When Todd McFarlane broke with Marvel in the early 1990s to publish Spawn at Image Comics, he was loudly defiant of the work-for-hire system that DC and Marvel offered, where creators never owned their creations. He has often called it "the plantation." But when he started hiring big-name writers to work on Spawn, he found it difficult not to become a bit of a plantation owner himself. In a single issue Neil Gaiman wrote (Spawn #9), he co-created Angela and a couple of other characters with McFarlane. McFarlane at first claimed that Gaiman retained creator rights to them, but later described them as his property entirely and treated Gaiman's work as for hire. In 2002, Gaiman sued McFarlane and won co-ownership; in 2012, McFarlane gave Gaiman full ownership of Angela. Gaiman, not especially attached to the creation, sold her to Marvel in 2013. Lots of superheroes have "immigrated" to other universes after being sold to new publishers. What makes Angela's move so bizarre is that almost everything about her was designed to play off Spawn. She was a Spawn-hunter, then his frenemy and romantic foil, and the unforgiving Heaven she served, almost as bad as Hell, had direct implications for Spawn's own story. Forced to develop a new context for her in the Marvel Universe, Jason Aaron, Al Ewing, Lee Garbett and Simone Bianchi recast her version of Heaven, or "Heven," as the undiscovered tenth realm out of Thor's nine realms. Angela was also suddenly Thor's sister that he'd never known about. Her entire original reason for being was gone, as if Buffy The Vampire Slayer was now Buffy The Girl Still Picking A Career. They might as well have revealed she was secretly Aunt May, while they were at it.
T Campbell has written quite a few online comics series and selected work for Marvel, Archie and Tokyopop. His longest-running works are Fans, Penny and Aggie-- and his current project with co-writer Phil Kahn, Guilded Age.
