Gaiman v. McFarlane 2010: 2002 for the Record

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

Some questions have been raised as to the 2002 jury decision regarding ownership and copyright of Spawn #9 and Angela #1-3. I covered the trial and reported the outcome in Comics Buyer's Guide #1511 (November 1, 2002). (I took this photo October 3, following the trial. It was the first time since the promotional events for Spawn #9 that writer and artist had appeared together to sign a copy. Andy Carter, age 12, asked the co-creators to sign a copy of the issue, which they did.) During the trial, Judge Shabaz had given the seven-woman jury a list of 18 questions to decide. Since some were to be skipped, if certain others were answered in a specific way, the total questions decided October 3 came to 15. (The verdict on each question had to be unanimous.) Results were as follows:

1. Does plaintiff Neil Gaiman have a copyright interest in the following?
Medieval Spawn: Yes
Cogliostro: Yes
Spawn #26: Yes

2. Would a reasonable person in plaintiff Gaiman's position have discovered prior to January 24, 1999, that the McFarlane defendants were claiming to be sole owners of copyright interests in the following?
Medieval Spawn: No
Cogliostro: No
Angela: No
Angela #1, #2, and #3: No

3. Did the plaintiff and the McFarlane defendants enter into a contract in 1992?
Yes

4. Did the McFarlane defendants breach the 1992 contract?
Yes

5. Did the plaintiff and the McFarlane defendants enter into a contract in 1997?
Yes

6. Did the McFarlane defendants breach the 1997 contract?
Yes

12. Was defendants' failure to identify plaintiff Gaiman as a co-author of Spawn #26, Spawn Volume 6, or Pathway to Judgement a false description or representation of the origin of the work?
Yes

13. Does plaintiff Gaiman believe that defendants' failure to identify him as a co-author of Spawn #26, Spawn Volume 6, or Pathway to Judgement is likely to damage him?
Yes

14. Did plaintiff Gaiman consent in writing to the use of his name and biographical information on Angela's Hunt?
No

15. Did plaintiff Gaiman make misrepresentations or omissioins of material fact to defendant concerning his DC Comics contract during the negotiations of the 1997 contract?
No

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Gaiman v. McFarlane 2010: It Is Ordered ...

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

Part Twenty-Five Senior U.S. District Judge for the 7th Circuit Court for the Western District of Wisconsin Barbara B. Crabb announced her decision on July 29: "IT IS ORDERED that plaintiff Neil Gaiman's motion for an order to compel discovery relating to the money earned from derivative characters Dark Ages (McFarlane) Spawn, Domina and Tiffany is GRANTED. Defendants Todd McFarlane, Todd McFarlane Productions, Inc. and TMP International, Inc. are to produce the requested information promptly and in no event later than September 1, 2010."

The decision came in Case #02-CV-48-BBC, Neil Gaiman, Marvels & Miracles LLC vs. Todd McFarlane, Todd McFarlane Productions, TMP International and Image Comics. It had been 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 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."

In her opinion, Crabb wrote, "The parties agree that they are co-owners of Angela and Medieval Spawn. Defendants do not contest plaintiff's right to an accounting and division of profits for the posters, trading cards, clothing, statuettes, animated series on HBO, video games, etc. that feature those characters. The dispute is limited to information about the profits earned from Dark Ages Spawn, Tiffany and Domina, which defendant has refused to provide to plaintiff. Defendants contend that these characters are not subject to plaintiff's copyright because they were based solely on plaintiff's ideas and not on any physical expression of those ideas. I conclude that the newer characters are derivative and that plaintiff is entitled to his share of the profits realized by these characters and to the immediate production of all documents and other information material to the calculation of the profits."

Her opinion noted some of the details of the storylines. For example, "The Dark Ages (McFarlane) Spawn is [like Medieval (Gaiman) Spawn] a twelfth century knight, referred to as The Black Knight, killed in a holy crusade far from his homeland and returned to Earth as Hellspawn. (In the first issue in which he is introduced, he is described as having been born in 901, tr. exh. 26, inside front cover; in future issues and in advertising for the comics and his action figure, he is described as having been born in the twelfth century.)"

