Gaiman v. McFarlane 2010: Scantily Clad Angels

[This is part of my running report on the 2010 hearing in the Neil Gaiman v. Todd McFarlane case. To see coverage from the beginning, click here.]

Part Fourteen Todd McFarlane's attorney Alex Grimsley asked whether Neil Gaiman had collaborated with other writers on a series. Gaiman said, "I did a book called The Children's Crusade which I ... wrote sort of book-ends and worked with a number of writers: Jamie DeLillo, Alisa Kwitney, Rachel Pollack, Nancy Collins, and many others. ... And ... my most recent comics work was a two-parter last year where I got to kill Batman." It was Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? - drawn by Andy Kubert. He described it as "the last Batman issue of Detective Comics and Batman Comics, and on that level you're kind of collaborating with 70 years of people who have written Batman and the people who are writing it now." However, Grimsley's next questions, which started with asking whether Pollack could have created an angel without being derivative of Angela, were objected to as calling for a legal conclusion, and the objections were sustained.

Grimsley turned to Spawn Bible and the page devoted to Tiffany: "Tiffany has ... on her right leg ... what appears to be like a little ammunition belt?" Gaiman responded, "I thought it was chocolates, but it could be ammunition. It could be anything." Grimsley asked, "Did you ever write anything or have any drawings where the angel used a gun?" "No." Grimsley showed another picture of Tiffany in which she was holding a gun. Gaiman said, "I don't believe somebody becomes less derivative of another character if they pick up a gun. Batman is still Batman if he's holding a gun." Grimsley went on, "And Tiffany has some sort of wing on her back. It looks like blades, correct?" "Yes." "She doesn't have the headpiece that Angela wore?" "No." "Both of these characters ... are, I guess to put it mildly, scantily clad?" "Yes." "Is it common in modern comic books to portray women scantily clad?" "Not the ones that I write." "OK, but putting aside the hadful that you write, is it fairly common?" "No." "No?" Gaiman said, "I was the editor this year of Year's Best American Comics and I read an awful lot of comics and most of them had fully clad women. I will accept there may be some comics out there with scantily clad women, but, no, I don't believe it's the norm." Grimsley said, "Well, when we're using the adjective 'scantily clad,' do you consider Wonder Woman to be fully clothed or scantily clad?" Gaiman said, "I haven't read a Wonder Woman comic in 10 years. I have no idea what she's wearing currently. Throughout her history, it has moved backwards and forwards. At one point in the '60s and '70s, she was in a trouser suit. The costumes vary."

Grimsley referred to a copy of Previews and asked Gaiman to describe the purpose of Previews, which he did. Then Grimsley displayed a page and asked whether Gaiman would describe them as scantily clad or fully clad. [I've tried to locate this specific copy of Previews without success. I believe the first image was of the Image title C.H.I.X., which was dated January 1998. In fact, as far as I could determine, most of the pages he chose in these samplings were from the Image listings of such series as Savage Dragon, and at least one was a special "swimsuit issue."] "Of the ones on here," Gaiman said, "one of them appears to be wearing fishnet bondage gear. One of them looks like Power Girl, who is a Superman knockoff in a cape. And one of them is a weird manga thing. I'm not even sure if she's - what she's - wearing. Are they fully dressed? No, they're wearing spandex." After a further sampling, Gaiman said, "I can absolutely, utterly, with my hand on my heart, testify that the ladies in those pictures in those ads that you showed me weren't wearing very much - nor were the men. Beyond that, I think generalizing the comics is deeply problematic."

Grimsley returned to differences between Angela and Tiffany and discussed differences between hair styles and that the headdress of Domina isn't the same as that of Angela. Gaiman said, "There are lots of different headdresses."

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Gaiman v. McFarlane 2010: Stock Characteristics

 [This is part of my running report on the 2010 hearing in the Neil Gaiman v. Todd McFarlane case. To see coverage from the beginning, click here.]

Part Thirteen Todd McFarlane's attorney Alex Grimsley said, "You admitted that Medieval Spawn is derived from the character Spawn?" Neil Gaiman responded, "I don't admit it. I avow it. It's a derivative character. ... That's the point." Grimsley spoke of Medieval Spawn toys and comic-book images as having spikes, an "M" on the chest, green eyes, and the Spawn logo on the shield. He asked Gaiman whether there were aspects of Medieval Spawn that Gaiman had drawn on from other works. "Things that I drew on to create the Medieval Spawn would include Barbara Tuchman's book A Distant Mirror; many visits as an English child to museums, to Hever Castle [Anne Boleyn's childhood home, parts dating from 1270, others dating to the 1500s], which, although it's actually very, very late medieval, early Renaissance, has lots of great armor and things like that; going to the Tower of London; reading Thomas Malory [author of Le Morte d'Arthur]; and so on and so forth." "You have a general understanding of what a knight in armor should be and what he should do, correct, from your background in life?" "From reasonably extensive reading, and, yes, being a human being on this planet." "For instance, a knight in armor will typically ride a horse because that was the means of transportation 800 years ago, right?" "The horse and also the cart were definitely means of transportation 800 years ago." "Right. The cart being pulled by a horse or donkey or oxen or some other beast?" "Goat." "I mean so some of that is just based on the time period?" "Sure. He's not in a car."

