue.


[25:39] David: Really? I didn't know that.


[25:40] Chase: Yeah. Created in the 50s, and ran until 1963. Did even better than the original Captain Marvel books did, and then it fell into obscurity until this chain of events where they wanted to revive the character, and in 1982, this guy, Dez Skinn, at Quality Communications, wanted to put new stories by a young Alan Moore in the anthology, Warrior. So, they reached out to Mick Anglo and came to an agreement, and started publishing in Warrior, which went bankrupt, and then Warrior got picked up by Pacific Comics, and it was in limbo there, until they went bankrupt, and then it got picked up by Eclipse, and that's when they started publishing, to again skirt around perceived legal issues they thought they might have with Marvel. So, they changed the character’s name to Miracleman, and they published that original Alan Moore series, and colored it, and that became this big hit early in Alan Moore's career. So, they were publishing that, and then he handed it off to Neil Gaiman, and he did his Golden Age arc, and they had two issues of the Silver Age, and then Eclipse went bankrupt. That got shut down again. So, they put their assets up for auction, and Neil Gaiman had actually assembled a crew who he was going to try and buy the assets, so they could continue the book, but then they got outbid by a one Mr. Todd McFarlane, the Toddfather.


[26:48] David: That's right


[26:49] Chase: And that's when it really gets crazy. They made these story arcs, and they had two issues done on the fourth arc. Todd scoops up the assets and is convinced that he owns the character. Neil Gaiman disagrees, because he was under the impression from Alan Moore that he and Mark Buckingham owned 1/3 of the character for their work on it, but Todd McFarlane decides anyway, “I own it.” So, he makes a statue, an action figure, and introduces his alter ego in an issue of Hellspawn for the Marvel Universe.


[27:13] David: Wait. So, Miracleman does appear or his--?


[27:16] Chase: Yeah, Mike Moran, Miracleman's alter ego, appears in Hellspawn #6.


[27:19] David: Interesting.


[27:20] Chase: This is all while the character’s in limbo. So, part of Gaiman's response to this is, he then sues McFarlane over all those characters he created for Spawn, including Angela, Cogliostro, and Medieval Spawn. So, they tie each other up in courts, and this lasts for years. So, remember 1602?


[27:36] David: Yes.


[27:37] Chase: The profits from that book were funneled into a fund designed to cover all of the legal expenses for Miracleman and the fight, and that book is dedicated to Todd, who made this necessary. So, it's a dedication that's a swipe.


[27:50] David: I don't know if I saw that dedication. That's hilarious. Did you read 1602?


[27:53] Chase: Yeah.


[27:54] David: So, for our listeners, 1602 was a Marvel miniseries written by Neil Gaiman. It was drawn by--was it one of the Kubert brothers that drew it? Yeah. The first, the original. It got some spin-offs, actually, after the fact. At some point, they did some additional 1602. They played in that universe a little bit, but the original was Adam or Andy Kubert. I think it was Andy Kubert.


[28:14] Chase: I think it was Andy.


[28:15] David: And I think Isanove was the colorist. Anyway, I really wanted to like that book, but when I originally read it, it was just okay for me, but on reflection--I read it a few years ago--actually, right before the whole thing with Neil Gaiman went down. The whole “I'm a weirdo” stuff that happened, and I liked it better on the second reading. I appreciate it a little bit more on the second reading. Anyway, sorry. Keep going.


[28:39] Chase: So, this book is out of print for over a decade. On the secondary market, the original trades are going crazy, and I know this because I really wanted to read it, because I feel like I became aware of this series when I was working in a comic shop in high school in 2003. You couldn't just go on the internet and download comics. You had to find back issues. So, I found a few back issues and loved it. So, I finally saved up a bunch of money and bought the original trades, because I got impatient. I spent $400 for the four volumes.


[29:05] David: Holy moly. Really?


[29:06] Chase: I did, yeah.


[29:07] David: You really wanted that.


