If Stan thought the Power Girl thing was hypocritical, he hadn't seen anything yet. There has never been a sadder, shallower, more ignominious attempt to cash in on a famous name in comics than Stan Lee Media. And that is saying something. The company seemed like a reasonable prospect at first. It generated superhero franchises under the Stan Lee brand, with Lee's exact degree of creative involvement nebulous as per usual. A staff of 165 created a Web portal that beat out Warner and Disney to win a Best of Show Web Award in 2000. Then the dot-com bubble burst. And then things got ugly. The bankrupt shell of the company, long after it dismissed its staff and stopped creating anything of value, filed lawsuit after lawsuit against Lee, Lee's other ventures and Marvel, essentially arguing that Lee co-created Marvel's characters and they were his by right, but also that he'd signed a deal with SLM which meant anything he created was theirs by right. The people involved really seemed to believe they could out-lawyer Disney in cases where they were clearly in the wrong. That worked out about as well as you'd expect.
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.