Grimsley tried to introduce a connection between Gaiman's Timothy Hunter character in Books of Magic (December 1990-March 1991) and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter character (1997-2007), but objections on grounds of relevance were sustained. Grimsley continued, "In creating characters there are certain stock characteristics that you might apply to the endeavor, depending on the nature of the character. ... Let's take a knight in armor. You might have armor, right?" Gaiman replied, "If he's a knight in armor, he would definitely have armor. If he didn't have armor, he would be a knight not in armor." Grimsley asked, "If you were creating a mobster, he might have an Italian or Sicilian accent?" "Probably not. ... I don't think I've ever created any Sicilian or Italian mobsters. I've written a lot of criminals." Grimsley said, "I'm trying to take a hypothetical. Let's say you were creating a character as a judge. They might wear a black robe." Gaiman responded, "Well, if they were in an American courtroom, of course, they wear a black robe. But that's not a stock character. That's part of what they wear." Grimsley said, "Well, I know judges who wear other colors, but you might -" Gaiman said, "I don't. I only remember Judge Shabaz. [See my postings from June 27.] They are very different. I can't see that I could create a stock judge from Judge Shabaz and Judge Crabb." Judge Crabb responded, "Thank you. Appreciate my individuality."

Returning to the question of whether there were any stock characteristics of a knight in armor, Gaiman answered, "No, because you'd have - It depends who's in the armor, what they're doing. ... I mean, I could sit here and come up with a dozen different kinds of knight-in-armor characteristics. ... You know, even in the Arthurian legends, there are hundreds of knights at the round table and they're all very different. You can't point to Gawain and say he's like Galahad or Lancelot going mad. They're very different people. You have an impulse for good for most of them, but, then, you have knights in armor who were evil or bad or whose motives are mixed up and conflicted."

Grimsley went on to focus on details of the life of Medieval Spawn, bringing up story elements that had not been part of Gaiman's original script for Spawn #9. "I always hoped," Gaiman said, "that they'd come up with something good after I left, that Todd would go in and make up a good backstory for him. ... I mean, if you're writing a comic, you create characters. You don't always create their entire life story. Bruce Wayne as Batman wasn't all there in Detective Comics #27. It comes in a bit at a time, but it's still the Batman created [in Detective #27]."

Grimsley asked whether Gaiman had written Medieval Spawn's dialogue. "Oh, yes." "So you wrote the way he speaks." "Yes." "And he speaks in a fairly stilted, maybe old-fashioned manner?" "He speaks in a sort of slightly old-fashioned manner, yes." [For a look at all of Medieval Spawn's dialogue, see my posting of Part Twelve from July 3.] "His speech is consistent in that manner through all of his appearances [in that comic]?" "Yes. He doesn't suddenly start talking like a Todd or something." "Or you." "Or me."

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Gaiman v. McFarlane 2010: Medieval Spawn's Backstory

Part Twelve [This is part of my running report on the 2010 hearing in the Neil Gaiman v. Todd McFarlane case. To see coverage from the beginning, click here.] Discussing the backstory of Medieval Spawn, Neil Gaiman said, "There isn't a lot of opportunity on those eight pages [in which the character appeared in Spawn #9] for conversation. In my backstory in my head, I think he'd been probably around fighting for ... five or 10 years, but nobody had actually turned around at that point and said, 'This is actually what's going on. You are going to be in Hell's army, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.' but he had ... still been going around doing a certain amount of good wherever he could and being noble, even though he was a Spawn. I seem to remember some line about how when Spawns were young they could still ... fight for good, and ... in the case of young and fighting for good, I take it that Spawn is still fighting for good 18 years after the comic started. So the print gives you 18 years at least."

