Only The Valiant

Valiant Entertainment got a whole bunch of money, and a whole bunch of new management, and announced plans to roll out new comics in 2012.

Peter Cuneo, former CEO of Marvel, has joined Valaint Entertainment as the Chairman of the company, and this comes along with an investment by Cuneo & Co., to give them working capital to produce new books in 2012.

They are planning to stick with the core characters, X-O, Harbinger, Bloodshot, Ninjak, etc., from what it sounds like.

Read the Press Release here.

Read the news on the major news sites:

Story on CBR

Story at Newsarama

Bill Jemas, former publisher at Marvel Comics, is now involved with Valiant Entertainment.

Rich Johnston at bleeding cool made the announcement of Jemas’s involvement. The announcement itself doesn’t say much about the capacity of his involvement, so that is still up for speculation. Whether he is an employee, a shareholder, an adviser, or any other capacity is not publicly known.

Jemas is known for being the publisher at Marvel Comics in 2000, the year that turned around Marvel from the brink of bankruptcy to the publishing success it is now. The big projects that were started during his tenure were Marvel Knights and the Ultimate Universe, both were very popular and successful.

He seems like the kind of guy that is willing to take risks and try different stuff, which is probably a good thing for Valiant.

I did a little leg work and ordered a copy of the complaint against Jim Shooter (thank you eLaw.com). I’ve got a copy of the lawsuit document that VE filed to sue Jim Shooter.

Essentially, the following seems to be the major scope:

• Jim Shooter has had the job of editor-in-chief for Valiant Entertainment since December 2008, and he was working on creating a line of comics to relaunch the Valiant Universe.
• Valiant was still negotiating with Classic Media to get the license for Magnus, Solar, and Turok. They really wanted these characters for the Valiant Universe.
• Apparently the deal with Dark Horse was not set in stone.
• Jim Shooter had a non-compete agreement with Valiant.
• They allege that Jim Shooter negotiated with Dark Horse to work for them, and to help them acquire the rights to the Gold Key characters while still working for Valiant, which violates the non-compete agreement and the non-disclosure agreement.

Jim Shooter was EiC! This was every Valiant fan’s dream come true, new Valiant stories under the direction of Big Jim himself.

It looks like Jim Shooter will have to file a document in response to this one, I’ll be working to get that when it is filed as well.

You can read the actual document filed with the New York County Clerk here:

VALIANT complaint against SHOOTER (pdf)

I got this document from a public source by my own means, and don’t mind sharing it here on this site. Permission is NOT given to copy the file and distribute it elsewhere. Please do not copy the file and post it elsewhere.

I previously posted about the lawsuit that Valiant Entertainment filed against Jim Shooter.

After hearing about the lawsuit, I sent out some requests for comment from a few of the parties involved.

Valiant Entertainment’s response was simple:

“Valiant Entertainment was unable to comment.

I also contacted Dark Horse Comics to see if they had any response or comment at this time, and they had a similarly simple response:

“We have No Comment at this time.

I’m going to try to contact Jim Shooter when I get home from work today. Perhaps I can get a trifecta of “No Comments”.

Also, I ordered a copy of the complaint filed with the New York County Clerk today, I hope that it will show up some time tomorrow. Expect some comments and information about the lawsuit after that arrives in my inbox.

A month or so ago, I wrote about a book that had been solicited from Image Comics, The Timeless Adventures of the Eternal Warrior. The title of this book is clearly in conflict with the Eternal Warrior trademark registered to Valiant Entertainment. After this was solicited, there was some speculation amongst Valiant fans that noticed this solicitation.

If this book were to be published, it would be quite a problem for Valiant Entertainment, showing that others are infringing on their protected trademarks, without them doing anything to counter that. Since some people have non-valiantly speculated that Valiant Entertainment is a dead company (because they have been very quiet), they thought that this might not be addressed by them.

It turns out that Image Comics has changed the title of the book to The Eternal Conflicts of the Cosmic Warrior. I wasn’t able to find any information about why this was changed, but it makes sense that it was changed because it was brought to their attention that this title is a trademark infringement.

I’m pretty sure that the use of this title was unintentional, and in fact, I ordered this book to check it out. Maybe the use of the title was good, because it drew some extra attention to the book!

Interesting stuff!

The Timeless Adventures of the Eternal Warrior, by Paul Grist, is being solicited this month in Previews. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, since Valiant Entertainment seems to have this trademark registered.

The solicitation of the book is as follows:

THE TIMELESS ADVENTURES OF THE ETERNAL WARRIOR (ONE-SHOT)
story PAUL GRIST
art & cover PAUL GRIST
OCTOBER 7
32 PAGES / FC
$3.50

The Eternal Warrior. He’s the Cosmic Champion, a wanderer through time, forever caught in the battle between order and chaos

There’s a woman called Bernadette who wants to be the Empress of the Universe, and she’s just found the one thing that could help her achieve that. The only man who can stop her is the Eternal Warrior. And he’s just arrived 10 minutes too late!

So what is the issue here?

It comes down to the difference between copyrights and trademarks.

Copyrights protect the content of a published work. For instance, the copyright for Eternal Warrior would refer to a character named Gilad that is ten thousand years old, wears a jacket with strange containers down one side, has a glove with spikes on it, and has long flowing hair like Fabio.

Trademarks protect titles of products. In this case, the title Eternal Warrior is registered by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to Valiant Entertainment. An online record of this registration is located here.

In particular, the use of the words Eternal Warrior as the title of a product is registered to Valiant Entertainment, Inc, and includes:

Printed matter, namely, comic books; graphic novels; books featuring stories in illustrated form; books relating to comic book characters; periodicals, namely, magazines featuring illustrated stories for children and adults; comic strips; posters; art prints; lithographic prints; seriographic prints; limited edition prints; collector’s cards featuring comic book characters; trading cards; trading card albums

As far as I understand Trademark laws, the contents of this comic solicited by Image are fine. Even the description of the character within the book as the Eternal Warrior is probably fine. The use of the words Eternal Warrior in the title of this book seems to be a violation of VEI’s registered trademark.

These trademark laws help to protect both consumer and producer. If VEI does eventually print a new Eternal Warrior comic book, it is in the companies interest and in our interest as consumers to only have one product in comic book stores called Eternal Warrior.

If I were to recommend to a friend that he go to the comic shop and buy the latest issue of Eternal Warrior, there should not be any confusion about which comic book I am referring to. With two different books, with entirely different content in the marketplace, the consumer could reasonably be confused.

It will be interesting to see what happens, and if this comic book does come out with the title that it is solicited with. I will be ordering a copy, at the very least for posterity, to see how this plays out.