Beth Elderkin at io9:
Comics, Contracts, and Covid: Inside the Scandal at Terrific ProductionTerrific Production is a comics publisher (or will be, if it ever gets around to publishing any comics) owned by Andrew Rev. Rev ran a company called Comico back during the '90s bubble, where he developed a reputation for not paying people (the article recounts a story of Bill Willingham driving to Comico headquarters -- in Chicago, from Seattle -- and demanding that Rev write him a check or he'd start breaking shit).
It would seem that Rev's back up to his old tricks, and he's been focusing specifically on recruiting inexperienced Filipino artists who don't know who he is and aren't familiar with how the comics industry typically works.
For three of the creators we spoke to—Mainé, Urdinola, and Casas—the dispute was because of the contract. Rev would claim that the first contracts they’d signed were invalid for things like general mistakes, Shepard sending it without his approval, Rev never signing it, or it not coming from a Terrific Production email address. Mainé, whose contract had Rev’s signature, said Rev accused him of “forgery.” Rev repeated this accusation to io9 (though he didn’t mention Mainé by name), and Shepard backed it up in his only response to our questions. Shepard, identifying the person as Mainé, claimed Mainé “tried to pull a con on us. A wrong page rate and Euros vs USD,” but emails obtained by io9 show Shepard agreeing to Mainé’s rate and preferred currency, and sending him the contract with Rev’s signature. We asked Shepard to provide documentation to support his account, but he didn’t reply. Rev suggested we “get an expert to compare signatures,” so we asked him to provide examples. He didn’t reply to our request.
The article's worth a read, at least for the Bill Willingham anecdotes. Shit's wild.
(via Heidi MacDonald at
the Beat)
