Group claims to own Marvel characters

Group claims to own Marvel characters

	Published : Fri, 16 Mar 2007 22:56 By : Agencies Print this Story

NEW YORK (AP) - A company once affiliated with comic book legend Stan Lee has filed a lawsuit against Marvel Entertainment claiming part ownership of characters including Spider-Man, the X-Men, The Fantastic Four and the Incredible Hulk.

The suit was filed Thursday by Stan Lee Media, an Internet publishing firm co-founded by Lee that went belly up seven years ago amid a stock manipulation scandal.

Now emerged from bankruptcy under new ownership, the company claims Lee signed away the rights to his creations in 1998 in exchange for salary and company stock, then valued at $100 million. But the company claims the agreement entitles it to 50 percent of the many millions of dollars Marvel made licensing comic book characters for blockbuster movies.

Marvel released a statement through its publicist calling the suit 'without merit.' It also issued a statement from Lee, who now holds the title of publisher emeritus at Marvel.

'I do not support this action and believe the suit to be baseless,' Lee said.

Lee himself filed a suit in January challenging the legitimacy of Stan Lee Media's current management group. In it, he called them 'rogue opportunists who seek to capitalize on the outrageous misappropriation' of his work.

Stan Lee's association with Stan Lee Media was brief and turbulent.

He initially founded the company in the late 1990s with Miami businessman Peter F. Paul in an attempt to move some of his comic-book creations onto the Web. The company was briefly a dot-com darling. Its publicly traded stock soared, then abruptly crashed, wiping out hundreds of millions of investment dollars. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2001. Paul pleaded guilty in 2005 to improperly manipulating the company's stock price.

Lee was never implicated in the scandal. He went on to sue Marvel himself for a share of its movie revenue. He eventually settled the case and has been on good terms with the company since 2005.