[29:08] Chase: I really wanted it. So, no, it comes out, it emerged in 2009 that the original creator, Mick Angelo, had just retained all the rights and had never actually sold them, and all of the publications that happened during the 80s were just this informal gentleman's agreement where Dez Skinn had actually licensed none of it, and had apparently been under the impression that the character was in the public domain, and had just been kicking Mick Anglo royalties as what he thought was a nice thing to do, but that wasn't it at all. Mick Anglo still just owned it outright. It's so f*cking wild. It wasn't even like he tried to, and it wasn't even usual for creators to retain that work for hire, but just because of the bad record-keeping of comics in the 50s, they were published with the Indicia, copyright Mick Anglo.


[29:54] David: Fantastic.


[29:55] Chase: So, Mick Anglo had just retained ownership. They did all of this legal wrangling over which publisher owned it, who had bought these assets, and it turned out, it didn't matter at all, because Mick Anglo still had just been sitting on it since the 60s.


[30:08] David: In all of this, had Mick Anglo passed away? Is that why he didn't say anything?


[30:13] Chase: I think the issue was, Mick Anglo was not even clear that he owned the character.


[30:18] David: Oh, he wasn't clear on it, either.


[30:20] Chase: Yeah, he wasn't clear on it, either. In fact, after ceasing work on Miracleman, he had gone on to do an adjacent character for his next comic. So, yeah, it seems like he was under the impression that it might have been work-for-hire and he himself didn’t own the character.


[30:32] David: Wow. When did this happen?


[30:34] Chase: So, this came out in 2009. The judge ruled “[…] claims, purchases, and exchanges of those rights by the various stakeholders, since the revival in 1982, were all illegitimate and without substance.” So, in 2009, Marvel just swooped in and purchased the rights from Mick Anglo. It took them 4 years to secure all the various copyrights, and then they started recoloring it and putting out their editions, but yeah, it was just this big multi-decade legal battle, spawned by somebody incorrectly thinking something was public domain, and a bunch of clearly terrible contract lawyers thereafter.


[31:04] David: Wow, that's amazing.


[31:05] Chase: Yeah.


[31:06] David: So, Marvel now owns Miracleman?


[31:08] Chase: Yeah.


[31:09] David: Clearly, they own all the publishing rights to all the material, because they've already put that out into the public arena.


[31:14] Chase: Yeah, and they've even republished some of the classic material, too.


[31:18] David: Tell us about the story of Miracleman. Not the publishing history, but what did you love about it, and what's the story about?


[31:24] Chase: It starts with a guy named Mike Moran, who has these dreams of flying, and then during this attack that he's involved in, he remembers his magic word, says it, and becomes Miracleman, and regains all of his memories of being Miracleman, and of having all these adventures in the 50s with these young lads, and stuff, but as he comes to find out, all of his memories are implanted by this evil experiment he was a part of, where this shadowy government service had repurposed all of this alien tech to try and make super weapons, and then when they became wise and started rejecting their programming, what he thought was his last adventure was the government trying to kill him, and he didn't die, but he had amnesia, and he was living this middle-class lifestyle until he recovered it, and it just becomes massive from there. I mean, Alan Moore uses this simplistic 50s superhero to jump off on the ridiculous naivete of comic adventures, mixed with this 80s cynicism and send-up of what ultimate power can do, and these shadowy conspiracies, and eventually, these aliens coming to earth. It's a very interesting book, I think, and this big breakdown of the superhero mythos.


[32:28] David: That's a good way to put it. It is the breakdown of superhero mythos. I agree with all that. In my reading of it, I saw that, and I came to it very late. So, a lot of the stuff that Alan Moore was doing for the first time, I've read 100 times since then. So, when I read the Alan Moore stuff, I was reading it for the 101st time, not the first time, which is how a lot of other people experienced it, but for me, you know how fans would talk about “if Superman did this, what would happen? You'll never get to see that in a comic book,” but you would speculate, “if Superman had sex with Lois Lane, what would really happen?” And Alan Moore was just taking all that, and just “well, let's do that story. Let's see what that is. Let's find out.” That's what a lot of it felt like, to me.


