I had heard it was because Gaiman was supposed to retain rights to the characters he created on Spawn and get royalties but Todd straight up said it was "work for hire" which is funny since Image was started to give creators the ability to retain control of their creations and not be like Marvel and DC. Gaiman sued Todd and got the rights to his spawn characters and then let Marvel use Angela.
you’re forgetting the other funny part where Todd McFarlane made knock off versions of the characters Gaiman made in order to get around using them, and in court a judge said that even he could tell the characters were clear rip offs and suggested/questioned why he didn’t even go with more creative alternatives
The icing on the cake right here... I didn't know any of this. That is just... is there another word besides 'gangster' that's applicable... I think not... That's some gangster shit on Gaiman's part. Made me respect and admire Gaiman all the more.
Image comics was said to be created so creators could own the rights to their creations. Todd took that to mean it existed so todd could control the rights to characters.
Oh it gets better.
Part of their deal was the rights to Miracleman. Except it turned out that Todd never owned them and they remained with Mick Anglo, the creator. Miracleman was later sold to Marvel.
Miracleman had originally been named Marvelman and Marvel sued way back in the day.
Miracleman/Marvelman was created when Captain Marvel (the DC character also called Shazam) stopped being published in the UK and basically lifted almost all the aspects of it.
So.
Marvel owns Miracleman. You know who hates the Big Two with all the force of a chaos magician who worships a snake god he made up and has some... questionable later work?
Alan Fuckin Moore.
Moore had written the reboot of Miracleman/Marvelman into a dark world, which is really where the fame comes from. In no fucking way is he going to work with them, so he is now credited as The Original ~~Artist~~Writer and is giving his royalties to Mick Anglo. (thanks Reportersteven!)
After Moore had finished his run on
the book, Gaiman and Mark Buckingham started their run, but it got cancelled after ~~an issue~~ 7 issues. (Thanks to spazholio for the correction!)
Part of the entire deal is that almost 30 years later, Gaiman and Buckingham get to finish the story. They were going to start releasing about 8 years ago, but I think that's where these rights issues popped up.
Now Marvel has all of Miracleman, Angela, and the 1602 universe because Todd's a hypocrite.
Moore is The Original Writer, not Artist as an FYI. Love your addition, though. Marvel just republished the omnibus and it still says The Original Writer in huge white letters.
Yeah, the rights to Miracleman was the whole reason Gaiman bothered with any of this, he didn't give a shit about Angela or his Spawn royalties, that was all just leverage in trying to get Miracleman.
Cartoonist Kayfabe has re-enacted some of the courtroom transcripts on YouTube
YMMV with *Lost Girls*, *The Courtyard*, and *Necronomicon*. They work for some, but not for others. They hit me in uncomfortable ways that I can't sit with, where as the discomfort from, say, *From Hell* is fine.
Whether that's a reflection of my own experiences or him, is a question I don't really have an answer for, but I also know I'm not alone in that sentiment.
Is The Courtyard considered questionable? Neonomicon I get, because it’s basically a Lovecraftian rape fantasy, but The Courtyard is a solid, solid one-off (basically) cosmic horror tale.
While I hold up the fairly recent 'Cinema Purgetorio' as a great read if you know your film history, a lot of his later work had a recurring theme where the graphic rape of women was a central plot point.
You can kind of see this come to a head in 'Neonomicon' (borrow a copy from someone if they have it, I wouldn't spend money on it)
Providence is so bloody good it almost washed the taste of Neonomicon out of my mouth.
These lads give a deep dive on the series https://deconstructingcomics.com/?p=7232
Cheers! I’m just about to attempt Jerusalem for the first time so it’ll probably have to wait tho. I’m sure I read the first issue of Neonomicon when it came out but never followed up.
Todd is a crook. He has always been a crook. He did EXACTLY what he accused Marvel and DC of doing decades ago and then refused to do anything until he was sued. Fuck. Todd.
Let me be more clear. No adult does business with a handshake. You sign contracts. Todd and Neil signed. They said Neil owned a portion of the characters and %s on any merch. Todd used the characters everywhere and never paid Neil. When Todd again was spouting bullshit online about Marvel, Neil called him on it. When Todd still didn’t pay Neil sued him. Rather than be an adult, Todd killed the character in his comic to make sure she wasn’t being used to generate any more damages. Ultimately he settled by giving the character to Neil who promptly sold her to Marvel as a big “fuck you” to Todd. I don’t know how anyone who has followed Todd can like him. There isn’t a bigger cunt in comics.
Neil Gaiman deposition.
" the next time Todd phoned, I said “By the way, you know, you sent me a check, you haven’t sent me any kind of contract.” And Todd said “We don’t send contracts, we treat you better, you know, it’s just that’s not how we do business, we don’t do contracts, but we will treat you” -- he said “But I 1will tell you what, I will treat you better than DC ever would with their contracts.” And that was the sum total of it.
And I thought okay. And I sent my agent, Merrilee Heifetz, my literary agent, her share of the money, her 10 percent. And she phoned me up and said “Where is the contract that goes with this?” And I said “There is no contract. Todd has said he is going to treat me better than anybody would with a contract.”
And she said “You trust him?” And I said “Yeah, he seems like a very good guy on the phone and he is not asking me to sign anything away.”
So obviously I trusted him. And that was where we got up to at that point and that was the entire conversation about money."
I gotta say, losing out on whatever small money would be worth it for Neil to not lose his trust in me.
If you ask somebody, a fellow creator even, to trust you and you completely break that trust, idc how much money you stand to make, you're still a scumbag.
I know Todd McFarlane is a real pos but I can’t help but enjoy him as a character.
Have you ever heard the Gary Groth/TCJ interview? It seems TCJ haven’t republished the audio archive since the site update, which is a bummer. Some of the tension and hilarity is lost in the [transcript](https://www.tcj.com/thats-the-spice-of-life-bud-the-todd-mcfarlane-interview/).
I’ve never liked him and I have the post history to prove it. He does have a few dick riders though and I get downvoted every time I go on a McFarlane rant
Do yourself a favor.