Looking at Spawn #9, it may be instructive to look at the total dialogue of Medieval Spawn talking to Angela, written by Gaiman. The speeches were as follows: "Good day, sweet maiden. You are hurt." "Where is this ogre?" "You would not wish to see my face, sweet maiden. Your sister, you say ...? I also had a sister, beautiful and wise, whom I swore I would see married before I died." "I ... went away, for many years. When I returned, my sister was indeed married ... not to the man I would have chosen, alas. If we knew the future, well, what then?" "I no longer have a name." "I also am most strong and fearsome. You shall wait here." "Very well." "No wizard, fair one. Once I was a man ... a bad man ... Now ... I know not what I am. This cave ... How much further must we go?" "What magic is this?" "What ... What manner of creature are you?" and "I don't understand ..." That's the printed material under discussion at this point in the hearing.

Gaiman said, "He's just met her. She's going, 'Ah, I'm a damsel in distress. Something bad is happening there. What are you?' And he said, 'Well, I was a bad man; now, I could be anything.'"

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Gaiman v. McFarlane 2010: A Traveling Minstrel Spawn?

Part Eleven [This is part of my running report on the 2010 hearing in the Neil Gaiman v. Todd McFarlane case. To see coverage from the beginning, click here.] Todd McFarlane attorney Alex Grimsley showed Neil Gaiman the final page of Spawn #8, written by Alan Moore. "See there at the feet of the devil creature? Can you make out what is gathered at his feet?" Gaiman answered, "Lots of Spawn costumes, probably with people in them." "So a mass of other Hellspawn?" "No, not necessarily," Gaiman said, "These are creatures in Hell. You get one Hellspawn ... every 400 years. These were lots and lots of neural parasites wearing people ... or, at least, that was the way that Alan and I talked it through at the time. ... They're not Spawn. Every 400 years, one of these guys gets tested to be officer material, and the army: Those are the grunts in the army. It's the difference between a general and the troops." Grimsley asked, "So the idea that there was an army of individuals in Hell wearing the neural parasitic suit (or having a neural parasitic suit wear them, if you will) preexisted issue #9?" There ensued a discussion of the timing of comic-book creation in a series, in which Gaiman commented that publication in sequence doesn't necessarily mean creation in sequence. "It's not like Alan writes this issue and then Todd draws it and then I write issue #9 and then Todd draws it."

Grimsley turned to the matter of influences in writing stories. "Sometimes your stories might bear similarities to another story?" "It happens over and over," Gaiman said, "They say there are three different stories you can tell." Grimsley specified Gaiman's fantasy novel American Gods (published in 2001). "You've been asked in the past ... if American Gods was inspired by Eight Days of Luke by Diana Wynne Jones." Eight Days of Luke had been published in 1975. Gaiman responded, "Yes. The answer was no. ... What I actually said was that I came up with a way of telling the story which was going to be naming days of the week after the gods that they are named after and, when I came up with that, I realized that Diana had done something ... similar in Eight Days of Luke. But the plot of American Gods and the plot of Eight Days of Luke bear no relationship to each other, nor do the characters." Grimsley asked whether characters created out of whole cloth could bear "superficial similarities to characters someone else creates." Gaiman replied, "That's always true."

Grimsley posed an example: "If you were to create a caveman character ... you might give him a club as a weapon, right?" Gaiman said, "It's a strange hypothetical. I've never written a caveman that I can think of and I don't think I'd give him a club because it's kind of stupid. I'd probably give him a stone ax, because that's what they used." Grimsely continued, "If someone else used a stone ax for a caveman doesn't mean they derived it from your caveman, right?" Gaiman said, "I would assume not." Grimsley moved on to Medieval Spawn, "You created ... the idea of a knight-in-armor Spawn, right?" Gaiman said, "No. I created the character." Gaiman agreed with Grimsley's identifying Spawn as an "action series," and Grimsley asked, "So Medieval Spawn was going to be a fighting character probably, right?" "I guess." "Not a traveling minstrel, right?"

Gaiman responded, "It could have been a traveling minstrel. That would have been fun to write, too." He added that he'd only had eight pages and didn't think Todd would have wanted to do a minstrel toy, "but we could have gone there." He elaborated, "When you're starting any kind of writing process, you have an infinite number of ways to go. I could not pretend, 17 years later at this point, to reconstruct my thought processes on how I decided it was going to be a knight in armor and why it would have been 800 years ago. ... In a comic called 1602 which I did for Marvel Comics [#1, November 2003 - #8, June 2004] ... I reinvented all of the Marvel characters and set them in the early 17th century, in 1602, and created Daredevil. Marvel's big fighting super-hero was actually a minstrel in it, and I invented him as a blind traveling minstrel. If you're a good writer, you crate characters that live on, that exist, and you don't say, 'Ah, because this is fighting, you can only be this one thing.' That's nonsense."

