Tom over at the Comic Reporter has a post this morning about the lawsuit filed by Stan Lee Media, Inc. against comics legend Stan Lee in June:
If you’ve been following the story, you know that at its heart is an Employment Agreement/Rights Assignment that the plaintiffs believed Lee entered into with Stan Lee Media in October 1998. (That date is in dispute, some saying it wasn’t formalized until 13 months later; others noting that it may have been an agreement with an SLM precursor.) Basically, the plaintiffs feel that agreement assigned all of Stan’s business endeavors and rights to same to Stan Lee Media, save for monies earned for the publicity duties Lee performed under a lifetime contract with Marvel. This includes all the work he did for the company, all the work he started while at the company that has since gone on to be utilized by POW!, things like his newspaper strip work, and, most importantly in a dollars and cents way, a claim for 10 percent of Marvel’s film profits that Lee’s lawyers later negotiated into a settlement for a sum believed to be in the low eight figures.
Of course, nearly every word in those last two sentences is up for debate, too.
This USA Today story from 2004 has some additional background on Stan Lee Media, Inc.
July 12th, 2007 at 1:06 pm
Is there anyone or anything that hasn’t either sued Stan Lee or been sued by him yet?
July 12th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
I remember a suit against Marvel, and then there’s this suit. What other lawsuits has he been involved in?
July 12th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
Seems like there were more. I couldn’t name them, though.
July 13th, 2007 at 1:39 am
Among the allegations is bankruptcy fraud. Stan signed an agreement in 2002 that was approved by the BK court. He pulled out assets free and clear of debt and promised to develop them for the benefit of shareholders and creditors. The court approved them to be put into a company called SLC LLC. Stan never formed that company. Recorded documents show that the assets were transferred shortly before the dismissal in late 2006. To whom were they transferred? By some magic, they were transferred into QED, a subsidiary of POW! No one seems to know how that could have happened without court approval or knowledge.