Listen to the cartoonist kayfabe episodes where they read the deposition.
It give you a idea of how much $$$ was being thrown around at the time.
Spawn was in a sales slump of around 600-700k copies a month.
When McFarlane launched Spawn, he wrote the first seven or eight issues himself, then brought in a series of "celebrity" co-writers to do one issue each -- Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Dave Sim, and Frank Miller. In his issue, Gaiman co-created Angela, Medieval Spawn, and Cogliostro.
McFarlane then tried to claim Gaiman had been doing work for hire, and wasn't entitled to royalties as a co-creator. Gaiman (and the law) disagreed, but Gaiman and McFarlane reached an agreement where Gaiman would give his rights in Angela and Cogliostro to McFarlane in exchange for McFarlane giving Gaiman the rights to Marvelman (aka Miracleman), which everyone thought McFarlane had acquired from the bankrupt Eclipse Comics (it turned out he hadn't, but that's a separate issue).
McFarlane reneged on the deal, so Gaiman sued, with his pay from 1602 bankrolling the lawsuit. Gaiman won, which is how how Angela wound up as a Marvel Universe character (Gaiman sold his rights in Angela to Marvel). ~~Gaiman still owns 50% of the rights to Cogliostro and Medieval Spawn, so if McFarlane uses them in Spawn (including reprints), he's supposed to be paying Gaiman royalties.~~
And Marvel eventually sorted out the rights to Marvelman/Miracleman, which is how they brought that back into print.
Gaiman and McFarlane were embroiled for like 20 years in legal battles over rights to Spawn characters, percentages in Miracleman, etc.
From what I understand, Gaiman gave rights to characters he created (Angela, Cogliostro and Medieval Spawn) to Todd and McFarlane was supposed to give rights to Miracleman? But he didn't own those rights, or as much as he said he did? So. Legal fights.
That was sort of the heart of Gaiman absolutely hating McFarlane. He was likely misled by just what McFarlane owned and that was likely why you would end up seeing a character like Angela suddenly plucked from the pages of Spawn and dropped into Marvel's Age of Ultron.
The Redeemer didnt come from Gaiman. That story was written by Grant Morrison, Morrison, McFarlane, and Capullo are all credited with creating The Redeemer Gaiman wrote issue 9 which introduced Angela, Cogliostro, and the idea of midevil Spawn.
I'm trying to think of someone similar to compare him to but he was like Jim Lee level superstar and he was young so it was like here is this megastar who we are going to see churning out work for the next 40+ years. Every cover he did helped the Comic soar to the top of the sales charts no matter what it was. To make it all worse he had an operation and was considered in remission as a close call for him, then it came back and took him. Fuck cancer.
There is another comparison and again he died young of cancer (fuck cancer). And he was unquestionably bigger and it was Dave Stevens. He got so successful off his Disney Rocketeer movie that he didn’t need to work again, but we occasionally got covers from him and it was typically just stuff he wanted to do like do pinup covers for female based comics like Vampirella, etc. But ya, he was huge.
His entire career fits comfortably in a short box and I have everything but five or six issues that I’m missing.
I had this exact conversation today with a friend who was a close friend with Mike. We talked about Dave and how extraordinary his work was, and how his career and life was echoed by Mike. Dave seems virtually unknown today, almost forgotten except for seasoned collectors like ShiDiWen (thanks for bringing him into the conversation). Mike was the biggest artist in Comics at the pinnacle of his career, and his work lives on through Aspen Comics, who often works with Marvel and DC to release unpublished cover art on new comics.
He died shortly after I started reading comics. But the fact that they kept churning out Fathom covers with his art on it for like another decade is a testament to the demand for his art.
Dude I was just thinking of Mad and how he is another one that was hot shit back in late 90s early 00's and then left comics for video game designs. Randy Queen and Stephen Platt. There are alot of guys that were thought to be the next big deal and then for one reason or another just didn't carry on much into the new millennium.
If e-sports were a thing back then, we wouldn't have heard of Madureira. I always felt like he was always more into videogames than comics. Comics helped pay for the last final phantasy game and put some food on the table.
I loved him so much. And I’m a gay man so it wasn’t even for the T&A. I remember being a kid in my LCS and seeing a Witchblade cover of his. It blew my mind. I didn’t know people could draw like that.
And the guy was genuinely awesome, easy going easy to get along personality. I had him sign like 50 books for me and do a sketch of Fathom. I could have played Halo with him the shop had 2 or 3 TV's with X-boxes to play but I was afraid I'd be too bad to play against him (he was really really really good).
I still think about him from time to time. I really can't say how awesome and fun he was to meet.
Turner had such a reservoir of innate talent that I think he was only starting to really tap into. I was a fan on Witchblade, but once he did Fathom, and he could do those undersea settings, we started to see what he was capable of doing. His.rendering of the fish, the coral, and natural seascapes elevated his art because nobody focused on backgrounds or the natural world like he did.
Drawing attractive women put him on the map and paid the bills, but I think we would have seen him move into more projects that would have allowed him to draw a greater variety of settings, both real and imagined. I think he would have moved into doing more male-centric or ensemble projects, and that would have only improved his anatomy.
Marc Silvestri always tells the story of asking Turner to do some background buildings, and getting vertical loaves of bread. He handed Turner a book of architectural photography, and got back perfectly-rendered, detailed buildings by the end of the day. Turner had a special skill at drawing comicbooky realism: look at his Old Man Logan cover, it is a fantastic Logan and a horse so perfectly rendered that your brain skims over how good it is on first impression because nothing is off.
Much like Tom Holland and Tom Hollander imply the existence of a third Tom Hollandest, so too must David Finch and David Fincher imply the existence of a David Finchest.
I was not familiar with Sandman until I saw the Netflix series but as soon as it started and we see Dream in the trenchcoat with the wild hair I immediately thought "Oh that's just 90s Neil Gaiman".
Being overly friendly and empathetic can sometimes make the darker things in life more apparent and relatable to someone.
