The latest brief has been filed in the Marvel vs Kirby case , and, keeping to form, the brief is full of accusations and claims.  There’s the usual argument that Stan Lee is a liar who can’t be trusted, and that the court was totally wrong in it’s finding by ignoring all of the Kirby evidence, which I expect also includes contradictory evidence in the form of archival Kirby interviews (such as the famous Comic Journal interview where Kirby claimed to have created everything from Superman on down).  The brief focuses on the usual authorship and work-for-hire debates – debates that may never be resolved to anyone’s satisfaction.  What does stand out is Toberoff’s claims that the District Court has erred by accepting Marvel’s evidence as truth, while denying the Kirby evidence – in particular that presented by Mark Evanier and John Morrow – as hearsay.  However the points of interest in this brief are the first reference to a Thor character that Kirby drew in 1942 (although the br

Now that the Ninth Circuit has ruled that documents contained in the 'Toberoff Timeline' can be introduced into the DC Comics vs Pacific Pictures case, things will begin to get far more interesting.  To summarise the situation, in June 2011 I wrote , "O n May 10, 2010, a suit was filed detailing the exact carve up of the potential non-DC Superman copyright. Whereas the carve up was, originally, 50% to the Siegels and 50% to the Shuster estate, the reality is that it's now completely different. The suit detailed who now owns what and featured a detailed time-line which had the DC lawyers running to file. The document that launched it all is called the "Superman – Marc Toberoff Timeline" and was prepared by an ex-employee of Toberoff, and submitted to DC in 2008. According to the court filing, Toberoff, "…asserted to the federal court that it was privileged, but his position was rejected," which meant that the timeline was now able