Screwed By The Lawyers / Comic Books

• In the late 1990s, Black Mermaid Productions of Australia were responsible for ElfQuest: Wavedancers, which featured a group of aquatic elves. "Creative differences" between Black Mermaid and EQ publisher Warp Graphics led to the cancellation of the series, and an agreement that neither company would reprint it. Warp came out with its own Wavedancers series featuring new characters, while Black Mermaid is reportedly working on something called Elf Fin.
• Jim Shooter's Defiant Comics was going to publish the comic Plasm. The title was changed to Warriors of Plasm when Marvel claimed the title was too similar to the Marvel UK comic Plasmer. The legal costs contributed to Defiant Comics going bankrupt.
• Zenith could not be reprinted for some time because Grant Morrison claimed that when Rebellion bought the rights to 2000 AD from IPC, it apparently didn't include the rights to Zenith. The series was published in collected form in the mid-2010s, although the precise legal resolution remains murky.
• Morrison's Doom Patrol and Flex Mentallo were kept out of reprints until the 2000s because of a trademark dispute with the Charles Atlas bodybuilding company over the character Flex, who began as a parody of Atlas's iconic comic strip advertisements.
  • On a similar note, his Gideon Stargrave mini-series, a spin-off of The Invisibles, is unlikely to ever get republished, as Morrison admitted that Stargrave is basically an expy of Jerry Cornelius, and Cornelius creator Michael Moorcock bears a grudge against Morrison for doing an homage to one of his stories, which Moorcock interpreted as plagiarism.
• Something of a running gag with Todd McFarlane and Spawn.
  • McFarlane was sued by NHL player Anthony Rory Twist over the mobster Tony Twist, who McFarlane had admitted was named after him. In 2004 McFarlane was found guilty of having profited on Twist's likeness and eventually settled out of court.
  • McFarlane's habit of claiming sole ownership over the characters he co-created - dating back to his work on Venom - has gotten him into a lot of trouble with Neil Gaiman, who wrote the stories that introduced the key characters Angela, Cogliostro, and Medieval Spawn in 1993. This resulted in an arduous legal battle that lasted until 2004, where a court hearing granted them joint ownership. Gaiman later returned to court over expies of Medieval Spawn and Angela and McFarlane's use of Miracleman, and it was ultimately decided that Gaiman would get Angela - eventually selling her to Marvel Comics in 2013 - and McFarlane would get Medieval Spawn and Cog.
  • Another well-known 80's superhero comic that was caught in a rights-ownership dispute for decades is the Alan Moore/Neil Gaiman Marvelman (Miracle Man in America) - Rebellion, IPC, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore and Todd McFarlane all had a claim on the series. Marvel apparently cleared the rights for the earliest stories featuring the character, but not for its run in Warrior magazine or Eclipse Comics. Said run, featuring the work of Moore and Gaiman, is naturally of the most interest to comic readers and was left as a particularly sad example of Keep Circulating the Tapes. McFarlane claimed he had gotten the rights to Miracleman when he purchased Eclipse's creative assets in 1996, and introduced the character into Spawn as a cosmic entity called the "Man Of Miracles/Mother of Creation". In 2001, Gaiman launched a second lawsuit against McFarlane to get ownership of the character back, and in 2009 Marvel purchased the character from his original creator, Mick Anglo. In 2014, Marvel finally began reprinting the Moore issues from the start in serial form, and has promised that once the Gaiman issues run out they will publish new issues that continue the arcs as originally planned, while Spawn underwent a Continuity Reboot that retconned Miracleman out of the comic.
• The 1978 one-shot comic Superman vs. Muhammad Ali was not reprinted until 2010, as the cover included the likenesses of over a hundred 1970s celebrities in the background. The lawyers had to be convinced no one would sue.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics):
  • In 2010, Ken Penders, former head writer for the series, filed copyright claims for all of his characters and creations, prompting Archie Comics to file a lawsuit against him and take him to court to disprove his claims. The case swung in Penders' favor when it became clear that Archie could not prove their ownership of the properties in question nor could they prove their writers signed a contract granting Archie and Sega legal ownership of characters created for the comic. In a panic, Archie decided to remove all of Penders' creations from the comic while it was in the middle of a story arc that centered around them, throwing the plot completely out of whack and making fans (and the creative staff) livid. In the end, the two sides settled, and though Penders stated that Archie could be allowed to use his creations and reprint his stories anyway if they paid royalties, the conditions he put up for that didn't sit well with Archie and they instead decided to perform a soft reboot for the series via a Cosmic Retcon at the end of Sonic the Hedgehog/Mega Man: Worlds Collide. The character removals also extended to all creators whose names were not Sega, DiC or Ian Flynn due to the aforementioned inability of Archie to prove they made the creators sign a contract over story and character ownership. Conversely, when it comes to Penders himself, the whole affair can best be described as bit of a Pyrrhic Victory for him. While he might have the rights to the names of and some concepts related to the characters he created, he can in most cases not really put them to any use without making heavy alterations to their design as they in their original form would be highly derivative of Sega's property and could therefore easily place him on the receiving end of this trope. Not to mention that, regardless of his motivations, Penders' actions and their consequences made him a pariah in the Sonic fandom.
  • Failed negotiations between Sega and Archie in 2017 directly resulted in the termination of the comic book series and transfer of the property to IDW Publishing.
• For a couple of years, Viz featured a strip called Captain Morgan and his Hammond Organ, about a pirate captain who was more interested in playing 70s pop and disco hits on his Wurlitzer than in raiding other ships (it makes no more sense in context). Unfortunately, the copyright holders of the songs complained. Viz didn't have a leg to stand on legally, and the only way out was to have used songs that were out of copyright, like hymns and spirituals. Given that this would have killed the joke, Viz had no choice but to drop the strip.