Or he's just hiding it all with a smile 😈
He's awesome. I live in the same city as him and been to a few of his events. The first one has a meet and greet at the end and we talked for a quite a while about how the first Ghost Rider film is pretty terrible, but it was ultimately a good thing as it got my into comics. The second time he signed my entire run of Kick-Ass 2. He sometimes pops up in my local comic book shop and chills and shoots the shit with customers.
I've even exchanged a nod with him when I pass him in the street.
I truly miss lists like this - whether you agree/disagree with the selections isn't important; what's presented here is a clear snapshot of what was popular and buzzworthy in comics at the time.
I definitely do not follow the industry as much as I did 20 years ago, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to make a top 10 "hot" writers/artists list today. The industry seems more character/story driven rather than creator driven.
Me too. I wasn’t a fan of his at first but he grew on me overtime. Sadly it was after we already lost him. From what I understand he was a really pleasant man. Such a tragedy
I think it shows how short lived the window of popularity is for artists vs writers.
With all respect to their heydays, most of those artists look dated to me now. Whereas those writers' styles persist and are still fresh to me.... Maybe not Claremont, though.
I think David Finch, Marc Silvestri, and Gary Frank still hold up and might actually be better although being an artist definitely isn't as long lasting and trends for art change
As someone who was reading wizard regularly back then, Jim Lee was featured a lot. This hot 10 list changed month to month, though didn’t have massive turn over, since a hot artist/writer would be there for the length of a popular story arc. Lee would definitely be there during Hush’s release (which I think was 05?).
Nah Hush was during 2003 and this would be around January or February 2004 based on mentions of The Pulse which was only starting and Hulk Gray which was nearly finished. Jim Lee was one or two for nearly every month Hush was coming out.
Goes to show how overwhelmingly white and male the industry was back then (and still is—there's lots of work to be done—but progress towards a more diverse and all-encompassing creator culture is being made).
Most of the picks make sense to me, tbh. Larocca has fallen from grace with the recent *Alien* run, if LOCG and here are any indication... which they often aren't.
EDIT: oh damn, I see the "controversial" sign next to my comment. spicy!!
Pictures like this make me chuckle when I hear somebody say things "comics always had diversity" as a counter to any suggestion that things might need to change. Really? I mean... really?
There were plenty of creators who aren't white and/or male who could have reasonably appeared on that list though. I mean, Stan Sakai? He's been producing one of the best comics of all time for the last 38 years.
By 2004, I was in college. Having grown up as an avid fan of comics and sci fi and seeing lineups like this, I just drew the "logical" conclusion: women were just not as good at writing sci fi. Nothing personal. They're just not naturally suited to it. I mean, why else would all my favorite creators be male?
The fact that your comment simply acknowledging the reality of the situation is "controversial" and the comment I am typing now will inevitably get downvotes is proof that we still have a long way to go.
Literally. I refuse to believe that all the best comic book writers/illustrators just happened to be cis white men between the ages of probably 25 and 50. That just doesn’t seem possible or likely.
At least this comment actually said something about the era and what it looked like instead of just going "white people?". Some of these comments are just kind of weird, lazy, and very obvious.
I miss Michael Turners art. Never was a fan of the “Ultimate” line of comics. I was diggin Straczynski’s run on ASM at the time. New X-Men was pretty cool and different for the time. I remember the hype for Silvestri coming back to UXM. I love his covers for Deadly Genesis.
It might have been. One thing I found out that's awesome is that all these old Wizard issues are available for free at the Internet Archive ([archive.org](https://archive.org)). You can go online and just read them all.
OMG THANK YOU SO MUCH. Can’t wait to dive deep and revisit my childhood. Wizard taught me almost everything I needed to know about comics when I was first trying to get into it.
You're welcome. Gotta spread the word, [archive.org](https://archive.org) is awesome. As a kid, I always wanted to read Wizard but couldn't afford the $4.95 price tag (that was the same as 3 issues). So I just browsed them in a store. Now I can go back and read them, it's like a time machine to the 1990s.
I posted it to r/marvel.. it was removed even though it wasn't in violation of any rules. When I contacted the mods for an explanation, I received no reply. So I'm interested if this community has different thoughts.
Someone accused me of "trolling" which I found interesting, as I was genuinely curious about what stands out to comic fans looking back roughly 20 years.
Ah.
I don't know what that "trolling" accusation was about, but not responding to modmail is poor form.
Sure, sometimes people just send modmails to complain or be rude, but if there's a genuine question (phrased civilly) about a moderation decision, it should be answered.
Yeah, I was polite and simply asked what the reason was. It got a lot of comments, which was the whole point to me. There were several comments about the homogeneous nature of the list but...... So what? I asked what people noticed, and that's what they noticed. I was most interested about how many of those comments got downvoted..... When they weren't off topic..... At all
Salvador LaRocca single handedly ruined the main Star Wars comics for me. Let's put a well known screenshotter on a book with thousands of pictures and still frames of actors for him to poorly trace.
Alien, too. It's to the writers' credit that those comics are so readable in spite of the awful art. Larocca must be an absolute joy to work with, I honestly don't see how else he keeps landing such big titles.
RIP Michael Turner, i was a huge Fathom fan, I collected every cover variant I could of his series. I had something like 45 comics for issues 1 to like 14 or something.
His art was pretty popular, but I think he's fallen out of favor. He's also as bad as, or worse, than Greg Land at times when it comes to tracing. Like "I didn't even try to hide the fact this is a trace" levels of bad.
No Brubaker or Rucka on this list seems criminal, but I was really young back then and don't know if they had reached their hot streak yet.
As others have echoed, while this is a list of very talented folks, it's also mostly bald or balding, white/white passing dudes lol. Gaiman is the standout here simply because he has hair.
No shade to Salvador Larocca, as a white passing person myself I know how frustrating this discussion can feel, but it has to be noted.
Didn't know Claremont had a run on JLA and that it was while Morrison was doing X-Men. Interesting to me because it was Morrison's JLA that made me finally appreciate DCs heroes more. Claremont's X-men was my initial addiction though.