[33:11] Chase: And I think it's hard to imagine the impact it had, at the time, especially because we've had so many of that, “what if Superman, but bad” stuff that's been filtered down, through Chronicle and various movies, and Brightburn, and this, that, and the other thing, and the various Injustice, but I feel like this series, because in the first issue, just going back to twists earlier, the big first issue twist is that his assistant, his little sidekick, Kid Miracleman, had survived, but Kid Miracleman never forgot about his powers and never went back to being a human. So, Kid Miracleman has been living as this god-like millionaire in the real world this entire time, building this empire, and has become absolutely wicked because of his infinite power, and Mike Moran has to fight that. So, I think that's the big--I don't know if it's the first one where you see what a meta-human could do if they were completely unhinged, but I think perhaps that issue of Miracleman, where Kid Miracleman ends up killing 1/3 of London is perhaps the most violent we might have seen, to that point.


[34:07] David: Probably, yeah. For me, I'd already read Warren Ellis's Supergod before I read Miracleman. So, I'd already seen the logical extension of what Alan Moore set up, before I saw what Alan Moore set up. Does that make sense?


[34:20] Chase: I think that's why, perhaps for somebody who's a modern reader, I think there are parts of that book that are certainly still shocking to me, but I think it's probably much less shocking now, in 2026, than it was when it came out in the 80s.


[34:33] David: Yeah, right.


[34:34] Chase: Because there's been so many things that have explored the same thing, in different ways, and perhaps, in varying levels of extremity that just weren't out there, at the time that this book was coming out.


[34:44] David: So, Todd McFarlane really did get the short end of the stick on this whole thing, didn't he?


[34:49] Chase: Yeah.


[34:50] David: He shelled out probably a couple million bucks to get all that Eclipse material, probably largely because he wanted the Miracleman stuff.


[34:56] Chase: No, dude. He actually purchased the assets for $25,000.


[35:00] David: Oh, $25,000. So, he wasn’t out that much, and the legal battles, weren't they also about Angela and Cogliostro, and stuff like that?


[35:08] Chase: Yeah.


[35:08] David: He lost those battles, right? Instead of Medieval Spawn, we have Viking Spawn, which is hilarious to me, but Angela is clearly in the Marvel Universe. I'm assuming Gaiman must have sold the rights to Angela to Marvel. Is that how that must have gone down? Because she was recently in Thor.


[35:25] Chase: Yeah, it looks like he sold the rights to Marvel in 2013. Legal dispute was resolved in his favor.


[35:30] David: I wonder if that was also just taking the piss, taking it out of Todd McFarlane's hands and giving it to Marvel, just because Todd McFarlane, famously--


[35:38] Chase: I’m sure.


[35:39] David: Yeah, that's funny.


[35:42] Chase: It feels enormously petty.


[35:43] David: A few years ago, Todd McFarlane losing all that is funny, and Todd's painted as the villain in all of this, but today, it's like the villain role has flipped in this a little bit. Was Todd right the whole time? I don't know. There's a question mark there for me now.


[36:00] Chase: Again, yeah, it's just back to the wacky world of contract law and legal rights in publishing. I mean, the real winners here are the lawyers.


[36:08] David: As always.


[36:09] Chase: Yeah. Isn't that the American dream?


[36:12] David: But what this all comes down to, though, is all this talk, especially the ending, which is a perfect comic book ending. “Oh, it was me the whole time.”


[36:22] Chase: Yeah, dude.


[36:23] David: “I was the owner the whole time.” Art as commerce, man. Getting a bunch of artists in a room, and trying to convince them to make money through publishing, and then watching how that unfolds and completely unravels. It's the history of comic books. Everything is like that. Nobody goes into comic books to make money. Everyone goes into comic books because they want to tell their story or make their comic books. So, you're constantly getting this stupid stuff.


[36:58] Chase: I feel like, at least from a corporate publisher perspective now too, just because of incidents like this, contracts are so much more on-lock now, in 2026, than they were in the 90s, than they were, especially in the 50s and 60s, where all this sh*t was new. So, they didn't even perceive that they would have to worry about these rights in 50 years, because they're just making these dime comics for kids to put in their back pocket. I don't think Superman or Captain Marvel, or anybody, was created with this idea that these are going to be institutional American characters that a billion-dollar industry can be built on. I imagine that was nowhere in anybody's wildest dreams, when those characters first debuted in the Golden Age.