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Gaiman v. McFarlane 2010: Spawn Bible and Spawn #8

Part Ten [This is part of my running report on the 2010 hearing in the Neil Gaiman v. Todd McFarlane case. To see coverage from the beginning, click here.] After a 15-minute recess, the hearing continued with Todd McFarlane's attorney Alex Grimsley beginning his cross-examination of Neil Gaiman. Grimsley referred to Spawn Bible (August 1996), whose credits were that the art was pencilled by Greg Capullo and inked by Danny Miki and Kevin Conrad and the entries were written by McFarlane, Beau Smith, Tom Orzechowski, and Andrew Grossberg. He asked Gaiman whether the page devoted to Angela summarized her "drives and personality." Gaiman responded, "The text is an adequate and fairly literate description by somebody else of the plot of Angela - of Spawn #9, and of Angelas #1 to #3. I don't know that I would agree with everything. I didn't write this." Asked whether there were parts with which he disagreed, Gaiman said, "The line 'Angela comes from Elysium, the first level of the Seven Heavens, closest to God' is not, for example, anything that I - You know, I just created Elysium. If Todd wants seven levels, he can add another six. That's fine." Asked whether he claimed co-creation of the idea of seven levels, Gaiman answered, "No. Alan Moore came up with the idea that there was seven levels of Hell in Spawn #8, and ... that was Alan's idea, and I imagine that is a reflection of the same thing done in angel terms." [In Spawn #8, a demon says his home is "the eighth sphere, some call it the Malebolge."] In any case, Gaiman agreed that the Spawn Bible description - though, "I would probably quibble with words all the way through it, but that's because I didn't write it" - was "a perfectly adequate description by somebody of the character in Spawn #9 and Angelas #1 to #3."


The questioning turned to "Medieval Spawn." "Medieval Spawn is another character you co-created?" "Yeah. I call him 'Olden Days Spawn,' I think, in this script, but Todd started calling him 'Medieval Spawn.'" "In the script, you actually think you named him something?" "He was Spawn. He was the Spawn of 800 years ago." Again, Grimsley referred to Spawn Bible, asking whether the "Medieval Spawn" entry was a fair description of the character Gaiman co-created. "It's an invented backstory, I guess," Gaiman said. "It could be - I didn't make any of that up, so that's not my - ... The story that I made up is the stuff right at the end and the stuff about the sister, which doesn't seem to be in there." The portion of description that he said was what he had created was, "... he was destroyed by Angela, without ever fully comprehending what he was." Gaiman said his creation had included providing thumbnails and drawings of the characters but he hadn't drawn any of the published images of the characters. "I described [Angela] in the script, but my co-creator had already had already given her a look." Regarding the Spawn of the Middle Ages, he said his script, "would have said ... it would be a medieval version of the Spawn costume or an armored version of the Spawn costume. I would have included the big Spawn shield, because that was on the cover."

The questioning turned to the issue that preceded Gaiman's: Spawn #8, drawn by McFarlane and written by Alan Moore. And, I discover with some shock, a fact I'd forgotten. It's "Dedicated To: Don & Maggie Thompson." My goodness! I remember now that we'd been touched and delighted at the time. But ... pause for a moment to grin. Then back to the hearing. Sorry for this self-indulgent interlude. Ahem. The story is titled "In Heaven (Everything Is Fine)." Gaiman said, "It's actually set in Hell. That's an ironic title." Grimsley noted the reference to an evolving neural parasite. Gaiman said, "Todd had asked Alan, and he mentioned to me, that he kept drawing the Spawn costume differently because he couldn't ever remember how many chains and spikes there were to be. So he was now getting letters from kids saying that the costume kept changing and could we come up with a rationale for why the costume was changing. So Alan came up with the idea, and I think we were talking about it, that ... the costume was a neural parasite and the costume was alive and it would keep the Spawn costume evolved and changed and responded and it wasn't actually a frozen thing."

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Gaiman v. McFarlane 2010: Medieval and Dark Ages Spawns

Part Nine [This is part of my running report on the 2010 hearing in the Neil Gaiman v. Todd McFarlane case. To see coverage from the beginning, click here.] Asked for his understanding of how often Hellspawn were to appear on Earth, Neil Gaiman responded, "Initially, when I first talked to Todd, he said every hundred years or so. And then, by the time I came to do the Angela mini-series, it had been sort of formalized as every 400 years ... I mean it was part of the Spawn mythos that it was 400 years. You got a Spawn every 400 years." Why? "Because it kept them special." Arntsen asked whether more than one Spawn would be active at a time. Gaiman said, "We sort of played with the idea. I suggested it to him - but I don't know if he ever used it - that the Cogliostro character I created was a very, very old Spawn who had never quite let his powers run out and had been around ... for thousands of years. But, no, you don't get two Spawns at the same time; you get one and then you get another one 400 years later. I believe there's a futuristic Spawn comic - or there used to be - set 400 years from now, for example."