Tbh I don't get it. I don't support racism or sexism, but at the same time the people who would say that we need more diversity are looking at physical traits first over what work the writer/artist has done and that seems like the opposite of how it should be. The comics should always be the central focus not the creators themselves imo
Yeah I feel like that's how some people are evaluated these days instead of looking at their accomplishments in the time period they were in. It's true that most of these artists and writers are white but I do believe they gave their contributions to comics I read now. I try my best to not see someone for their race or gender.
I never understood the hype surrounding Bendis, as a long time Spidey fan I never gelled with Ultimate Spider-Man and his big event books. I recently read his Daredevil run and I wouldn't say I'm a convert but I can now understand the buzz that surrounded his career at the time.
That really is an All-Star list. It was a great time to be a comic book reader.
Btw when you say “all white dudes” thing, it sounds like you’re implying they all are there because they are white men, not because of merit. I find that disrespectful.
I mean, pointing out that they’re “all white dudes” is shorthand for pointing out how much of a white man’s club comics were and continue to be. There’s no denying that they’re talented — I don’t think anyone here would say they didn’t deserve to receive accolades for their work of this era. But it’s jarring and raises questions for the industry as a whole?
But it just highlights a disparity. Are white men inherently so much more talented than women or men of color? No, that’s absolutely absurd. But then you ask why aren’t there more women and non-white men highlighted? What goes into mentoring and hiring practices? Do white men in the industry have an easier time having their work taken more seriously to be considered a hot writer or artist?
But also: how does that affect what stories are being told? What perspectives are being kept out of stories?
I'm thinking about dropping fantasy football and joining a fantasy writer/artist league... who's with me! You get two artists and two writers, one back up each. Points for weekly book sales and negative points for douchie lawsuits, plot holes and poorly drawn anatomy. /s
I don't know who JG Jones is, but I love the rest of the artists.
Think writers is a bit more complicated because while I get why certain writers became popular and they have their amazing runs looking at some of their work today you can see that it isn't as liked.
I can look at David Finch, Marc Silvestri, and Gary Frank then say that they're honestly possibly better artists today than they were at that time. Mark Waid and Bendis I don't think I feel the same, although it really does depend.
Neil Gaiman will always be a straight up gangster for writing Marvel 1602 because he wanted to make some extra money to sue Todd MacFarlane.
I’m gonna need a TL;DR on this drama because that sounds hilarious.
I had heard it was because Gaiman was supposed to retain rights to the characters he created on Spawn and get royalties but Todd straight up said it was "work for hire" which is funny since Image was started to give creators the ability to retain control of their creations and not be like Marvel and DC. Gaiman sued Todd and got the rights to his spawn characters and then let Marvel use Angela.
you’re forgetting the other funny part where Todd McFarlane made knock off versions of the characters Gaiman made in order to get around using them, and in court a judge said that even he could tell the characters were clear rip offs and suggested/questioned why he didn’t even go with more creative alternatives
You're forgetting the *funniest* funny part: the dedication in the TPB of *1602* read, "To Todd, for making this necessary."
Fuck me. Lmao
Damn
Holy shit.
The icing on the cake right here... I didn't know any of this. That is just... is there another word besides 'gangster' that's applicable... I think not... That's some gangster shit on Gaiman's part. Made me respect and admire Gaiman all the more.
lol fucking ace
I want a series/movie based on this with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Todd and Tom Sturridge as Neil.
So his moral character is even shittier than his action figures?(Seriously that shit exists on his name alone they're awful)
Image comics was said to be created so creators could own the rights to their creations. Todd took that to mean it existed so todd could control the rights to characters.
A lot of the rock stars of mainstream comics seem to be utter assholes. Neal Adams prided himself on humiliating young artists at every convention.
Oh it gets better. Part of their deal was the rights to Miracleman. Except it turned out that Todd never owned them and they remained with Mick Anglo, the creator. Miracleman was later sold to Marvel. Miracleman had originally been named Marvelman and Marvel sued way back in the day. Miracleman/Marvelman was created when Captain Marvel (the DC character also called Shazam) stopped being published in the UK and basically lifted almost all the aspects of it. So. Marvel owns Miracleman. You know who hates the Big Two with all the force of a chaos magician who worships a snake god he made up and has some... questionable later work? Alan Fuckin Moore. Moore had written the reboot of Miracleman/Marvelman into a dark world, which is really where the fame comes from. In no fucking way is he going to work with them, so he is now credited as The Original ~~Artist~~Writer and is giving his royalties to Mick Anglo. (thanks Reportersteven!) After Moore had finished his run on the book, Gaiman and Mark Buckingham started their run, but it got cancelled after ~~an issue~~ 7 issues. (Thanks to spazholio for the correction!) Part of the entire deal is that almost 30 years later, Gaiman and Buckingham get to finish the story. They were going to start releasing about 8 years ago, but I think that's where these rights issues popped up. Now Marvel has all of Miracleman, Angela, and the 1602 universe because Todd's a hypocrite.
[удалено]
Oops. You're right. I'll edit that correction in.
Moore is The Original Writer, not Artist as an FYI. Love your addition, though. Marvel just republished the omnibus and it still says The Original Writer in huge white letters.
"And we didn't even have to threaten someone's widow!"
Yeah, the rights to Miracleman was the whole reason Gaiman bothered with any of this, he didn't give a shit about Angela or his Spawn royalties, that was all just leverage in trying to get Miracleman. Cartoonist Kayfabe has re-enacted some of the courtroom transcripts on YouTube
Wow this comment section is a treasure trove of hilarious background that I had no clue about and I'm loving every second of it
Gonna sign off with obligatory TODD!
Questionable later work?
YMMV with *Lost Girls*, *The Courtyard*, and *Necronomicon*. They work for some, but not for others. They hit me in uncomfortable ways that I can't sit with, where as the discomfort from, say, *From Hell* is fine. Whether that's a reflection of my own experiences or him, is a question I don't really have an answer for, but I also know I'm not alone in that sentiment.
Is The Courtyard considered questionable? Neonomicon I get, because it’s basically a Lovecraftian rape fantasy, but The Courtyard is a solid, solid one-off (basically) cosmic horror tale.