[37:34] David: Yeah, I think that's true. I think today, though, you're right, it's very different. Any publisher who is trying to take all the rights and ownership of a thing in 2026, it's slightly predatory. You're not doing that in good faith, for the most part, and I have to say, at my time at IDW Publishing, I managed all the contracts for all kinds of stuff, but including when we would do somebody's creator-owned book, and I would hear the wildest--and IDW Publishing, while we were there, at least, was very much about the creators retaining ownership of the things that they created, and if they were giving up ownership, they were very well informed of what they were giving away, and why they were giving it away, and what they were getting in return. I know that when I was handling contracts, I would go well above and beyond explaining everything out, and like, “this is exactly what it is. This is exactly what it says. Make sure you have a lawyer to look at it, but this is our intent,” but I would hear these insane stories from some of these creators, about other publishers they were talking to, some of them were legitimate, and what they were asking for, basically, and it's just like, “that's not right. You can't just take all the creative rights, just own something, and the return on that is, ‘I promise to print some copies of your book and give you some copies.’” That's the contract deal. That's so predatory. It's so disgusting, and it used to drive me crazy when I would hear these stories.


[39:01] Chase: There's two sides to it, because even thinking of Star Trek licensing, for the original series, I think more or less, even for redshirts in the original series, because of the agreement they signed with CBS, the estates retain likeness rights for all of the actors in the original Star Trek series. So, it makes licensing original series material extra challenging, compared to stuff where CBS just owns the likeness rights. There were certain background characters we were not allowed to use, because the estate of a popular redshirt was exceptionally litigious. So, we had to have no-zones for artists using certain reference material, and stuff like that. You can make the argument that maybe everyone should retain their likeness rights, but I think now that there is this idea of licensing across multiple formats in comics, movies, television, recorded stories, whatever, people who own those IPs are much more cognizant, I think, of capturing the rights that make that easy for them. I can't necessarily fault them for wanting to do that, certainly.


[39:59] David: I'm not saying, by any stretch, that a publisher shouldn't try to get all the rights for, let's say, a creative endeavor, if that's what they want to do. What I am saying, though, is that there is fair compensation for things like that, and the fair compensation is not, “I'll give you 10 copies of the book that you created, when and if I print it.” That is predatory. That is not a real offer, or a real deal, by any stretch of the imagination. There's a package in place that you can put in front of somebody, and that's something that people would mutually agree to, depending on what the property is and who the people are that are involved, but that is something that everybody has to be real clear on what they're signing and what they're giving away, and what they're keeping, and what they're being compensated for what they're giving away.


[40:43] Chase: Alan Moore, again, famously for his Watchmen agreement, where he thought the rights reverted to him when it stopped being published, but now it will never stop being published, because it's one of the things keeping the lights on at DC.


[40:55] David: And they're never going to give it back to him, either.


[40:56] Chase: They're never going to give it back to him, ever.


[40:58] David: They will not let those rights revert. Yeah, fascinating.


[41:01] Chase: Well, he's a victim of his own success too, in that way. I mean, setting aside, yeah, DC has clearly crunched the numbers, and continuing to sell Watchmen is worth more monetarily to them than having absolutely no relationship with Alan Moore.


[41:12] David: Yeah, I don't think that was true, for a certain time, but maybe it's true now. I don't know, because Alan Moore's just not producing anything anymore.


[41:20] Chase: I love Alan Moore’s stuff, but what was his last printing money hit?


[41:25] David: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, I guess, would be the last big thing, but that's the last big work that he even did, produced.


[41:30] Chase: It's definitely not his weird porno he did for Top Shelf.


[41:35] David: Yeah, what was that fairy thing? What was it called?


[41:37] Chase: Retelling of f*cking Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty and ****.


[41:43] David: I thought it was Peter Pan. I never actually read it.


[41:45] Chase: Yeah, no, it was a few. It was Wendy, and stuff. Yeah. I used to have a copy. I got rid of it after my last move. I'm like, “I don't know. I'm never going to read this again.”


