Ghost Rider creator owes Marvel 17K

TheBigBadWolf · Site Admin Joined: Jan 17, 2004 Posts: 12527 Points: 8548

What a fucking shame....Marvel Comics won their counter claim against Gary Friedrich (who CREATED the Ghost Rider character) who was selling Ghost Rider prints and merchandise at conventions.

The 20th Century Danny Boy site, describes that Marvel is demanding payment of $17,000 from the penniless creator, who must also agree not just to stop selling any Ghost Rider products of his own creation, but also to refrain from any action promoting himself as the creator of Ghost Rider for financial gain (though he is “permitted” to sign Ghost Rider items, as long as those items are licensed Marvel or Hasbro Ghost Rider merchandise).

Last time we saw Gary he chatted with us about everything going on in this case. Imagine getting up their in age, driving a medical supplies truck and seeing your creation all over the big screen and not getting a piece of that pie.

You can read more about the injustice here:
http://ohdannyboy.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/gary-friedrich-enterprises-llc-et-al-v.html

You can read our interview with Gary from about two years ago here:
http://www.comicmonsters.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=910
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GrayRider · Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2012 10:21 pm Post subject:

Sounds like Marvel, heartless, money grubbing, screwing over the creators of their characters.

Sad that Gary has fallen on such hard times. He certainly deserves better.
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fearless-freak · Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2012 11:30 pm Post subject:

he created one of the most iconic anti heros of comics, his creation so why can't he make money from his creations at cons
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paperdragon · Posted: Sat Feb 11, 2012 4:54 am Post subject:

Every artist sells prints at cons and I dont know the particulars about whether they have some permission to do so (which I rather doubt) from the companies.

I see small time artists who have never worked for the big boys selling prints of their characters so I know there is no contractual agreements allowing them to do so.

However the truth of the matter lays behind the fact that he sued Marvel in 2007 over rights to his creation and the matter drug on until this last Decemeber 2011. He lost his case and any claim he may have had to his creation. So undoubtaly this is a case of tit for tat by Marvel in a punitive move to punish him further. The final decision was reached by verdict that he had signed(cashed) checks that had assignment legends, which in essence say " by signing over the check I gave over my rights to ***** "

Also in 1978, Friedrich signed a written assignment document by which he expressly granted "to Marvel forever all rights of any kind and nature" in the work he created.

Further more Gary never copyrighted his character at any time.

Its is a sad case of a Mega-Goliath punishing a gnat, I'm sure his case against Marvel and other entities involved in the movie cost them tons of money, and probably drained Gary's megar coffer also.

Its a case of sellers remorse, who would have ever dreamed comic characters generating the Millions of dollars they do now thru movies. I grant that it does not seem fair, as is often brought up over Jack "King" Kirby's even being denied the owner ship of his art or any residual monies for the creation of practically the entire marvel universe.

Young enthusiastic artists are still to this day swindeled right in front of their faces out of rights to their creations, "gosh your going to print my book"

Here is an interview with Steve Niles about this very same subject.

For a while, it looked like they weren't going to make it. It was the mid-'90s, and comic book writer Steve Niles was down and out in Los Angeles. In quick succession, Disney Interactive had hired him, moved him across the country from Pittsburgh to the West Coast — and then laid him off.

The character Cal McDonald was Niles' big property at the time. A hard-boiled, paranormal detective who solves cases with the help of a zombie sidekick and a network of ghouls, Cal appears in a book Niles wrote, called Criminal Macabre. Cal, like Niles, relocates to Los Angeles. Once there, Cal, also like Niles, meets some dubious characters. Niles went around town pitching Cal and every other story he had to anybody in Hollywood who would listen.

One of the ideas kicking around in his head was about a town in Alaska where it's night for a good portion of the year. He'd read about an Alaskan hamlet that outlawed alcohol because the depression rate was so high, where the townsfolk were imbued with a kind of survivor mentality. Niles immediately thought, "vampires." Not that he knew what to do with the idea, exactly. Make it a movie maybe? He'd pitched it earlier as a comic book to Vertigo, the only big indie publisher at the time. It didn't want it.

Neither did Hollywood. Mostly because they didn't get it. "Let me throw a wrinkle at you," one studio executive said. "What if there was a diamond buried under the town, and the vampires wanted it, and that was why they came to the town, because that diamond would turn them into day walkers."