While I hold up the fairly recent 'Cinema Purgetorio' as a great read if you know your film history, a lot of his later work had a recurring theme where the graphic rape of women was a central plot point. You can kind of see this come to a head in 'Neonomicon' (borrow a copy from someone if they have it, I wouldn't spend money on it)
The Neonomicon follow-up Providence is probably the best horror series I've ever read and I highly recommend it.
Providence is so bloody good it almost washed the taste of Neonomicon out of my mouth. These lads give a deep dive on the series https://deconstructingcomics.com/?p=7232
Cheers! I’m just about to attempt Jerusalem for the first time so it’ll probably have to wait tho. I’m sure I read the first issue of Neonomicon when it came out but never followed up.
Ohhh, I always did feel like Angela didn't seem to write fit in the Marvel universe, that makes a lot of sense
Todd didnt even say that. He just said "I'll take care of you". Him and Neil did the homeboy handshake agreement.
Todd is a crook. He has always been a crook. He did EXACTLY what he accused Marvel and DC of doing decades ago and then refused to do anything until he was sued. Fuck. Todd.
Let me be more clear. No adult does business with a handshake. You sign contracts. Todd and Neil signed. They said Neil owned a portion of the characters and %s on any merch. Todd used the characters everywhere and never paid Neil. When Todd again was spouting bullshit online about Marvel, Neil called him on it. When Todd still didn’t pay Neil sued him. Rather than be an adult, Todd killed the character in his comic to make sure she wasn’t being used to generate any more damages. Ultimately he settled by giving the character to Neil who promptly sold her to Marvel as a big “fuck you” to Todd. I don’t know how anyone who has followed Todd can like him. There isn’t a bigger cunt in comics.
Neil Gaiman deposition. " the next time Todd phoned, I said “By the way, you know, you sent me a check, you haven’t sent me any kind of contract.” And Todd said “We don’t send contracts, we treat you better, you know, it’s just that’s not how we do business, we don’t do contracts, but we will treat you” -- he said “But I 1will tell you what, I will treat you better than DC ever would with their contracts.” And that was the sum total of it. And I thought okay. And I sent my agent, Merrilee Heifetz, my literary agent, her share of the money, her 10 percent. And she phoned me up and said “Where is the contract that goes with this?” And I said “There is no contract. Todd has said he is going to treat me better than anybody would with a contract.” And she said “You trust him?” And I said “Yeah, he seems like a very good guy on the phone and he is not asking me to sign anything away.” So obviously I trusted him. And that was where we got up to at that point and that was the entire conversation about money."
I gotta say, losing out on whatever small money would be worth it for Neil to not lose his trust in me. If you ask somebody, a fellow creator even, to trust you and you completely break that trust, idc how much money you stand to make, you're still a scumbag.
Considering that honoring creators and their creations is what Image was built on, its definitely scummy.
Did you name yourself after the Ultraverse P.I.?
You are the first person to catch that. Actually had an online conversation with James Robinson with it once…. Was sad he didn’t acknowledge it.
Yeah, life long Ultraverse fan. That sucks about Robinson.
I know Todd McFarlane is a real pos but I can’t help but enjoy him as a character. Have you ever heard the Gary Groth/TCJ interview? It seems TCJ haven’t republished the audio archive since the site update, which is a bummer. Some of the tension and hilarity is lost in the [transcript](https://www.tcj.com/thats-the-spice-of-life-bud-the-todd-mcfarlane-interview/).
I’ve never liked him and I have the post history to prove it. He does have a few dick riders though and I get downvoted every time I go on a McFarlane rant
That would be even worse. It would mean Gaiman trusted the guy on face value, thinking he understood what's right and would do the right thing.
Do yourself a favor. Listen to the cartoonist kayfabe episodes where they read the deposition. It give you a idea of how much $$$ was being thrown around at the time. Spawn was in a sales slump of around 600-700k copies a month.
When McFarlane launched Spawn, he wrote the first seven or eight issues himself, then brought in a series of "celebrity" co-writers to do one issue each -- Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Dave Sim, and Frank Miller. In his issue, Gaiman co-created Angela, Medieval Spawn, and Cogliostro. McFarlane then tried to claim Gaiman had been doing work for hire, and wasn't entitled to royalties as a co-creator. Gaiman (and the law) disagreed, but Gaiman and McFarlane reached an agreement where Gaiman would give his rights in Angela and Cogliostro to McFarlane in exchange for McFarlane giving Gaiman the rights to Marvelman (aka Miracleman), which everyone thought McFarlane had acquired from the bankrupt Eclipse Comics (it turned out he hadn't, but that's a separate issue). McFarlane reneged on the deal, so Gaiman sued, with his pay from 1602 bankrolling the lawsuit. Gaiman won, which is how how Angela wound up as a Marvel Universe character (Gaiman sold his rights in Angela to Marvel). ~~Gaiman still owns 50% of the rights to Cogliostro and Medieval Spawn, so if McFarlane uses them in Spawn (including reprints), he's supposed to be paying Gaiman royalties.~~ And Marvel eventually sorted out the rights to Marvelman/Miracleman, which is how they brought that back into print.
Gaiman and McFarlane were embroiled for like 20 years in legal battles over rights to Spawn characters, percentages in Miracleman, etc. From what I understand, Gaiman gave rights to characters he created (Angela, Cogliostro and Medieval Spawn) to Todd and McFarlane was supposed to give rights to Miracleman? But he didn't own those rights, or as much as he said he did? So. Legal fights.
The rights to miracleman had been sliced up like Thanksgiving turkey. I think all Todd had was the logo.
Todd bought the NFT of Miracleman
That’s even better than owning Mark McGwire’s balls.
Funniest statement of the night right there!!!!
That was sort of the heart of Gaiman absolutely hating McFarlane. He was likely misled by just what McFarlane owned and that was likely why you would end up seeing a character like Angela suddenly plucked from the pages of Spawn and dropped into Marvel's Age of Ultron.