Arntsen read from Spawn #32: "They occur but once each four hundred years, and their infrequence are relegated to fable and legend." Gaiman agreed, "You ... get one every 400 years." Arntsen read from a screen shot from the Spawn website: "Spawn: The Dark Ages introduces Lord Covenant, a 12th century knight killed in a holy crusade far from his homeland, who returns to Earth as a Hellspawn. As a plague of violence and turmoil cover the English countryside, the Dark Knight must choose whether to align himself with the innocent inhabitants of the once-thriving kingdom or with the malevolent forces of evil and corruption." He asked how that character related to the character Gaiman had created in Spawn #9. "I would have assumed it was the same character." "And why is that?" "Because it's the one 1,200 years ago who's the knight in armor fighting the English countryside in medieval times. It's not like there were two of them."

Asked to compare the character shown on the cover of Spawn: The Dark Ages #1 (March 1999) to the character he'd created for Spawn #9, Gaiman said, "It looks like the same kind of thing. It's a knight in armory Spawn, Spawn costume, big armory bits." He went on to confirm that in the 1999 issue, the character wore a cloak and rode a horse. Discussing differences in a view of the "Dark Ages" character in Spawn: The Dark Ages #2, he said, "You've got longer hair right now and a different kind of mask with sort of faintly dragonish kind of shape, rather than just a knight-in-armor shape." Would that be consistent with the Spawn #9 character? "Sure. I mean we get to see the character I created in Spawn #9 in the five minutes before he gets killed. I assume he's worn different things. He could well have had a haircut." Other variations on the Medieval Spawn" and the "Dark Ages" Spawn were shown, including one in which "Dark Ages Spawn" received an ax. "I would expect him to use all sorts of medieval weapons. That's the fun of having a character in that period: You get axes, you get maces, you get whatever kind of weapons could have been used at that time. In Angela #3, I have Angela fighting her way through Hell with a stolen ax. ... It's the kind of thing you do: You give them weapons."

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Gaiman v. McFarlane 2010: Similar Angels

Part Eight [This is part of my running report on the 2010 hearing in the Neil Gaiman v. Todd McFarlane case. To see coverage from the beginning, click here.] Arntsen turned to a comparison of the angels Gaiman had co-created with the angels involved in the Spawn storyline in #97 (July 2000) through #100 (November 2000). He quoted dialogue from a page in #99 (September 2000), which read, "By Elysium! The heavenly hosts!" and asked Gaiman, "What is that a reference to?" Gaiman responded, "Elysium was the place that they lived, and the heavenly hosts were the 333,000 kick-ass lady warrior angels." Asked, "Were those elements that you created?" Gaiman replied, "Yes." Going on to #100 and displaying one of the last pages, Arntsen asked, "Can you recognize what's being shown there?" "Spawn holding Angela's dead body while all of the other heavenly hosts of kick-ass lady warrior angels who look a bit like her stand around in the air." Arntsen then referred to images of other angels and asked Gaiman to describe similarities between Angela and Domina. "They are dressed incredibly similarly and they have the same facial stuff, very similar hair. Slightly different headpieces. I don't know, I would have assumed that this was one of the variant Angelas. ... Todd did a lot of Angelas in different costumes ... and changed the way she looked as a toy. I would have thought it was one of those." Gaiman was asked to describe another Domina picture that was in evidence, and he answered, "Same loincloth, things wrapped around the leg, weaponry, slightly different upper-body straps, but very similar costume."

Arntsen showed an image of Tiffany from Spawn Bible (August 1996). [It's shown here along with the entry for Angela in the same comic book.] Gaiman said, "That's a page of Tiffany, who's another one of the warrior angels: sharp shoulder points and blonder and sort of hair that goes up and explodes, rather than goes down, but there's sort of long hair around the back. Same knee things, same loincloth and thong and big belt and heavy shoulderpiece. And also the weaponry." Asked to compare that drawing of Tiffany to the drawing of Angela for Spawn #9, Gaiman said, "Similar pose, very similar character. Again, the hair color is very different, and Angela has sort of the Viking wings as a headpiece, which Tiffany doesn't. But they're obviously very similar characters. The facial thing - the sort of masky face thing - is the same, and the style is the same."

