Those signs and drawings? Now illegal.

Gary Friedrich co-created Ghost Rider for Marvel and currently depends on the small amount of money he makes at conventions to support himself. In 2007, he sued Marvel and others alleging the rights to the character belonged to the creators because Marvel didn’t register the character’s first appearance in 1972 with the U.S. Copyright Office. Marvel countersued Friedrich for damages for his selling Ghost Rider merchandise online and at conventions.

The final judgement is in, and Daniel Best has the court documents available at his site. Marvel will drop their countersuit if Friedrich pays them $17,000, relinquishes his co-creator credit, and stops selling his own Ghost Rider sketches or other Ghost Rider merchandise. He’s allowed to autograph Ghost Rider merchandise for pay, but it has to be officially-licensed merchandise and he can’t promote himself as the creator of the character on that merchandise he’s signing, which is frickin’ ridiculous. How does that even work? He can sign officially licensed merchandise but can’t tell people he’s the co-creator if there’s a money exchange involved? Oh, that’ll sell merch. People love buying stuff with sharpie marks on it from a guy who doesn’t say who he is or why he’s scribbling on this stuff.

This now means that Gary Friedrich has the right to appeal, and appeal he shall, but it also means that he now owes Marvel Comics, a multi-million dollar making machine, backed by the multi-billion dollar Disney company, $17,000 and cannot ever sell anything related to Ghost Rider, nor can he even say that he created Ghost Rider for any form of gain or advertising. [...] As Friedrich himself has stated, he is unemployed, has no real assets and is, for all intents and purposes, destitute. $17,000 might be chump change for some, but for someone in Friedrich’s situation it’s a lot of cash. [Daniel Best, emphasis ours]

Friedrich didn’t get jack for the first Ghost Rider film, nor is he being paid anything for Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance which opens next Friday. For Friedrich and many other artists in the comics business, selling sketches, prints, and other self-made merchandise at conventions becomes the thing which pays the bills because they aren’t getting royalties on those million and billion dollar franchises they helped create. This ruling doesn’t just hurt Friedrich, but could open the door to other lawsuits against artists selling their own sketches.

A Facebook page has been set up in support of Friedrich, as well as a petition. Stay tuned, because others are rallying to help Friedrich as well.

[Sources: Daniel Best, CBR, and BleedingCool, Image credit: Juan Zavala. Thanks to Steven for the tip.]

Day-and-date does wonders, huh?

In case you were wondering if digital comics were a passing fad, they made $500,000 in 2009, $8 million in 2010, and the numbers in for 2011 are $25 million.

That’s still only a single digit percentage of the market…but consider that DC was only selling digital comics day-and-date for a third of the year, and that Marvel wasn’t fully onboard with this day-and-date thing until after DC demonstrated it would make them lots and lots of money. In fact, Marvel is still pretty gun-shy with their digital strategy; digital availability is spotty at best at the House of Ideas.

2012 promises to be an interesting time for digital comics, to say the least.

image courtesy DC Comics

It’s Wednesday, and that means new comics! What have we got in the pipe for today? A lot of cancelled books, that’s what.

• “All-New Batman The Brave and the Bold” buys the bat-farm with issue #16. Which is kind of a shame, since it had a cute Silver Age for kids vibe.
• Meanwhile, Marvel is canceling “Black Panther” after #529, we assume to make more room for even more X-books and Disney tie-ins. Also getting canceled? “Punisher MAX”.
• Marvel also has a boatload of graphic novels hitting the stands for once, including the eighth volume of “Uncanny X-Men” from the Marvel Masterworks line.
• Dark Horse is rolling out more Conan, and even more Star Wars books.
• IDW is launching a new Doctor Who miniseries, and John Byrne’s Next Men by John Byrne gets a wrap-up mini starting with issue #40
• And finally, Image is putting out a new issue of “Spawn”, shockingly enough, and is debuting a comic called “Thief of Thieves”. So it’s a thief who steals other thieves? Isn’t that kind of like Candleja

[Ed. here: While we're busy finding Seitz, you can see the full release list under the jump.]

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“I still believe in heroes.” — Nick motherf–king Fury

Marvel has released an extended version of the Avengers trailer which played during the Super Bowl yesterday. That trailer and another .gif are below, but first, let’s nerd out about the mystery aliens in Loki’s Army. (Spoilers to follow.) BleedingCool put together a great post on who the aliens in Loki’s army seem to be, and it doesn’t appear to be the Skrull or the Kree after all. Here are some screencaps of the aliens falling from the sky, possibly emerging from the top of a building:

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Welcome to Issue Number One, where we look at this week’s new comic series and miniseries starting up and whether they’re any good.

The answer is, largely, no. You have been warned, there will be spoilers.

Alpha Girl

Zombies as a cultural trope are creeping back into the grave, but we can understand why Image wants as many zombie books as it can get; “The Walking Dead” is their single biggest success in the entire company right now. That said, this book is pretty much a disaster from start to finish; the tone is all over the map, swinging from shamelessly mawkish to bad slapstick from page to page; the characters are incredibly irritating, especially our lead; and the plot setup is shoddy, obviously hoping to use gags to cover up how dumb it is and failing miserably. Meanwhile, the art is too cartoony to carry the heavy stuff while simultaneously somehow not selling the comedy.

This is the kind of book where people screaming “S**T!” is supposed to pass for comedy: they do it three times in the first issue. If you have to give Image money this week, buy the second issue of Fatale. And speaking of Brubaker…
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There’s actually quite a lot hitting stands this week. Well, quite a lot that we care about and/or want to make fun of, so let’s get to it!

• DC puts out Xombi as a trade, and the Animal Man/Swamp Thing crossover kicks into high gear.
• Marvel has the third issue of “Cable Beats Up The Avengers”, er, “X-Sanction”, begins its huge push for Winter Soldier, and also is apparently trying to bring Carnage back with “Carnage U.S.A.”. He kills, eats, and impersonates Miley Cyrus. OK, not really, but that’d be a better story.
• Oh, there’s also a new issue of “The Twelve”. That only took forever.
• Image launches Alpha Girl, which is about all the women of the 1980s being turned into rabid man-eaters (literally). Hoping for another huge hit TV show, guys?
• Also, Fatale #2 is hitting print, so go buy it.
• Dark Horse has “Dawn of the Jedi #0″ as a one-shot.
• IDW has more Locke and Key and they’re also firing up a “Magic: The Gathering” miniseries, since this is apparently 1996.
• And Dynamite is launching “Warriors of Mars”, which crosses over John Carter and Gullivar Jones, and unless you’re a huge pulp fiction nerd, you probably have no idea what I just said.

Let us know what you’re picking up today, and as always, the full list is under the cut.

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