Stan's Marvelous Settlement

In Thursday's post about Marvel movies, I mentioned that that was one of the day's big stories in comics. The other big story was Stan Lee's settlement with Marvel. He'd sued Marvel three years ago for his contractual share of the profits from the recent Marvel movies. While that trial was ongoing, it was often misunderstood that Stan was suing for the actual rights to the characters he co-created. Observers would sometimes get up in arms that, although Stan was getting his due, the artists that he originally worked with were still being ignored. But this was entirely a contractual dispute--Stan said the company owed him money it had promised and, as these things usually go, Marvel said it didn't. A big court decision in Stan's favor a couple of months back led to the expectation that Marvel would be coming to the table to bargain before very long.

That's exactly what happened, and now that a settlement has been announced, it seems that we're not getting the same kind of misunderstanding. (Examples are here and here.) The details aren't exactly public, but the assumption is that Stan gets $10 million. (The reasons for that assumption can be found in those same links.) Apparently everybody's happy. The AP has it on good authority that at least Stan is. They quote his lawyer: "We are very, very happy with the resolution." Yeah, I guess--although the speculation up until now has been that he would do better. Tom Spurgeon at The Comic Reporter took a look at headlines about the case and speculates that "Lee also seems to have won some sort of right to being referred as sole creator of the Marvel properties and various indifferent press sources even call him a cartoonist." Although a different AP report referred to "cartoonist" Stan Lee (or maybe it was the same one I quoted, but somebody at the Sun-Times knew better and corrected it for their paper), my own quick look at Google News didn't reveal anything about rights. Spurgeon, of course, has far better sources on this than I do.