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Gaiman v. McFarlane 2010: 333,000 Warrior Angels

Part Seven [This is part of my running report on the 2010 hearing in the Neil Gaiman v. Todd McFarlane case. To see coverage from the beginning, click here. When last I posted, I was in the midst of Neil's discussion of the creation of Medieval Spawn and the angel huntress Angela. I do hope that any reader who has begun with this installment will stop reading here and click on the link above in order to work his or her way chronologically to this point. I understand that Everyone these days knows how to read blogs in reverse order, but ...]

Later, Gaiman wrote three pages of Spawn #26 (December 1994) and a three-issue mini-series titled Angela (#1 December 1994; #2 January 1995; #3 February 1995) about the angel. "I did Angela ... because my son was 12 and he discovered the Spawn toys and things and wanted me to do something that he'd like, because most of the stuff I wrote was for adults in comics." Asked whether he'd expanded on Angela's world in the mini-series, he responded, "Sure ... part of the fun of it was creating this sort of huge backstory. ... you discover that she's 100,000 years old ... and there's an angelic host: There's 333,000 of these beautiful warrior angels and they're arresting her. She's in trouble right at the beginning. Part of the fun for me was creating ideas. If you're writing comics, what you always want to do is leave the ground more fertile than when you were there. You want to leave more stuff for people who are going to be writing ongoing series to play with, which is why it was fun for me giving Todd, for example, the idea that there had been lots of Spawns. It was something that left him with more than had been before. So with this, I created a heavenly city called Elysium. I created 333,000 warrior angels who all look like exotic dancers and named a few of them. And they all looked different. They all have certain very specific similarities: the masky thing around the eyes, for example, the fact that they are part of this order of kick-ass lady warrior angels." Asked if any of the angels were Domina or Tiffany, Gaiman said they weren't. His angels had such names as Surielle, Kuan Yin, Anahita, Saranyu, and Gabrielle. "I basically just took names of angels or gods or goddesses specifically from different cultures and gave them to the ladies. So, in the same way that Angela was fundamentally a joke name, it was also a very serious name. It's 'angel.' It's a name with 'angel' in it."

He summarized the mini-series. "She gets arrested for being a traitor, for having hunted Spawn without a license, even though she said she did have a license. ... The angels go and get Spawn to come and be a witness at her trial. She realizes she is being set up. She and Spawn escape from Heaven to Hell and have an awful lot of shouting, fighting, hitting, and running around. And then ... she essentially gets a confession out of Gabrielle, the lady who set her up, and Gabrielle gets arrested. Angela is given a pardon or exonerated but decides that she doesn't want to be working for Heaven any more, she wants to go freelance ... not actually directly taking orders from anybody else. She was just going to be out there on her own: kick-ass angel for hire."

Arntsen asked Gaiman to discuss whether he'd been involved in writing comic-book series that were produced over a long period of time. He responded, "The most famous one would be Sandman, which was a comic that I wrote that ran 75 issues. It's now collected in 10 volumes of paperbacks." The series appeared dated from January 1989 to March 1996. "In it, I created a lot of characters and I also used some DC Comics characters, and there were also some characters who were deemed derivative by DC Comics. When they worked up my royalty on them, some merchandising or some spinoffs happened." Asked if characters evolve over the course of a series, he replied, "Oh, sure. ... Characters change and character costumes change. ... The Batman of now does not wear the costume of the Batman of 1939, ditto Superman, ditto Wonder Woman. ... Morpheus, my character in Sandman: He dresses in lots of different ways, always chiefly wearing black and having ... longish coats or cloaks. But always - It's obvious the same character, it's obviously the same person, but you get different artists and they draw things differently. You decide to try things a different way."

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Gaiman v. McFarlane 2010: Neil's Summary

Part Six [This is part of my running report on the 2010 hearing in the Neil Gaiman v. Todd McFarlane case. To see coverage from the beginning, click here.] Neil has posted this summary on his blog.

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Gaiman v. McFarlane 2010: Neil Gaiman Begins His Testimony

Part Five [This is part of my running report on the 2010 hearing in the Neil Gaiman v. Todd McFarlane case. To see coverage from the beginning, click here.] Arntsen asked Gaiman to introduce himself, and he responded, "I'm a writer." He cited his comics, adult novels, and children's books and commented that he'd won Eisner, Hugo, Nebula, and Newbery Awards [and has, since his testimony, won the Carnegie Medal] and noted that the Coraline film (nominated for an Oscar) had been based on his novel.