She summarized the appearance of the angel characters: "Tiffany and Domina are visually similar to Angela and share her same basic traits. All three are warrior angels with voluptuous physiques, long hair and mask-like eye makeup. all three wear battle uniforms consisting of thong bikinis, garters, wide weapon belts, elbow-length gloves and ill-fitting armor bras." She compared the two Spawns of the middle ages: "Defendant argues that when the court disregards the elements of Medieval (Gaiman) Spawn that are derived from the original Spawn and the stock elements that accompany a person of aristocratic lineage in the middle ages, such as traveling on horseback, wearing armor and carrying a weapon, every other aspect of Dark Ages (McFarlane) Spawn is new and different from Medieval (Gaiman) Spawn. It is true that Dark Ages (McFarlane) Spawn and Medieval (Gaiman) Spawn differ slightly in their backgrounds, but these are elements of their characters that make them individually copyrightable, not ones that prevent Dark Ages (McFarlane) Spawn from being found derivative. It is more significant that Dark Ages Spawn has the distinctive look of Medieval (Gaiman) Spawn that would cause any reader, casual or constant, to see a substantial similarity between them." She went on to discuss the basic concept of the series, then wrote, "Much as defendant tries to distinguish the two knight Hellspawn, he never explains why, of all the universe of possible Hellspawn incarnations, he introduced two knights from the same century. Not only does this break the Hellspawn 'rule' that Malebolgia never returns a Hellspawns [sic] to Earth more than once every 400 years (or possibly every 100 years, as suggested in Spawn, No. 9, exh. #1, at 4), it suggests that what defendant really wanted to do was exploit the possibilities of the knight introduced in issue no. 9. (This possibility is supported by the odd timing of defendant's letter to plaintiff on February 14, 1999, just before publication of the first issue of Spawn: The Dark Ages, to the effect that defendant was rescinding their previous agreements and retaining all rights to Medieval (Gaiman) Spawn.)"

She then elaborated with concepts of her own, not expressed during the June 14 testimony: "If defendant really wanted to differentiate the new Hellspawn, why not make him a Portugese explorer in the 16th century; an officer of the royal Navy in the 18th century, an idealistic recruit of Simon Bolivar in the 19th century, a companion of Odysseus on his voyages, a Roman gladiator, a younger brother of Emperor Nakamikado in the early 18th century, a Spanish conquistador, an aristocrat in the Qing dynasty, an American Indian warrior or a member of the court of Queen Elizabeth I? It seems far more than coincidence that Dark Ages (McFarlane) Spawn is a knight from the same century as Medieval (Gaiman) Spawn."


She wrote that it was irrelevant whether Spawn: The Dark Ages writer Brian Holguin had tried to base his Dark Ages (McFarlane) Spawn on Medieval (Gaiman) Spawn. "... what is relevant is that he had access to Medieval (Gaiman) Spawn before he created his version of the middle ages knight." She cited earlier court decisions including the 1977 case decision "holding that George Harrison had access to tune he used for 'He's So Fine'; therefore, even if copying was subconscious, it amounted to infringement." "The small differences in the two knights do not undermine a finding of derivation ... It is not, as defendent claims, a simple borrowing of an idea but a borrowing of the expression of ideas of the copyright owners. It would be considered infringing if it had been developed by anyone not working for defendent." She said the same applied to the other angels. "Certainly they are similar enough to be infringing if they had been produced and sold by someone other than the copyright owners. The totality of their attributes and traits, that is, their visual appearance, their costumes, their manner of speaking, their activities and their common origin (Heaven's angelic phalanx), mark them as derivative of Angela."

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What Todd McFarlane Taught Me

Following yesterday's post, I was deluged with demands to elaborate on my statement, "Todd is one of the few people who has ever changed one of my attitudes toward convention duties." Which is to say: Tasha Robinson said she'd be interested in a follow-up post.

So OK.

First, keep in mind that the pond has to be pretty tiny before I am a big fish in it. Among celebrities, I am not one. (I sometimes get to hang out around them, mind you, and I treasure every fangirl moment while [usually] managing not to vocalize my "I am so doggoned deliriously happy to be in the presence of Celebrity X, of whom I am a fan" thoughts.) And I love - love - talking to people. Which means I wildly enjoy hanging around the Comics Buyer's Guide booth and talking both with our readers and with innocent bystanders who happen by when I feel like nattering. But there's a downside to "pulling booth duty," and that is that I also need to be out and about in order to talk with people who are trapped at their own booths. And I am occasionally frustrated when I realize that I'm in the middle of what is turning out to be a lengthy (albeit fascinating) conversation with one visitor, while there is actually a line of other people forming behind that person: people who are increasingly ticked off that I'm not wrapping up Conversation One more speedily so as to get to Conversation Two with one of them. And, as I say, I'm not a celebrity.