[41:54] David: I've never read it.


[41:55] Chase: What Alan Moore is into is not perhaps what I'm into. I'm not a wizard.


[42:00] David: You're not. He just did this really cool thing with one of the big instruction platforms out there. I think it's a British instruction platform. Basically, all these masterminds of various things do these tutorials on whatever they're experts at, and Alan Moore did this whole video tutorial on, basically, Writing 101, according to Alan Moore, and it's a couple of hours long. It's really amazing, and I started it. It's been probably a year since I started it, and then I haven't gotten back to it, but the first bit I saw was exactly who I thought Alan Moore was, who he's presenting himself as in this tutorial.


[42:37] Chase: He's such a smart writer. I just feel like the way his work is so layered and just functions thematically, as a criticism of what he's writing about, in certain ways, I mean, there are just many different interpretations and ways you can revisit his work that are very satisfying.


[42:53] David: And his writing is clear, in a way that a dummy like me can understand. Another thing that I read this past weekend was, I finished off the Green Lantern series by Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp. I was reading this series on my iPad using my DC app. When I finished it, if it had been a comic book, I would have thrown it across the room so hard, and as far as I possibly could, because I have never been more frustrated by a reading of a comic book series than I was by that particular series. I didn't understand a single word of it. I didn't understand anything. By the end of it, I was so confused. I had no idea what got resolved. I didn't know any of the players, and I was reading a big chunk. I read the second series, basically, over the course of only the last two months, and I don't have any clue what happened in the second volume of this book. I'm just like, “I think I hate Grant Morrison now. I'm done with him. I can't understand him. I don't understand what he's trying to say. I don't understand any of it,” and it really pissed me off, because Liam Sharp was doing this crazy work, man. The artwork he was throwing at us, clearly, he was going over the top, and he was experimenting with all these different techniques in the work, and it was really interesting and beautiful, at times. Sometimes, it fell apart, but he was clearly trying for a very specific aesthetic and experimentation, and I loved it, and I couldn't understand it at all, and I've never felt that way about Alan Moore. His stuff, I always get it. It is at that level of complexity. I am never lost within that complexity. I feel like I'm able to understand and follow almost all of it. Some stuff goes over my head, but most of it, it's all still there.


[44:33] Chase: And I think that's the reason why you can make the argument for him as one of, if not the greatest comic book writer of all time. Every single story he's done functions just on a surface level of an enjoyable story, has clear characters, great action, rising stakes. You don't have to be cued-in onto the symbolism or the thematic elements of what he's trying to say, and still enjoy the very good human characters that he creates and puts in front of you.


[44:58] David: Yeah. Anyway, hats off to him, and hats off to Todd McFarlane for losing $25,000.


[45:04] Chase: Probably not so long after he spent $3 million on a baseball.


[45:09] David: Right. $25,000, he probably didn't even know.


[45:12] Chase: Right. That's a rounding error for Todd McFarlane, in that era of his career.


[45:16] David: So, what else, Chase? Anything else, before we sign off for the afternoon here?


[45:19] Chase: I think that's everything I have been fixated on lately. Just snare drum shows and legal eagles.


[45:27] David: All right, well, thanks for bringing it. You brought it today, Chase.


[45:29] Chase: I'm always happy when you have me on.


[45:31] David: Well, I'm always happy when you're here. Well, thank you, everybody, for tuning in today. That was a wild one. I didn't know where that one was going to go. Hopefully, you learned some things to pick up in this episode, not just things to put down, because we do like to elevate the medium, as often as we can, but every once in a while, you’ve got to talk about the duds, Chase.


[45:47] Chase: Yeah. Well, I say I'm a hater, but actually, I love most things.


[45:53] David: Clearly. Thanks, everybody, for listening, and we'll see you next week. Hopefully, John will be back. All right, thanks, everybody. Bye.


[45:59] Chase: Bye.


This has been The Corner Box with David and John. Please take a moment and give us a five-star rating. It really helps. Join us again next week for another dive into the wonderful world of comics.