How had he gone about creating for McFarlane? "Todd had ... asked me to write an issue of Spawn. ... He wanted celebrity writers. ... Todd ... had told me that I could write anything that I wanted. He said that I had complete carte blanche. If I wanted to do 23 page of Spawn reading a newspaper, I could." At that point, he said, McFarlane was working on #4 or #5 of Spawn, writing him as a warrior of Hell. "If you're a warrior of Hell," Gaiman said, "then you've got to be fighting something. So fighting Heaven seemed to make sense. And I thought, if you're warriors, you can't have nice angels, because you have to have somebody to fight - so, therefore, they have to be warrior angels. And thought, Why not make it a female character?

"So I called Todd and said, 'OK, this is the idea: female character, angel, talked him through it a little bit, and also asked Todd, 'Could there have been previous Spawns, because you haven't actually seen any previous Spawns at that time?' And he said he didn't see why not, as long as there weren't a lot of them. You couldn't have one every few years; they had to come along every hundred years or so. Because I thought, well, the best way to introduce a character who is going to fight Spawn is to actually show her killing a previous one of his predecessors, which establishes that she's the kind of person who does that kind of thing: kills Spawns."

The solicitation had to be ready before #9 shipped, so McFarlane drew a cover to accompany the solicitation. [It appeared in Diamond Comic Distributors' Previews catalog with the cover date of March 1993.] Gaiman explained the concept of the comics industry's solicitation process and then remarked on what McFarlane had drawn to accompany the solicitation: "I had to give Todd a little precis of what it would be, and he drew that cover - which wasn't exactly what I had in mind for the character. ... I thought when we were talking angels, we were probably talking something with more clothes. But I thought, Great, that's what we're given and that's kind of fun and, so, took the elements that Todd had created in there, the spear that he'd drawn. I thought, great, I'll play with that. So that ... was the first image." [The image appeared in the full-page ad, above, as well as in the solicitation itself.] "I'd come up with the idea of a character, she was going to be called Angela, and I did a little precis and a description for Todd of what was going to happen. He drew that image. I then took that image and made that the character that I was writing when I wrote the comic."

"Did you write the entire Spawn #9?"

"Yes."

"Were you aware of other characters like [this]?"

"There definitely hadn't been an army - as far as I know, anyway - ... an army of female kick-ass warrior angels, lady angels, who were also - who were hunters and merciless and not terribly nice. Because I thought, If Spawn & Co. are fighting these guys, then the other side needed to be almost as bad."

He commented that he was "making her a hunter ... somebody who just hunts these things and she has their heads on her wall."

As to "Medieval Spawn": "The idea was that there would have been a Spawn who was a knight in armor, and I had him essentially show up. I didn't have that many pages; it was one issue, so I came up with the idea of a Spawn who was a knight in armor. He shows up on his finely caparisoned horse. He has a shield, a sword, and a version of the Spawn costume that's essentially armor or something closer to what a knight in armor might wear or what a medieval knight would have worn. He shows up. ... I created a little backstory for him: the idea that he had been tricked by a devil; that his sister who he loved had - he returned from the dead to find that she had married his greatest enemy, somebody he hated, but he was still trying to be noble and knightly."

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Gaiman v. McFarlane 2010: Revisiting October 3, 2002

Part Four [This is part of my running report on the 2010 hearing in the Neil Gaiman v. Todd McFarlane case. To see coverage from the beginning, click here.] Taking a breath before posting Neil's testimony in the 2010 case, I remind readers of what happened in 2002. Quoting myself from Comics Buyer's Guide #1510: "The Oct. 3 verdicts in Neil Gaiman v. Todd McFarlane brought victory on all counts to Gaiman, co-creator with McFarlane of Spawn #9 and, with that issue, the characters of Count Cogliostro and Medieval Spawn. Moreover, the copyright ramifications of the jury findings could mean that Gaiman can license those characters for use in crossovers with other comic-book publishers." Obviously, the intervening years have not brought such crossovers to comics shops - and I should have added the character Angela to that first sentence.

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Gaiman v. McFarlane 2010: Opening Statements

Part Three [This is part of my running report on the 2010 hearing in the Neil Gaiman v. Todd McFarlane case. To see coverage from the beginning, click here.] Ed Treleven had posted May 25 a colorful account of the background of the case. Intriguingly, judging from her comments during the June 14 hearing, Judge Crabb had apparently not seen color exhibits before the hearing. Nor were the visual displays (screens at witness chair, lawyer tables, and judge's chair - fed from views from a horizontal platform not adjusted to show a vertical comic-book page) sharp enough to permit viewers to read some of the exhibits under discussion.