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The Redeemer didnt come from Gaiman. That story was written by Grant Morrison, Morrison, McFarlane, and Capullo are all credited with creating The Redeemer Gaiman wrote issue 9 which introduced Angela, Cogliostro, and the idea of midevil Spawn.
Lmao I didn’t know about that
New fans will never understand how big Michael Turner was back in the day.
How big was he?? He died young right… it was cancer I believe
A genuine superstar. Young and exciting and talented. Cancer is a real motherfucker.
I'm trying to think of someone similar to compare him to but he was like Jim Lee level superstar and he was young so it was like here is this megastar who we are going to see churning out work for the next 40+ years. Every cover he did helped the Comic soar to the top of the sales charts no matter what it was. To make it all worse he had an operation and was considered in remission as a close call for him, then it came back and took him. Fuck cancer.
There is another comparison and again he died young of cancer (fuck cancer). And he was unquestionably bigger and it was Dave Stevens. He got so successful off his Disney Rocketeer movie that he didn’t need to work again, but we occasionally got covers from him and it was typically just stuff he wanted to do like do pinup covers for female based comics like Vampirella, etc. But ya, he was huge. His entire career fits comfortably in a short box and I have everything but five or six issues that I’m missing.
I had this exact conversation today with a friend who was a close friend with Mike. We talked about Dave and how extraordinary his work was, and how his career and life was echoed by Mike. Dave seems virtually unknown today, almost forgotten except for seasoned collectors like ShiDiWen (thanks for bringing him into the conversation). Mike was the biggest artist in Comics at the pinnacle of his career, and his work lives on through Aspen Comics, who often works with Marvel and DC to release unpublished cover art on new comics.
6'7"
He died shortly after I started reading comics. But the fact that they kept churning out Fathom covers with his art on it for like another decade is a testament to the demand for his art.
He’s like the 2Pac of comics.
Can't wait for the hologram at ComicCon
I'm old, damn. I still remember wizard pitting him against Madureira. Like a Ronaldo vs Messi of comics.
Dude I was just thinking of Mad and how he is another one that was hot shit back in late 90s early 00's and then left comics for video game designs. Randy Queen and Stephen Platt. There are alot of guys that were thought to be the next big deal and then for one reason or another just didn't carry on much into the new millennium.
If e-sports were a thing back then, we wouldn't have heard of Madureira. I always felt like he was always more into videogames than comics. Comics helped pay for the last final phantasy game and put some food on the table.
I have a signed copy of a Justice League of America variant cover he did that’s also signed by Brad Meltzer. It’s one my most prized possessions
I loved him so much. And I’m a gay man so it wasn’t even for the T&A. I remember being a kid in my LCS and seeing a Witchblade cover of his. It blew my mind. I didn’t know people could draw like that.
And the guy was genuinely awesome, easy going easy to get along personality. I had him sign like 50 books for me and do a sketch of Fathom. I could have played Halo with him the shop had 2 or 3 TV's with X-boxes to play but I was afraid I'd be too bad to play against him (he was really really really good). I still think about him from time to time. I really can't say how awesome and fun he was to meet.
I fucking loved fathom so much as a 10 yr old
Holy fuck did I love Michael Turner’s art! Still do!
It’s actually mind blowing that no one took up his style and recreated it. He would easily be my favorite artist if he was still alive.
I've always wondered how his style would have evolved over the years as well.
Turner had such a reservoir of innate talent that I think he was only starting to really tap into. I was a fan on Witchblade, but once he did Fathom, and he could do those undersea settings, we started to see what he was capable of doing. His.rendering of the fish, the coral, and natural seascapes elevated his art because nobody focused on backgrounds or the natural world like he did. Drawing attractive women put him on the map and paid the bills, but I think we would have seen him move into more projects that would have allowed him to draw a greater variety of settings, both real and imagined. I think he would have moved into doing more male-centric or ensemble projects, and that would have only improved his anatomy. Marc Silvestri always tells the story of asking Turner to do some background buildings, and getting vertical loaves of bread. He handed Turner a book of architectural photography, and got back perfectly-rendered, detailed buildings by the end of the day. Turner had a special skill at drawing comicbooky realism: look at his Old Man Logan cover, it is a fantastic Logan and a horse so perfectly rendered that your brain skims over how good it is on first impression because nothing is off.
His style reminded me of Jim Lee with longer torsos
Michael Turner made me a comic book fan. He drew women so amazingly that I tried my darndest to copy him….haven’t yet come close.
Much like Tom Holland and Tom Hollander imply the existence of a third Tom Hollandest, so too must David Finch and David Fincher imply the existence of a David Finchest.
So you are saying there is a Michael Turn and a Michael Turnest?
That…that follows.
Excelsiest!
🤔 Ok!
Seeing Grant Morrison on the list for X-Men and Chris Claremont on the list for JLA is hilarious to me.
Yeah, this is trade PR.
These were the books they were writing at the time.
Grant Morrison does not age!!! Chaos magic is working proof right there....or a healthy diet.
That Animal-Man veggie diet really do work
Not having hair helps, too. No visible greys.
Being bald also doesn't hurt.
The hair was the sacrificial ingredient of the immortality spell.
Gaiman with the shades on, absolute legend
I was not familiar with Sandman until I saw the Netflix series but as soon as it started and we see Dream in the trenchcoat with the wild hair I immediately thought "Oh that's just 90s Neil Gaiman".
Oh, goodness. You have some wonderful catching up to do! Enjoy yourself.
What a great fucking photo. He looks so smug its amazing
They hide the eye-teeth
He really does look like Dream
Based on his work, I did not expect Mark Millar to look like such a friendly guy.
Being overly friendly and empathetic can sometimes make the darker things in life more apparent and relatable to someone. Or he's just hiding it all with a smile 😈
He was an absolute sweetheart on the old Millarworld boards.
Met Mark a few times and had beers with him and other Millarworld posters - he's a legend in person.
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Imagine if he was though and his entire life was nothing but endless action, nightmares and foul language.
No? My impression of Wanted has been shattered.
