George Khoury on Marvelman/Miracleman saga

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Alan Davis
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Joined: Sat Aug 06, 2005 9:13 pm

Re: George Khoury on Marvelman/Miracleman saga

Post by Alan Davis »

I’m pretty irritated by these postings.
After George Khoury messed up my contribution on the original Kimota book from TwoMorrows back in 2001 he assured me it was all an error and asked me to contribute to the new book so he could get it right. The book isn’t out yet but Khoury has posted what he describes as a ‘light summary’ that continues to promote the same inaccuracies.
Among other errors he repeats the fallacy that my falling out with Alan Moore ended Marvelman in Warrior but worst of all, while he saw fit to quote others, he has reduced my contribution to an inarticulate and misleading paraphrasing
—(Side note: Although Alan Davis retained the rights to his MM artwork and creations, he’s stated that he never received any payment for the Eclipse reprints)
As more than one person has pointed out already, why would anyone expect payment if they were retaining what they were selling? I have no idea how my assertion that Eclipse published my art against my wishes and without my permission could be reduced to the above.
http://www.mania.com/alan-moore-reflect ... rticle_117

KA: Well, certainly. And, it’s led to this courtroom nightmare between Neil Gaiman and Todd McFarlane, after he bought the rights to Eclipse, hoping to pick up the character. As I understand, you passed on your stake to Mr. Gaiman when you handed the book over to him at Eclipse, did you not?
AM: That’s right, because I’d not been any happier with the way that the character was handled by Eclipse and, I didn’t trust the people there either. They had made certain promises to me that I wanted to be absolutely sure that the artist at that time, Alan Davis, was happy about his work being reprinted. And, I told them that I could not commence writing any new work until they had got that affirmation. They finally left it until the last minute, and then asked me why I hadn’t got the new Marvelman work in, at which point I reiterated my request for some proof that Alan Davis was okay about the whole thing. They said that they were getting this proof—and that they really needed me to start work—that this proof existed, that it was on its way, and they would be showing it to me as soon as possible. I started work because I believed that they were telling the truth. I later found out this was not the case. So, by the time I’d finished working with Marvelman, I was pretty sick of all the publishers that had been involved with it up to that point. I knew that Neil had always been interested in the characters, and was probably the only writer who would be able to take it off in his own direction and would be able to do a good job with the script. But, like I said, when I asked if he and Mark Buckingham wanted to take over the strip, I did say that I was very uncertain about the ownership of a lot of this stuff and that it might cause him a lot of trouble, which, unfortunately, I think it did. Neil has been through an awful lot of trouble with Todd McFarlane. Eclipse never owned Marvelman. Throughout all of this, the character has always been owned by Mick Anglo. Anyone else that said they owned it wasn’t telling the truth.
I have to admit I never spotted this unexpected validation of my assertion. I was maybe overwhelmed by guilt that Alan’s creativity was impaired by his concern over my treatment from Eclipse. So much so that he forgot that he had my address and phone number!
I’d hoped by now that the whole Marvelman thing would have become, rightfully, ancient history but now that Marvel is making plans I’m sure I’ll have to listen to far more ill-informed mythology before too long.

Alan
Ilke
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Post by Ilke »

It's noted in the latest 'Cancellations' list from Diamond that Kimota! The Miracleman Companion: The Definitive Edition HC has been cancelled by TwoMorrows Publishing.

http://previews.diamondcomics.com/suppo ... Cancel.txt
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