So, while I enjoy booth duty, sometimes I hate booth duty. And I know true celebrities who seem to feel pretty much the same. And I feel sorry for the super-celebrities who can't even walk through a convention hall without a security contingent to keep away people who want to talk to those celebrities, because ... well ... how much fun can that be? And my attitude in days long gone by was pretty much, "Yeah, I know I'm supposed to be at the booth, but there's a great sale at Booth Whatever, so I'll see you when I get back." And then Todd made what I think was the keynote speech at a long ago Pro/Con (a small convention for working comics pros; no, there hasn't been one since the 1990s). And here (in my words, less eloquent than his) is what he said:

"When I was a fan, I'd be eager to meet an artist I'd admired. I'd go to the table where he was supposed to be appearing, but often whoever it was wouldn't be there. So I'd figure he'd been called away for something important and would be back soon. When I'd return to the table an hour later and he still wasn't there, I'd figure to check back later. If I went to the table much later and he still wasn't there, I'd walk away and, as I did so, I'd think, 'Oh, well, I guess I don't need to see him. And I guess I didn't like his work that much, anyway."

So yikes. Todd's point: If you've announced you're going to be someplace at a particular time, you should be there. If something comes up so that you can't be there, leave something - a note, a sign, a message with others at the booth - that says (a) there's been a change in your schedule and (b) what that new schedule is. He's right, and I've tried to abide by that attitude ever since.

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Gaiman v. McFarlane 2010: What I Have Learned

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

Part Twenty-Four Two dozen posts, and we're still waiting for the judge's decision. While we're waiting (and this will probably be my last post on the subject until Judge Barbara Crabb announces her decision; tomorrow, I'll talk about the upcoming Comic-Con or about some fun book I've read or this autumn's convention in Madison - which Harlan Ellison says will be his last convention - or some such), it might be a good time to reflect on what I have learned from attending both the 2002 trial and this 2010 hearing.

But first: a quote. Just 31 minutes into the 1965 Western comedy-musical Cat Ballou, Jane Fonda tells Michael Callan about the horrible things the railroad people have done to her father, whose property they've tried to get. "They've put manure in his well and they've made him talk to lawyers and now they've sent a gunman around to drive him off." That making him talk to lawyers is somehow equivalent to putting manure in his well and sending a gunman to drive him off struck me as a memorable and somehow hilarious concept. (Mind you, the lawyers to whom I've quoted the line have universally been unamused; maybe I'm just not up to Jane Fonda's delivery. Come to think of it, maybe that's another lesson learned: Don't quote Cat Ballou to lawyers.) In any case, that's the first lesson I've learned from all this: If you can, settle matters out of court. While reading legal repartee can be amusing for spectators, it's apparently not that much fun for the guy on the witness stand or the guy paying the attorneys.

Speaking of being a spectator, though, I must say attending a trial virtually from start to finish fascinated me. For example, there was an objection repeatedly used in the 2002 case that I'd never come across in any fictional account of a trial: It was something about (hey, it's been eight years) not having a witness repeat something that was in the documents the jury was given as evidence - because that would be redundant. Or something. Point is: If you can, attend a trial from start to finish. Even if your memories grow as foggy as mine, you'll learn something about the judicial process, and I saw it from jury selection to verdict. (That, by the way, is more than the jury does - since its members are occasionally sent out of the courtroom while lawyers argue something.)

Expand your circle of friends, if you get the chance. I'd never met writer Brian Holguin before June 14, but now we're Facebook Friends, and he was kind enough to provide some comments on what transpired that day. The world of comics is a world in which people read for pleasure (and, if you don't think that's an unusual trait, you're fortunate and living in a pretty exclusive environment). There are a lot of people you haven't met yet who can enrich your life.

Be civil. My impression was that neither Todd nor Neil was happy to be sitting in a courtroom. Their attorneys were pitted against each other, each determined to make the best case for their client. But everyone throughout the proceedings was polite, responsive, and helpful. People held doors for each other.

If you're going to be collaborating on a creative work, ask yourself whether you should have a contract. Should I have led with this? I've written and edited for more than 27 years almost exclusively on a work-for-hire basis. That's one way to make a living. I own most of what I wrote before that. That's another way to make a living. In either case, it's a good idea to agree on what you're getting into while you're getting into it.