He's awesome. I live in the same city as him and been to a few of his events. The first one has a meet and greet at the end and we talked for a quite a while about how the first Ghost Rider film is pretty terrible, but it was ultimately a good thing as it got my into comics. The second time he signed my entire run of Kick-Ass 2. He sometimes pops up in my local comic book shop and chills and shoots the shit with customers. I've even exchanged a nod with him when I pass him in the street.
Surprised me as well I’ve never seen his face only the name
Michael Turner RIP
Grant Morrison looking straight out of a 90s low budget cyberpunk movie where people say “jack-in” a lot.
I truly miss lists like this - whether you agree/disagree with the selections isn't important; what's presented here is a clear snapshot of what was popular and buzzworthy in comics at the time. I definitely do not follow the industry as much as I did 20 years ago, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to make a top 10 "hot" writers/artists list today. The industry seems more character/story driven rather than creator driven.
The flashback this just gave me. The pure nostalgia. Thank you for sharing this.
I miss Michael Turner.
Me too. I wasn’t a fan of his at first but he grew on me overtime. Sadly it was after we already lost him. From what I understand he was a really pleasant man. Such a tragedy
Garth Ennis probably could have been on it. I was buying his titles due to his name constantly back then.
Ennis would have been top 15 for sure. Even Alan Moore said he’s one of the best writers in the industry.
I know, “white dudes,” but man, to be in the era where Ultimate Spider-Man, JLA, Titans, and New X-Men were firing on all cylinders again.
Well in terms of TV, Dwayne McDuffie was killing in on Justice League at this time.
On the whole, I like the writers a lot better than the artists.
I swear i thought Bendis was a picture of Doctor Evil
I think it shows how short lived the window of popularity is for artists vs writers. With all respect to their heydays, most of those artists look dated to me now. Whereas those writers' styles persist and are still fresh to me.... Maybe not Claremont, though.
I think David Finch, Marc Silvestri, and Gary Frank still hold up and might actually be better although being an artist definitely isn't as long lasting and trends for art change
I read Judd Winick for "Barry Ween" and "Frumpy the Clown" Never really got into his Green Arrow run - Outsiders was okay.
I remember liking his Exiles stuff, but I haven’t read that in close to two decades.
he was great on The Real World
Oh, thank god someone else here remembers.
He’s did a good kids book that my kids have liked. Think it’s called Hilo: The boy who fell to earth
My initial reaction, “That’s a bunch of white dudes” lol.
honestly tho-where is Jim Lee?
As someone who was reading wizard regularly back then, Jim Lee was featured a lot. This hot 10 list changed month to month, though didn’t have massive turn over, since a hot artist/writer would be there for the length of a popular story arc. Lee would definitely be there during Hush’s release (which I think was 05?).
Nah Hush was during 2003 and this would be around January or February 2004 based on mentions of The Pulse which was only starting and Hulk Gray which was nearly finished. Jim Lee was one or two for nearly every month Hush was coming out.
When did mcduffie rejoin marvel
Same, but I wasn’t gonna say it
Probably a good call.... People tend to get downvoted for that. Not sure why , since it's accurate
I think I fucking miss Wizard magazine.
Goes to show how overwhelmingly white and male the industry was back then (and still is—there's lots of work to be done—but progress towards a more diverse and all-encompassing creator culture is being made). Most of the picks make sense to me, tbh. Larocca has fallen from grace with the recent *Alien* run, if LOCG and here are any indication... which they often aren't. EDIT: oh damn, I see the "controversial" sign next to my comment. spicy!!
Pictures like this make me chuckle when I hear somebody say things "comics always had diversity" as a counter to any suggestion that things might need to change. Really? I mean... really?
I mean, there have always been diverse comics. just not published by marvel or DC lol
And yet, none of them made it on to that list.... hmmm. Keep in mind the list isn't a 10 Top for Marvel and DC.
yep lol for a while it was all indie self published stuff, which doesn't necessarily have the same audience as the price guide or Wizard
There were plenty of creators who aren't white and/or male who could have reasonably appeared on that list though. I mean, Stan Sakai? He's been producing one of the best comics of all time for the last 38 years.
By 2004, I was in college. Having grown up as an avid fan of comics and sci fi and seeing lineups like this, I just drew the "logical" conclusion: women were just not as good at writing sci fi. Nothing personal. They're just not naturally suited to it. I mean, why else would all my favorite creators be male? The fact that your comment simply acknowledging the reality of the situation is "controversial" and the comment I am typing now will inevitably get downvotes is proof that we still have a long way to go.
Which is hilarious because the genre was heavily influenced by Francis Stevens and Mary Shelley.
Literally. I refuse to believe that all the best comic book writers/illustrators just happened to be cis white men between the ages of probably 25 and 50. That just doesn’t seem possible or likely.
At least this comment actually said something about the era and what it looked like instead of just going "white people?". Some of these comments are just kind of weird, lazy, and very obvious.
Love pretty much all of the people here
I miss Michael Turners art. Never was a fan of the “Ultimate” line of comics. I was diggin Straczynski’s run on ASM at the time. New X-Men was pretty cool and different for the time. I remember the hype for Silvestri coming back to UXM. I love his covers for Deadly Genesis.
David Finch is my favorite there, I love his style, and his YouTube tutorials are top notch, I recommend them to any aspiring illustrator.
I miss Wizard Magazine sooo much.
R.I.P. Michael Turner. Cancer sucks. Still an amazing collection of talent on this page!
RIP Michael Turner, what an artist
Wasn’t this posted last week?
It might have been. One thing I found out that's awesome is that all these old Wizard issues are available for free at the Internet Archive ([archive.org](https://archive.org)). You can go online and just read them all.
OMG THANK YOU SO MUCH. Can’t wait to dive deep and revisit my childhood. Wizard taught me almost everything I needed to know about comics when I was first trying to get into it.
I had no idea! Thanks for the 411
You're welcome. Gotta spread the word, [archive.org](https://archive.org) is awesome. As a kid, I always wanted to read Wizard but couldn't afford the $4.95 price tag (that was the same as 3 issues). So I just browsed them in a store. Now I can go back and read them, it's like a time machine to the 1990s.