"What?" Niles said.

"I just don't understand the vampires' motivation," the executive said.

Niles sighed and leaned forward. "To kill you," he said.

It was downhill from there.

"They were picturing Bela Lugosi running around in a cape in the snow," Niles says.

It is a decade later, and Niles is now 46 — wiry, energetic, a bit on the scruffy side. Back in the days of manifold rejection, he was 33 years old, making $125 a week working retail at Book City in Burbank.

He is sitting in his home office, in the cozy Toluca Lake house he shares with his girlfriend, cats, dogs, a turtle and, conservatively, several thousand toy skulls, robots, sea creatures, zombies and miscellaneous monsters. His office is not so much a man cave as a boy cave — a teenage horror geek's wet dream.

Eventually, someone took a chance. Niles' friend Ted Adams of IDW Publishing liked the vampires-in-Alaska idea. "To me it was a no-brainer," Adams recalls. "It stood out as a great high-concept story, something you could describe in three or four sentences. It was like Mardi Gras for vampires."

IDW, then a fledgling company, published the resulting story, titled 30 Days of Night, as a comic book miniseries.

When it came out, suddenly, everybody who initially said no was interested. And suddenly, the tone of the Hollywood meetings changed.

"They were blowing us off in a different way," Niles recalls. "Instead of 'Thank you for coming in,' it was 'Thank you for coming in. We're gonna go talk to some people.' "

Agents swore up and down on their mothers' lives that Niles had never offered them the idea before. A bidding war ensued — MGM versus Sony versus DreamWorks. Sony won, and produced the film via Columbia Pictures, working with Evil Dead director Sam Raimi, Niles' longtime hero.

The comic book and resultant 2009 film were the making of both Niles and the tiny independent company that published him. It was IDW's breakout hit. Now, the company is the third largest comic book publisher in the United States and dukes it out each year for the top indie-publisher slot with Dark Horse (of the Hellboy franchise) and Image (of Walking Dead).

"It was a huge moment for comics," Niles says. "The fact that it was a little tiny independent comic made it special."

For a year or so after Niles sold the movie rights, everything he touched found a buyer: The mass of stories he'd been writing since he was 15, the Bigfoot sagas and Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde narratives and mutant–demon baby tales he'd been stashing away in desk drawers. The fairy tale came true. Lovers of independent comics took heart: One of their own had made it. "30 Days of Night gave me my career," Niles says. "I had all but given up."

Life is a series, however, not a one-off. Like most success stories, Niles' is a lesson in the grind of the everyday as much as in how luck favors the prepared mind. These days, comic sales are down while online pirating is up. Which means people are reading them, yes, "but they're stealing them," Niles says.

"You are killing the stuff you want," he'll tell kids. "If you like corporately controlled art, keep it up."

Yes, 30 Days of Night was a million-dollar deal. But Niles didn't get a million bucks. He made a few hundred thousand. He bought a house. But talk about horror: His ex-wife took it with her when they divorced.

"I rent now," he says with a shrug. "I live check to check, project to project. Someone became a millionaire off 30 Days of Night, just not me."

If he thought about the unfairness of it, he believes he'd lose his mind.

He is doing a relaunch of 30 Days of Night, in which the vampires get really mad at humans for wrecking the planet. Vampires are immortal and have to live here for quite a bit longer than we do. They regard humans as food. Seen from their perspective, Niles explains, "It's like finding out cows are destroying the Earth."

In case you were wondering, that's their motivation.
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GrayRider · Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2012 12:35 am Post subject:

Wow. So Gary signed away all rights in '78, no doubt for a less than stellar sum, and now that creation is bringing in the bucks. Pretty sad if Gary was that short sighted, but if he signed it all away he's got no leg to stand on.

It's pretty F'd up that Marvel would squash him trying to make a little money off of his creation, but I agree PD, it's a bit of payback from Marvel for Gary daring to sue them. It sure ain't right, or fair, but unfortunately Marvel has the law on their side.
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Wolfen · Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2012 2:01 am Post subject:

I didn't know Gary signed the rights away. Still,I would think Marvel would still help him and Ploog out some since they both should get something.

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