In other news, turns out there actually is a God.
I thought this was going to be yet another appeal of the Tony Twist court case - I’d forgotten about this one. That is indeed all kinds of awesome. Be even MORE awesome if this somehow eventually leads to Miracleman being available for sale again but it sounds like no-one knows.
Man, what a dick McFarlane really is. I mean, John Byrne always seems to be a difficult person (putting it mildly) but at least he’s one of the all time great artists. This guy always seems a spectacularly arrogant, unprincipled jerk PLUS (in my opnion, anyway) turning out astonishingly over praised art.
Marvel acquired the rights a year or so ago. Reprints start going on sale this summer.
I just like that the judge actually seems to understand the work quite well. Comics fan?
WOOHOO!!! There’s still a couple of issues in the middle of the run I never read and all the ones I *did *once own are with my baby brother on the other side of the world. This reprints news makes me very happy 
I absolutely concur.
I second that “WOOHOO”, especially since I’ve never read any of the (reportedly great) Marvel-/Miracleman stories.
But wait: Isn’t it summer already?
Bad news: Marvel’s reprinting the old Marvelman stories from the fifties, not the Moore and Gaiman run. That run Marvel doesn’t have the rights to.
Woo! Go neil!
Funny for a second there, I thought this was referring to the “Family Guy” creator.
Awww 
Can someone summarize or point to me to a summary of why MacFarlane is so disliked (by some, anyway)?
I didn’t know anything about this until now, but given that it involves both Neil Gaiman, and possibly the most quotable decision a judge has ever handed down, I think I have to change my title in honor of this case.
Dude owes my friend $25 from back when Todd owned a comic shop in the Pacific Northwest. He closed the shop with little notice and my friend still had trade credit left.
I found Dave Sim’s (yes, yes, I know, hardly a shining light of humanity, but he remained true to his DIY principles) commentary on McFarlane’s nature interesting. Basically, he noted that Todd simply could not wait to sell out and screw everyone around him. He’d thought him sort of a nice chap before.
He’s disliked for many reasons, most notably for not paying people. The Neil Gaiman case here is pretty representative (as far as I can gather) of a lot of people in the industry’s experiences. Some context: McFarlane was one of the founders of a company called Image comics which was launched on some pretty lofty ideals, notably the promise of greater creative freedom and control of creative content. The latter being a decades long sore point with artists and writers working for Marvel and DC who traditionally zealously retained the rights to their staff’s work.
Image promised to put writers and creators first and finally give them the respect and control that they deserved, rather than it was implied, being cash cows for the only two major players in town. It was, he claimed, all going to be great - authors and writers would be treated well because they would all be working together, for each other. To this end, it’s claimed McFarlane encouraged creators to produce work for Image on the basis of verbal agreements rather than old school contracts. Hey, they were all ladies and gentlemen of their word, right? Long story short, Gaiman is by no means the only person who claims that having trusted McFarlane, he reneged on handshake deals and lied this to cheat his peers out of what they’d been promised.
He also seems a spiteful, arrogant and unpleasant man. He’s done such charming things as turning his peers Peter David and John Byrne into Klansmen in his comic Spawn. Peter David has been highly critical of McFarlane down the years but has NEVER been personal about it. He’s definitely not a fan, though. Here is Peter David commenting on Mcfarlane back in 2004 when he was made bankrupt (this case has been going on for some time!):
Spawn was a cool character concept, but after the first several issues that set up his origin, the only ones worth reading were those written by guest authors like Gaiman. Whenever a new issue came out and I saw that it was written by McFarlane, I knew it was going to suck. Reports of his dickish behavior didn’t inspire me to stick with it and I stopped reading fairly early in its run.
Good to hear Gaiman won here.
Thanks for the background. Fascinating stuff.
Adding my woohoo in here too. I was never a big fan of Spawn but I gotta say that the Medieval Spawn four (?) series was a true thing of art.