Here's the thing: I've been a fan of Neil Gaiman's work since I read Ghastly beyond Belief, which he put together with Kim Newman for Arrow Books in 1985 (and which he tells me will probably never be reprinted). I've been a fan of Neil Gaiman himself since I first met him; he seems to be able unceasingly to make the world a better place. I think I came to fully appreciate Todd's professionalism when I interviewed him just before Spider-Man #1 came out - and his art when he discussed his approach to creation in an interview he did with Stan Lee. Todd is one of the few people who has ever changed one of my attitudes toward convention duties. (Long story. It was a great lecture at a long-ago convention.) I know there's a tendency to look on all this as some sort of entertainment for the rest of us - but it's not an entertainment for them. Just saying ...

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Gaiman v. McFarlane 2010: Post-Hearing Briefs in Brief

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

Part Twenty-Three Following the June 14 evidentiary hearing, attorneys for Neil Gaiman and Todd McFarlane filed post-hearing briefs running more than a dozen pages each in support of their respective positions. In the words of the McFarlane attorneys, "The issue this Court is being asked to decide is whether Neil Gaiman is entitled to a share of profits attributable to characters known as Dark Ages Spawn, Tiffany and Domina. ... In the accounting process, there is no dispute that Mr. Gaiman is entitled to a share of profits from the comics in which the characters Medieval Spawn or Angela appeared or from derivative uses of those characters, such as action figures created of those characters. Mr. Gaiman now argues that he is entitled to a share of profits from other characters ... Mr. Gaiman's theory is that these other characters - Dark Ages Spawn, Tiffany and Domina - are derivative of the co-owned characters." In the words of the Gaiman attorneys, "The visual and literary similarities between the characters are far too striking to be brushed off as coincidences or merely similar 'ideas.' Under the law, a character is derivative if it would be an infringement when used by an unauthorized party. ... There can be no question that if anyone else had created comics using Tiffany, Domina, or Dark Ages Spawn, the McFarlane Defendants would have sued them for infringement of their copyrights in the Angela and Medieval Spawn characters, and won."

Each group of attorneys detailed the arguments for their side, citing testimony given during the June 14 hearing. Tomorrow, presumably before Judge Crabb announces her decision, I'll cite the lessons I have learned from all this. Then, we'll wait for the decision.

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Gaiman v. McFarlane 2010: Testimony Wraps Up

[This is part of my running report on the 2010 hearing on the Neil Gaiman v. Todd McFarlane case. To see coverage from the beginning, click here.]
 
Part Twenty-Two The hearing had begun at 9 a.m. It was now somewhere near 2 p.m. McFarlane was his own final witness, and his attorney Alex Grimsley asked him to compare the angel Tiffany (above), introduced in Spawn #44 (March 1996, written by McFarlane, pencilled by Tony Daniel, inked by Kevin Conrad) to the angel Angela (below), introduced in Spawn #9 (March 1993, written by Gaiman, drawn by McFarlane, here shown from Angela #3 (February 1995), pencilled by Greg Capullo and inked by Mark Pennington). McFarlane said they had the same marking around the eyes - but added that that had been a pre-existing element.
* "Angela has a spear, and Tiffany has a gun."
* "The hair is not the same."
* "Tiffany's wings are steel." He compared her wings to ninja blades.
* "Angela never had wings on her back."
When Grimsley referred to the entry on Tiffany in Spawn Bible, McFarlane said, "I don't believe I wrote that." Had McFarlane drawn the angel Domina? "I don't believe so."

Turning to the series Spawn: The Dark Ages, Grimsley asked why McFarlane had produced it. (It ran 28 issues, starting with the March 1999 issue and ending with the issue dated July 2001.) McFarlane answered, "I wanted to put more comic books out." Did he direct the team producing Spawn: The Dark Ages to base it on a specific time period? "I don't recall specifying," he said, adding that he'd told the team to "come up with something cool."

Gaiman attorney Allen Arntsen began the cross-examination. "Neil Gaiman created both Medieval Spawn and Angela in Spawn #9, right? "Right." "Angela was the first bounty-hunter angel?" "Right." "Angela is in the related story in Spawn #26, right?" "Correct, two or three pages, yeah." "Neil wrote Angela #1-3?" "Correct." "She's a major player in the Spawn universe?" "Correct. If I said it, I'll stand by it." Arntsen turned to the matter of whether there had been multiple Spawns in medieval times: "every 400 years, right?" "There may have been a time when that was true." Arntsen cited the letters page response in Curse of the Spawn #4 (December 1996): "A new Spawn appears on earth every 400 years and Daniel Llanso [the Spawn of Curse of the Spawn] is the Spawn that shows up 400 years after Al Simmons." Following an afternoon break, Arntsen returned to the 400-year plot device. McFarlane responded, "We weren't terribly consistent, and it wasn't a rule."