The opening statement by Arntsen's associate Jeff Simmons suggested three identifying factors to determine whether a character in comic books is derivative of or infringing on another character. "If it's a derivative character, it would be an infringing character, if somebody else, somebody who was not authorized to use it, used that character." He said courts typically use the character's backstory and, in the case of comics characters, that character's powers and the character's costume. He added a reference to Judge Posner's 2004 decision in McFarlane's appeal to the 2002 decision: "Judge Posner particularly said with regard to the Medieval Spawn character, you look at the way the character speaks. Judge Posner said, if he talks medieval and he looks medieval, then he infringes Medieval Spawn." Simmons said the judge should look for the same basic traits in the characters under discussion.

Grimsley opened by saying, "We believe the topic ... [is] more appropriate for jury trial." Crabb said she'd already ruled on that matter. He discussed what he called the difference between an idea and the expression of that idea, saying that, regarding the question of the idea of warrior angels, "Ideas cannot be the subject of copyright." He said that it had been agreed that McFarlane and Gaiman had co-created Medieval Spawn (a derivative of Spawn, already created by McFarlane) but that the copyright was limited to the additional elements. "There are elements in the design of Angela that are designed from the Spawn character. There are other elements of Angela, the female warrior, that are somewhat just generic to the comic industry, and in this respect you could go all the way back to Wonder Woman to see many of those elements." He argued that, if, say, similarities between angels Tiffany and Domina and Gaiman co-creation Angela mean the first two are derivative of the third, "essentially what Mr. Gaiman would be successful in arguing is that he has a copyright on the idea of the female warrior angel. And if Dark Ages Spawn is found sufficient to be derivative of Medieval Spawn and Mr. Gaiman is going to say the creative work that Mr. Holguin did was nothing more than copying his work, essentially Mr. Gaiman is saying, 'I have a copyright on the idea of a Hellspawn from medieval times.' The law is clear that those ideas cannot be the subject of the copyright, only the actual expression of those ideas."

Then, Gaiman took the stand.

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Gaiman v. McFarlane 2010: The New Spawn Case

Part Two [This is part of my running report on the 2010 hearing in the Neil Gaiman v. Todd McFarlane case. To see coverage from the beginning, click here.] Judge Crabb is a Senior U.S. District Judge for the 7th Circuit Court for the Western District of Wisconsin. The 2002 case had been a jury trial presided over by Senior Judge John C. Shabaz, who has since retired. It had determined that Neil Gaiman had been co-creator with Todd McFarlane of Spawn #9 and, with that issue, the characters of Count Cogliostro, Medieval Spawn, and warrior angel Angela. The case had been appealed in 2004 and its decision upheld February 24, 2004, by Circuit Judges Richard A. Posner, Michael S. Kanne, and Ilana Diamond Rovner. Gaiman's lead attorney this time, as in 2002, was Allen Arntsen. McFarlane's lead attorney was J. Alex Grimsley. And the current suit involved the ownership of characters that had appeared over the years in McFarlane's "Spawn" titles, specifically "Dark Ages Spawn" and warrior angels "Tiffany" and "Domina." Gaiman (on the left) was the only witness for the plaintiff (Gaiman); writer Brian Holguin and McFarlane (left and right on the right) were the two witnesses for the defendent (McFarlane).

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Gaiman v. McFarlane 2010: It Begins

Part One [This is the first part of my running report on the 2010 hearing in the Neil Gaiman v. Todd McFarlane case. For additional historical perspective, check out The Comics Chronicles' look back on Spawn #9 and the sales impact the "guest-author" issues had on the series.]

In May, my buddy Jon Manzo had alerted me to the fact that there was going to be some sort of hearing in Madison, Wisconsin, on June 14, 2010, regarding legal matters concerning Todd McFarlane and Neil Gaiman. I noted that in passing and eventually decided that I wanted to stay up to date in such matters, since I'd covered the October 2002 case Neil Gaiman v. Todd McFarlane in Comics Buyer's Guide #1510 and #1511.

My deep understanding of legal matters led me to think that the current case would probably consist of about an hour's worth of lawyers making motions, after which everyone would scatter. Indeed, when I entered the Robert W. Kastenmeier United States Courthouse, among the first people I encountered was Ken Levin, whom I think I'd first met in the 2002 case. Also among folks in the lobby was the aforementioned Jon. So lawyers were, indeed, on hand - and then I stepped into the elevator and there was Todd. Entering Courtroom 260, it was almost deja vu: Neil was with his lawyers at the plaintiff's table.

It was Case #02-CV-48-BBC, Neil Gaiman, Marvels & Miracles LLC vs. Todd McFarlane, Todd McFarlane Productions, TMP International and Image Comics. And I began to take notes. (How many notes I took may be indicated by just how long it's taken me to write this, which is only the beginning of what should be several posts.)

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