• Marvel Comics' had a few cases of this with licensed properties they'd integrated into the Marvel Universe:
  • Rom: Spaceknight probably won't be reprinted. Rom's a space based hero who normally battles an Eldritch Abomination race called the Dire Wraiths. However, Marvel only licensed the character of Rom from Parker Brothers, who'd created the original Rom toy; he's now owned by Hasbro after a series of acquisitions. Conversely, Hasbro's comic partner IDW Publishing rebooted Rom for the shared universe of their Transformers and G.I. Joe comics, but had to completely strip him and the Wraiths of their Marvel-created elements (including Rom's human form, his supporting cast and the character designs of the Wraiths). The best Marvel can do these days is a Serial Numbers Filed Off offspring who talks about a great hero - although the Dire Wraiths still turn up as villains now and then.
  • This also happened to the Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1977) series, in which he rampaged through Earth-616, chased by S.H.I.E.L.D. Once Marvel lost the rights, one of the villains initially mutated Godzilla into something different, so that he could still appear as a nameless Kaiju (though that was retconned). He reappeared years later with a different, yet still Godzilla-like look, appearing just long enough so that his storyline with another character could be completed with his death. It wouldn't be the last time Godzilla would appear in a prominent comic book featuring superheroes, as the MonsterVerse incarnation (and that franchise's versions of other kaiju) would crossover with DC Comics for Justice League vs. Godzilla vs. Kong.
  • Shogun Warriors is yet another example of this, as the giant robots names and likenesses were licensed from the eponymous Mattel toy line. Once the series and licensing deal ended, the three robots were effectively Killed Offscreen, but the pilots, supporting cast and antagonists remained available to Marvel.
• Spider-Man: The storyline Spider-Verse had virtually every Spider-Man in existence show up in some form. However, there are eight that were not allowed to appear. Seven were confirmed, though: the Spider-Man portrayed by Tobey Maguire, the Spider-Man portrayed by Andrew Garfield, the Spider-Man of The Spectacular Spider-Man, the Spider-Man of Spider-Man: The New Animated Series and the three Spider-Boys from the Amalgam Universe. The first four Spideys are owned by Sony Pictures, the latter three are (both legally and in-universe) half-Marvel, half-DC Comics (and it goes the other way too: DC stated they couldn't use any Amalgam character in Convergence either for the same reason). There was a workaround. One of the issues featured a conversation between two of the Spider-Men, who mentioned having seen (respectively) a Spider-Man who looked exactly like Tobey Maguire (referred to as "the guy from Seabiscuit") and a Spider-Man who looked exactly like Andrew Garfield (referred to as "the guy from The Social Network"). Additionally, they mentioned having seen a Spider-Man who kept teaching grammar and a Spider-Man who wouldn't stop singing show tunes.
• It's rumored that the reason Eli Bradley (AKA Patriot) hasn't appeared in any of the Young Avengers-related comics in recent years is due to a legal dispute between Marvel and the estate of Robert Morales, who created the Bradley family.
• In the early 1990s, Marvel UK was given the license from Warner Bros. to publish Tiny Toon Adventures comic books in most of Europe (except the US, where they were published on magazines from DC Comics). Marvel lost that license after just a year, were bought by Disney over a decade later, and Warner made all their comics based off their property published by DC in all territories following that stint, so it's safe to say the comics will not be reprinted anytime soon. The comics became extremely valuable and hard to find over time because of the comic book line's short lifespan, and Marvel UK isn't bothering to negotiate with their rival.
• Inverted with Marvel's Super-Villain Team-Up. After its original cancellation, DC attempted to trademark the term "Super Villain", so Marvel put out a few additional issues to prevent that.
• It's not just Disney's ownership of Marvel Comics that's preventing the comic book line of Nickelodeon's The Ren & Stimpy Show from being reprinted. Issue #6, dated May 1993, features Spider-Man as a main character, making his removal in a reprinting impossible.
• Whoo, boy. X-Men and Fantastic Four was screwed by this trope between 2015 and 2019. Around 2015, Disney and Marvel Comics was angry at 20th Century Fox for its iron grip on the Fantastic Four movie rights and the mess that was Fantastic Four (2015). To absolutely deny Fox any sort of promotion (and to spite themselves in the process), Marvel went full denial towards the Fantastic Four and the X-Men, removing them from cartoons and games, cancelling the Fantastic Four's comic and trying to raise the popularity of the similar-looking group The Inhumans over the X-Men. Tensions would cool when Fox had a changing of the guard and Deadpool ended up becoming the biggest R-Rated movie in history with Disney's acquisition of Fox allowing both teams to return to media in full force. Despite Marvel owning rights to just about every other media type to the character, fans are fearful that this will be repeated concerning Spider-Man after talks broke down between Disney and Sony, leading Spidey to be nearly jettisoned out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe until finally deciding to give him another film (what happens afterwards is currently unknown).
• There was a Milestone Comics revival announced in 2015 to debut in 2018 that was cancelled due to an ongoing legal dispute between Dwayne Mcduffie’s wife on behalf of his estate and the other two creators of the company. She has claimed in court that they went so far as to make a new company behind her back to cut her out of the half she owns to make the deal with DC Comics for the revival.
• Once Upon a Caper was originally released as Once Upon a Super Hero, but had to change its name due to DC and Marvel holding a joint trademark over the term "super hero". And it's likely we'll never get more than the first issue due to a rights dispute.

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