Questioning ended with a return to McFarlane attorney Grimsley: "How familiar are you with Spawn: The Dark Ages stories?" "Not very familiar." Regarding the 400-year basis? "We weren't consistent." "Why would you not be consistent?" "Things happen. I couldn't even keep track of how many spikes were on the costume." "Why not keep to the rules you set out?" "You break those rules because of the wants of the fans and marketing."

The session ended with attorneys agreeing to see to it that Judge Barbara Crabb received both attorneys' post-hearing briefs and (because some of the photocopies supplied to her as evidence had been virtually illegible) a set of exhibits in color by June 25.

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Gaiman v. McFarlane 2010: Marketing and Angela's Design

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

Part Twenty-One Todd McFarlane discussed the economics of the comic-book and toy businesses briefly. Regarding the toys, he said, "The Spawn line as a whole was successful out of the gate, [produced] to draw on the popularity of Spawn." He addressed the issue of the Previews catalog listing for Spawn: The Dark Ages #1. "This is the main way you market to retailers." He said the solicitation did not mention Medieval Spawn. "We can make stuff look like other stuff and give it consistency. You call attention to the things that will get you sales. [In this case] the value is Spawn. ... If the intent was for us to use Medieval Spawn, we would have called him 'Medieval Spawn.' We weren't trying to do that."

Spawn #9 by Gaiman and McFarlane introduced Angela. "Were there elements of Angela used from Spawn?" Yes." He elaborated on his approach to drawing. "We have a flat piece of paper. We create the illusion of 3-D using cape, wind, and hair." He cited similarities to Spawn:
* Marks on her face are a repetition of the marks on Spawn's face, with the black indicating a bad guy.
* Blank eyes [since she's not a devil, her eyes aren't green]
* Her symbol is the opposite of the Spawn mark
* Her earrings are based on the Spawn mark
* "There are sharp points on Spawn, so she's got sharp points."
* "She's an angel, but wings locked on the back don't work [artistically], so they're on her head" (like Valkyrie headdresses)
* The chains of Spawn are turned into ribbons and even her hair

"Why is Angela scantily clad?" "A couple of obvious reasons: the history of women characters when men are at the helm." He cited paintings by Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo. "If we don't show skin, we put her in skin-tight clothes. Boys have been doing it since, I assume, the invention of boys."

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Gaiman v. McFarlane 2010: McFarlane on Spawn Basics

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

Part Twenty [Apologies to diehards who have been patiently hanging in there, as I dole out installment after installment. At the end of the hearing day June 14, when I asked defense witnesses Brian Holguin (left) and Todd McFarlane (right) to pose for photos, Todd suggested they stand by the parking meters across the street from the Robert W. Kastenmeier United States Courthouse - symbolizing the wait for the time until the decision would be announced. (Note: They struck a different pose for each of three shots. This is the "serious" one.) I fear the wait for me to wrap up this coverage could exceed that time. Here's hoping I can finish this report before Senior U.S. District Judge Barbara B. Crabb announces her decision. Or maybe I shouldn't hope that; I know all involved are in a state of suspense until matters are resolved.]

McFarlane took the stand. Asked by his attorney Alex Grimsley to describe Spawn, he said, "It's a love story." The central character dies but is offered a chance to return to see the woman he loves, and McFarlane noted that Simmons' wife is named Wanda, as is his own wife. "The main concept is that Al Simmons literally trades everything to come back one last time, and he's signed on the dotted line. But the world he comes back to is topsy-turvy, his great love is now remarried, there's a child, and now he finds he's got these fantastic powers - but he's stripped of his skin, so he's unrecognizable: all power but no identity. That's the beginning of his journey."

Asked to describe the role of the Hellspawns of which Simmons becomes one, McFarlane said, "From Biblical times, there's a build-up for Armageddon. So you need soldiers - grunts - in their armies. You also need generals. The Spawns on Earth are in training." Asked to compare the Al Simmons Spawn to Medieval Spawn, McFarlane said, "The shield has the Spawn logo that appeared on the first hundred-plus issues, and that indicates Spawn. There's the mark on his mask." Discussing the logo, McFarlane said he'd wanted one "like the old-fashioned comic-book symbols." He compared it the "S" in the diamond on Superman's chest and Batman's bat symbol. "The Spawn logo is my own 'S.'" Grimsley said, "Regarding Spawn #9: Neil wrote the script. Did he ever reference the name 'Medieval Spawn'?" "No, his name is Spawn." There was a "Medieval Spawn" action figure; McFarlane said, "At this time, the toy company wasn't in existence."

