The following pages are the first part of a minimally edited transcript of the three-day trial for Marv Wolfman's lawsuit against Marvel Characters, Inc. and its licensing partners held Nov. 15-17, 1999. Wolfman claimed that he, not Marvel, owned the characters he created while working at Marvel and that Marvel had no right to license his character Blade for a recent popular motion picture. The implications of Wolfman's suit were far-reaching and a victory for him could have had a great impact on the comics industry, yet Judge Roderick McKelvie ruled in Marvel's favor on Nov. 6, 2000.

The Blade trial and its accompanying briefs and exhibits constituted a crash course in the comics profession for the judge, and it seems clear that he was especially curious to learn about the unwritten rules and conventions that have guided the behavior and professional expectations of comics creators and publishers. Was there a standard industry-wide practice under which Wolfman or Marvel could have assumed that he or it was the owner of a particular creative property?

Marvel's answer was: Yes, everyone knew if you put something into a Marvel comic, it wasn't yours anymore; all creations were permanent residents of what Marvel called its House of Ideas. Wolfman's answer, however, was that there was no standard practice, that the comics industry allowed for a variety of different arrangements between creator and publisher. In support of this he told anecdotes about writers (Don McGregor, Steve Gerber) he knew who had claimed ownership over characters they had created while working at Marvel. He told about colleagues who had acknowledged Wolfman's control over his characters by seeking his permission whenever those characters were to be used. And when Wolfman ran out of anecdotes, his sole witness -- professional anecdote-teller Mark Evanier -- was called to the stand to tell about things he had heard about the varying circumstances surrounding other comics creators and their creations.

Not present were the protagonists of Wolfman's anecdotes, the creators themselves. No comics creators were called to testify on Wolfman's behalf about their firsthand experiences with publishers. Since much of Wolfman and Evanier's testimony concerned second-hand information, the judge frequently dismissed their comments as hearsay.

Instead of testifying on the witness stand, most of those creators were waiting at home to see how the trial would come out. Several comics professionals have expressed a strong interest in Wolfman's suit to the Journal, many hinting that they had their own suits ready to go if Wolfman were to succeed.

The Journal attempted to contact creators whose names came up in Wolfman's testimony, to confirm the accuracy of Wolfman's representations, to get their views of industry conditions in the 1970s and to ask where they stood on the issues raised by the Blade trial. Their comments appear in sidebars to the trial transcript.

The trial opened with statements by Wolfman's attorney, Michael Diliberto; Marvel's attorney, David Fleischer; and New Line Productions attorney Louis Petrich.

(To read the first half of the Journal's reprinting of the Marv Wolfman trial transcripts, please see Comics Journal #236, on sale at better retailers nationwide.)