I Love Rob Liefeld | A Comic Book Blog: 2011

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

McSweeney's to Publish Children's Books by Matt Furie and Lisa Hanawalt

McSweeney's, one of the best publishers around, has started a children's book imprint called McMullens, and two of the first books will be by comic book creators Matt Furie (Boy's Club) and Lisa Hanawalt (I Want You). This is neat.

Furie's book is called The Night Riders, and is described as this: "a nocturnal frog and mouse awake at midnight, share a salad of lettuce and bugs and strike out on an epic dirtbike adventure toward the sunrise. As the friends make their way from forest to bat cave to ghost town to ocean to shore and beyond, new friends are discovered, a huge crab is narrowly avoided, and a whole world is revealed."

Hanawalt is illustrating Benny's Brigade, which is written by Arthur Bradford and described as this: "Sisters Elsie and Theo are at recess one day when they see a nut wiggling on the ground. When they gently crack the shell, out pops Benny—the world's smallest, chattiest, and most gentlemanly walrus. When Benny tells the girls that he misses his home in the sea, they build him a milk-carton boat, and send Benny sailing, along with an adventurous band of three slugs. Together, Benny's Brigade (as they call themselves) begin an adventure to a truck-sized island paradise, avoiding the salt water as much as they can. Slugs don't like salt."

You can subscribe to all of the McMullens books here, or pre-order these two books from Amazon: The Night Riders (coming May 2012) and Benny's Brigade (coming June 2012).

Thursday, July 7, 2011

Sean Witzke interviews Brandon Graham

Sean's a very smart guy, and Brandon is one of my favorite comic book makers, so I totally dug this interview. I particularly enjoyed the "comics creator melee mode" section, since one of the best parts of Brandon's own blog is his writing about other people's art. Go here to read the interview.

Friday, June 17, 2011

Defiant, Marvel, and the Plasm Lawsuit

Jim Shooter, former head of Marvel and Valiant, also started a comics company called Defiant Comics back in the 90s. I liked a couple of their comics (they only made a few before going out of business), including their initial ongoing series, called "Warriors of Plasm." David Lapham drew it.

I remember hearing at the time that the book was initially going to be called just "Plasm," but that they changed it because of a lawsuit with Marvel. Shooter has discussed this lawsuit briefly since then:

We also, when we first started out, were sued by Marvel Comics. When we announced Plasm, they claimed they had a character that that infringed upon. What they actually had was a name registered in the U.K. trademark with intent to use. They ended up suing us. We ended up fighting that out in court. It cost us over $300,000 in court. We won, hands down. The judge scolded them at the them [sic], because he knew they were just using it as a business weapon. Trying to use the court to squelch a competitor.

Especially since, to them, I was a dangerous competitor. The last time I had started a company, I had taken a chunk out of their market share. They lost and lost big. But when you're a small company and somebody bleeds $300,000 out of you -- also 120 hours of my time, a similar amount of time for Winston [Fowlkes] who was the publisher.

-Jim Shooter, former editor-in-chief of Defiant Comics, October 2000

A spurious trademark infringement lawsuit against us by Marvel helped speed our demise. They lost, but it cost us over $300,000 to defend ourselves. Bleeding that much money out of a small start-up is lethal. Their true mission was accomplished.

-Jim Shooter, June 2011

Here's my own comment on this situation: Jim Shooter should not blame Marvel for killing Defiant; he should blame his own lawyers. Any lawyer who allows a case to go to trial where, even if he or she wins, the litigation costs would run the client out of business is not a good lawyer, no matter how skilled he or she is at arguing in court.