Asked what characteristics of the original Spawn he'd used when he'd drawn Medieval Spawn, McFarlane replied, "I used almost every single one."

* "the mask with the white mark" (to contrast with a black mark for villains)

* green eyes

* red cloak

* spikes on arms and legs, "though not exactly the same amount"

* an "M" on the chest

* a skull on the belly

* chains

* a clawed hand
* "gnarly skin" from having the flesh ripped off
"Essentially, I took the original costume and gave it a different veneer." Asked to explain an illustration from Spawn #8, he said, "It's the costume coming alive again. It can morph because it's alive in and of itself." He continued, "All Spawns came from the original, pre-existing Spawn. The Spawn in Spawn: The Dark Ages was similar to the original Spawn. [For example] all Spawns have green eyes: In Sunday school, they say we're created in the likeness of The Master. Spawn's Master is Malebolgia, so he has green eyes."

Al Simmons in life was African-American. McFarlane said, "African-American super-heroes don't get their fair shake. In Simmons, we get rid of the one thing we do when we prejudge: strip it away. He's a hero, regardless of what color the skin is. He's not human; he's not made of flesh and blood; he doesn't actually have eyes. He says, 'I'm made out of something ... else!'" Regarding the spikes and skulls? "They are just cool stuff. Spikes are a big part of the character."

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Gaiman v. McFarlane 2010: Writing "Marvel Method"

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

Part Nineteen Neil Gaiman attorney Allen Arntsen asked defense witness Spawn: The Dark Ages writer Brian Holguin whether he was familiar with the entire body of Spawn comics. "I'm not familiar with the entire body of work. Todd was saying to forget about it." Holguin described the process of creating comic books for the Spawn-connected series he'd worked on: He and McFarlane had worked "Marvel method." In that process, the creators discuss what will happen in the story in general, dealing with whatever specifics they feel are important; then, the artist lays out and draws the story, and the writer then provides the dialogue and other text. (In the "full-script" method, in contrast, the writer - like a screenplay writer - provides virtually all the text before the artist illustrates it.) As noted in Part Seventeen, Holguin's first published Spawn work had been for Spawn #72 (May 1998): the story "Bloodless." The credits on the issue showed the story as by McFarlane and Holguin, the pencilled art as by Greg Capullo, and inking on the art as by Danny Miki, McFarlane, and Chance Wolf. "Todd and Greg worked out the story." Holguin dialogued it later. "After six issues, I took over both plot and script." Asked whether he was aware of the character Violator, who had appeared in Spawn #14-15, Holguin replied, "I'm aware now, not then. There were 70 issues; I'd read 25 or 30. I worked on the animated show, and the movie came out about then." He said he wanted to get away from the existing cyborg-assassin character Overt-Kill (aka Overkill). Arntsen asked, "Who made the decision to set Spawn: The Dark Ages in the 12th century?" "That would be me," Holguin said, "because of the Crusades."

Asked to discuss the relationship between Lord Iain Covenant and Baron Rivalen (the two identified as such in Spawn: The Dark Ages #2), Holguin said, "I haven't seen the books for a decade. I don't recall the relationship: whatever it says in the comic." The same went for Covenant's wife, Eloise, also in #2. Arntsen referred to Dark Age's Spawn's dialogue on the first page of #8: "You say this angel ... this seraphic huntress as you call her ... She is out to slay me? Very well then, I say. Yes. I am glad of it. I am ready for the dark embrace of the grave. This is no life for a man." Discussing the approach to writing that dialogue: It could have been in Middle English. Holguin said, "But I don't think you'd sell many copies." The judge laughed. "I don't, either."

[As noted in Part Seventeen, Holguin provided comments on my transcribed notes.] Holguin commented on June 27, "Ha! I didn't realize the judge laughed. It's weird: Both teams of lawyers seemed to really be invested in the notion of whether the characters 'spoke Medieval,' which just seems ludicrous to me. Both Neil and I testified that there's no such thing as 'speaking Medieval.' And even if you decided that Covenant speaks in a faux medieval dialect, then so does literally every other character in the series. Does that mean they're all interchangeable? It's so strange how the things you think are important as a creator and the things lawyers or judges think are important are so far apart."

