I’ve talked about how Spider-Man 2099 was THE comic for me when I was growing up.
Well, the writer of that comic is a guy named Peter David. He’s one of those people that within the world of comics is first ballot hall of fame. Outside that world, he is largely unknown.
I can’t even begin to list his great accomplishments, but the biggest is perhaps single-handedly reviving The Hulk. Hulk has become a garbage tier book and nobody wanted to write it. He took the helm and made it incredible (pun intended) for TWELVE years straight. If not for Peter, it’s not unlikely that The Hulk would be some relic of the past instead of perpetually relevant.
Just look at how long this dude’s Wikipedia page is.
As is typically the case in the world of Marvel/DC the actual creators get the short end of the stick. They are doing work for hire. If they create some famous characters, they don’t see financial benefits from merch, movies, tv, etc. The benefits are not great. And in their old age they don’t have much to fall back on. Happened to Jack Kirby, and still happens now.
They’ve got a new Spider-Verse movie coming out with my boy Spider-Man 2099 featuring in it heavily, and what is Peter David, the creator, going to see from that? Not much!
As you can imagine, at the only moderately old age of 66 he’s not doing too well, and his family has to resort to some gofundme biz because Disney certainly isn’t going to help him out.
ROM was a toy that became a comic book in the '70s and '80s. But due to lots of hassle with licensing and rights changing hands, the original ROM comic hasn’t been able to be legally reprinted. Hasbro and Marvel just announced a new deal, so it’s finally coming back.
We talked about Diamond going bankrupt, but I just now looked at the actual bankruptcy filing. The interesting part is really that it lists their top 30 creditors.
Many of your favorite companies are there.
What I don’t understand is even after losing their monopoly and business slowing down, they shouldn’t be losing money. Their business is such that retailers pre-order things months in advance. If they don’t make unnecessary orders from suppliers, they shouldn’t have too much unsold inventory. And so much of the inventory, like the Pokémon cards, are so easy to move, there should be no problem covering the bill.
How did they fuck this up so badly? I can understand business slowing down to the point where the orders aren’t big enough for them to carry on the business as a whole. But not covering the bill to the suppliers in a presale business makes no sense to me.
For the curious, who don’t want to dig through the article:
He demanded special credits as the creator of Deadpool, separately from Fabian Nicieza, but was ignored, and was credited the same as Nicieza was. It should also be noted - Rob worked on exactly three issues that Deadpool appeared in as an appearance character(And also as a pretty straight up and down knockoff of deathstroke) before he quit. Nicieza is the one who came up with the manner of speaking, the character, and basically everything but the initial look and the name. The other creators of Deadpool as we know him today(and that the movie is based on), Louise Simonson and Joe Kelly, are not credited, which he has no problem with. He’s basically to Deadpool as Bob Kane is to Batman.
Feige “Didn’t Acknowlege” him on the red carpet at the premiere. Feige basically spent his entire time on the red carpet talking to the media and standing for photos.
He didn’t get invited to the Cast-and-crew-only afterparty of a film he didn’t work on, and had no involvement with, and had just assumed he was invited without talking to anyone about it.
Claims that photos of him were taken with the production crew, but that they were not published and/or deleted. He appears to have expected these photos to be used as promotional material for the movie, which again, he did not work on, and was not involved with.
Edit - Also this is the third or fourth time he’s done this exact bit, making a big song and dance about quitting Marvel for good.