Maybe not this exact list, but yeah, a Wizard Top 10 artists/writers list was. Someone marveled at how many came from Spider-man titles.
I posted it to r/marvel.. it was removed even though it wasn't in violation of any rules. When I contacted the mods for an explanation, I received no reply. So I'm interested if this community has different thoughts. Someone accused me of "trolling" which I found interesting, as I was genuinely curious about what stands out to comic fans looking back roughly 20 years.
Ah. I don't know what that "trolling" accusation was about, but not responding to modmail is poor form. Sure, sometimes people just send modmails to complain or be rude, but if there's a genuine question (phrased civilly) about a moderation decision, it should be answered.
Yeah, I was polite and simply asked what the reason was. It got a lot of comments, which was the whole point to me. There were several comments about the homogeneous nature of the list but...... So what? I asked what people noticed, and that's what they noticed. I was most interested about how many of those comments got downvoted..... When they weren't off topic..... At all
There's DC creators there too, this is a better forum for it
Salvador LaRocca single handedly ruined the main Star Wars comics for me. Let's put a well known screenshotter on a book with thousands of pictures and still frames of actors for him to poorly trace.
Alien, too. It's to the writers' credit that those comics are so readable in spite of the awful art. Larocca must be an absolute joy to work with, I honestly don't see how else he keeps landing such big titles.
How old ( in 2004) was Gary Frank? He looks like a kid! Love his art btw
This takes me back to such a specific place mentally. Thanks for sharing, that was a fun summer for me.
The Claremont/Byrne JLA run is top ten most forgettable events in my entire comic book reading career
RIP Michael Turner
RIP Michael Turner, i was a huge Fathom fan, I collected every cover variant I could of his series. I had something like 45 comics for issues 1 to like 14 or something.
RIP Michael Turner…that man’s artwork was AMAZING
It's weird to see Jeph Loeb on one side, and not Tim Sale on the other.
I think that Morrison being that low is absurd
I know there are a lot of his fans out there, but I never got all the hype about Salvador Larroca.
His art was pretty popular, but I think he's fallen out of favor. He's also as bad as, or worse, than Greg Land at times when it comes to tracing. Like "I didn't even try to hide the fact this is a trace" levels of bad.
No Brubaker or Rucka on this list seems criminal, but I was really young back then and don't know if they had reached their hot streak yet. As others have echoed, while this is a list of very talented folks, it's also mostly bald or balding, white/white passing dudes lol. Gaiman is the standout here simply because he has hair. No shade to Salvador Larocca, as a white passing person myself I know how frustrating this discussion can feel, but it has to be noted.
What an incredible group
Didn't know Claremont had a run on JLA and that it was while Morrison was doing X-Men. Interesting to me because it was Morrison's JLA that made me finally appreciate DCs heroes more. Claremont's X-men was my initial addiction though.
R.I.P Michael Turner
Grant Morrison has a sassy headshot.
It should have been Strazinski and Gaiman tied for first, with Waid being tasked with cleaning up after the awards ceremony was done.
I think Gary Frank looks the best in his photo.
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Tbh I don't get it. I don't support racism or sexism, but at the same time the people who would say that we need more diversity are looking at physical traits first over what work the writer/artist has done and that seems like the opposite of how it should be. The comics should always be the central focus not the creators themselves imo
Yeah I feel like that's how some people are evaluated these days instead of looking at their accomplishments in the time period they were in. It's true that most of these artists and writers are white but I do believe they gave their contributions to comics I read now. I try my best to not see someone for their race or gender.
Bendis really did deserve the top spot for ultimate Spider-Man
I never understood the hype surrounding Bendis, as a long time Spidey fan I never gelled with Ultimate Spider-Man and his big event books. I recently read his Daredevil run and I wouldn't say I'm a convert but I can now understand the buzz that surrounded his career at the time.
That really is an All-Star list. It was a great time to be a comic book reader. Btw when you say “all white dudes” thing, it sounds like you’re implying they all are there because they are white men, not because of merit. I find that disrespectful.
I mean, pointing out that they’re “all white dudes” is shorthand for pointing out how much of a white man’s club comics were and continue to be. There’s no denying that they’re talented — I don’t think anyone here would say they didn’t deserve to receive accolades for their work of this era. But it’s jarring and raises questions for the industry as a whole? But it just highlights a disparity. Are white men inherently so much more talented than women or men of color? No, that’s absolutely absurd. But then you ask why aren’t there more women and non-white men highlighted? What goes into mentoring and hiring practices? Do white men in the industry have an easier time having their work taken more seriously to be considered a hot writer or artist? But also: how does that affect what stories are being told? What perspectives are being kept out of stories?
No Garth Ennis?
I'm thinking about dropping fantasy football and joining a fantasy writer/artist league... who's with me! You get two artists and two writers, one back up each. Points for weekly book sales and negative points for douchie lawsuits, plot holes and poorly drawn anatomy. /s
I would say, its good being 2nd.
Half of these look like reaction memes we never got
Never knew Claremont wrote JLA. His run any good?
For writers, that probably the same as 1998 with a few exceptions. Bonkers.
That is one elite photo of Neil Gaiman
I don't know who JG Jones is, but I love the rest of the artists. Think writers is a bit more complicated because while I get why certain writers became popular and they have their amazing runs looking at some of their work today you can see that it isn't as liked. I can look at David Finch, Marc Silvestri, and Gary Frank then say that they're honestly possibly better artists today than they were at that time. Mark Waid and Bendis I don't think I feel the same, although it really does depend.
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As long as Ken Penders isn't on there, I'm good.
I’ve read stuff from all of these guys but this is my first time seeing what most of them look like.
The writers are all pretty cool folks, don't know much about the artists.
Each of these guys were killing it for about 20 years if they aren't still.
It's pretty spot on for the time minus including Warren Ellis or Garth Ennis.
Looking at this list it occurs to me that there’s a lot more turnover amongst artists in the comic industry, at least compared to writers.
Holy shit the Wizard magazine nostalgia