Regarding the language, Holguin said, "It's a little poetic. It's a little flowery. But it's a dramatic moment. The dramatic monologue is bread and butter in the comic industry."

McFarlane attorney Alex Grimsley then asked about heroic speech, and Holguin said, "It's not necessarily realistic."

One witness remained to be examined: Todd McFarlane.

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Gaiman v. McFarlane 2010: Brian Holguin on the Stand

[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 Eighteen Todd McFarlane attorney Alex Grimley asked defense witness Spawn: The Dark Ages writer Brian Holguin whether he'd read Spawn #9. Holguin replied, "Long ago - and I reread it recently." "There's a courtly style of speech. Did you try to emulate that style of speech?" [Medieval Spawn's dialogue in that issue is reproduced in Part Twelve.] Holguin answered, "No, not at all." Asked about Spawn Bible (August 1996), Holguin said, "I wasn't aware it existed." There was a discussion about whether the Dark Ages Spawn Holguin had written had fought and died in the Crusades or died in Ireland, and Holguin said about the character he had written, "He felt that [what he'd done] was his duty to his church and to his God." [As noted in Part Seventeen, Holguin provided comments on my transcribed notes.] Holguin wrote June 27, "I think they were asking me specifically about the 'Medieval Spawn' entry in the Spawn Bible. They were holding up the issue opened to that page. Again, I knew the Spawn Bible existed and had seen it at Todd's office but don't remember ever referencing it at all. I would usually just ask Todd if I needed character background. I hadn't seen the 'Medieval Spawn' entry until the day before the hearing, when I saw it in the lawyer's office. The history of the character (I believe written by Tom Orzechowski) is completely different from the Dark Ages character."

Grimsley asked whether there was a backstory for the character Holguin had written. Holguin said, "It doesn't surprise me that Mr. Gaiman said he had a backstory in mind. There's [no backstory] to take. The character shows up and is immediately killed." Holguin wrote June 27, "Yeah, this is the thing that puzzles me. I take Neil at his word that he had a backstory in mind, but where was it ever published or printed that I could have had access to it? It's certainly not in Spawn #9. If there are points of similarity, to my mind it must be coincidence. I don't see how I could have known what the history of Neil's character was, if it was never published or shared with the public."

Holguin wrote an introduction to the series in Spawn: The Dark Ages #1. It included the passage, "This is a Spawn book. It is a new chapter in the canon of one of the most successful entertainment franchises of the last decade. There are legions of fans out there with very strong feelings about the Spawn mythos and what exactly it should and should not be, and they are not shy (or subtle) about expressing themselves. I'm not going to pretend that's not a little intimidating." When Grimsley asked why Holguin had referred in it to the framework - "A flawed but ultimately good man finds himself at the mercy of a devil, who bargains with him for his soul. The mortal agrees to become a Hellspawn, a nascent soldier in the army of Hell, in exchange for a chance to return to earth and to perhaps, just maybe, earn his salvation and free himself from the devil's grip." - Holguin answered, "To let readers know, if they're Spawn fans, that it's part of the same world. I also wanted to state the theme of the Spawn universe." He was asked about his passage, "Oh well. A little pressure is good for the soul. Because, in the end, this is a book that must (and I believe does) stand on its own. It must not only honor the Spawn tradition; it must add to it." Holguin answered, "I wrote [the series] to stand on its own, and the whole tradition is they're all meant to be self-contained." He said he had discussed with McFarlane an aspect addressed by artist Liam McCormack-Sharp in his introduction in that issue: "I have tried to get a genuine feel for the period and have kept well clear of fairy tale settings, while infusing the piece with, I hope, some sort of contemporary sensibility." Holguin said, "This was meant to be dark and gritty and Gothic, a rough, tough comic book."

Concluding his testimony with Grimsley, Holguin said he was "quite a fan" of Gaiman's work. He concluded, "If Todd had asked me to take Medieval Spawn and spin it off, I'd have been happy to do it, and that's not what we did."

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Gaiman v. McFarlane 2010: Soliciting Spawn

[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 Sixteen In the closing segment of Neil Gaiman's testimony, Todd McFarlane attorney Alex Grimsley asked whether Gaiman recalled whether the Medieval Spawn toy had been popular. "From what I remember, it must have been popular, because he did a lot more." Grimsley asked, regarding the Spawn: The Dark Ages series as it was being solicited, "If you were writing the solicitation for the issue, you wouldn't say, you know, 'Here is a new series based on this popular character'?" Gaiman said, "I'm a writer, not a marketer." "OK, but you write the solicitation, correct?" "Normally, no. ... I wrote the ones for Spawn #9 all those years ago because Todd asked me to and they had to put something out. But, no, I don't think I've written a solicitation since." Grimsley handed Gaiman a Lord Covenant toy and asked whether he recognized it. Gaiman said, "No." Grimsley asked, "That doesn't appear to be a character that you created?" Gaiman responded, "I wouldn't have thought so."

That wrapped up his testimony at the hearing. After the lunch break, the next witness would be for McFarlane: Spawn: The Dark Ages writer Brian Holguin.

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Gaiman v. McFarlane 2010: Dost Speak Medieval?

[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 Fifteen Todd McFarlane attorney Alex Grimsley asked Neil Gaiman, "What period in time is Medieval Spawn from?" "800 years ago ... 12th century ... Obviously, somewhere between 1100 and 1200, maybe 1250, if you wanted to push it." ... "And there was nothing in issue #9 that told us what country this character lived in?" "I assumed it was England, but I don't think we ever locked that down, that part." "So there was nothing saying whether he was English, French, German, whatever." "He does speak English." "But it's an English comic book, correct?" "Yeah, but I'm the kind of person who actually, if it was in France, might well have written in French just to make kids go and look up French words in dictionaries. I did that recently with some Latin stuff in a comic." "OK, so if a Medieval Spawn spoke French, would that be different than the character you created?" "Actually, a Medieval Spawn, thinking about it, probably would have been speaking French. ... Because Saxon would have been - I'm sorry." "OK, but your character spoke in English." "His dialogue was written in English." "So, if his dialogue was written in French, would that be a different character than the one you created?" "I've seen issues of Spawn #9 translated into French and Japanese and Spanish, and it's the same character."

"If there was ... a Spawn from medieval times who spoke in rap, would that be different than the character you created?" "One would assume he was under some kind of horrible spell." "Is that a 'yes'?" "That was - I think it's a silly question, with all due respect." Grimsley referred to Spawn: The Dark Ages #1 (March 1999) and the first appearance of the Spawn shown in that series. "He simply says, 'What am I?' right? ... Is that line particularly medieval ... speech?" "No ... That's a simple English declarative sentence. It would have been the same going back all the way. That's nice." "OK," said Grimsley, "so a modern person would not say, 'What am I?'" "The ... King James Bible, which was written a long time ago, is filled with beautiful simple English declarative sentences that we would say now and that they said then. ... It's a glorious little sentence." "And in your mind, that's speaking medieval?" "In my mind, that's a good, clear English declarative sentence." "And is that speaking medieval?" Gaiman replied, "There is no such thing as speaking medieval. Medieval is a time period. It goes approximately 1,000 years, maybe 1,500 years, but definitely 1,000 years. It's not a language." Grimsley asked, "The way that you view the way Medieval Spawn spoke is really in just short declarative sentences, there's nothing else distinctive about his speech?"

Gaiman said, "No, I had him talking to a young lady in fair knightly terms." [All of Medieval Spawn's speeches appear in this post.] "That's something that - a character, you assume, has learned a little knighthood and he's talking to a young lady and he's using his fancy words. ... There's a difference between demotic speech and the fancy stuff and the stuff that you'd use, if you were being knightly. If you're being courtly, I assume that, if you're talking to your king, you don't talk the same way that you talk to your dog." Referring to Spawn #9, Gaiman discussed the character's speech. "The last thing that Spawn says here is, 'I don't understand.' It's a nice simple English declarative sentence. It's not harsh. It's not clever. 'I no longer have a name.' And so on and so forth. It's absolutely how you would, as a knight, speak to a maiden. It's not necessarily how you'd speak to the person killing you, which is why the language changes a little bit."

Asked whether Dark Ages Spawn speaks the same way Medieval Spawn does, Gaiman answered, "Looking through the comics, I thought Brian [Holguin] was doing a fairly creditable job of trying to give the feeling that this was happening in the old days." "Your contention is that Brian Holguin, sitting here, the writer on Dark Ages, didn't create a new character?" "Yes. ... I assume it's the same character. It's Spawn in the 12th century as a knight in armor."

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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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