In 2002, noted comics writer and novelist Neil Gaiman (The Sandman, American Gods) sued writer/artist Todd McFarlane for the profits accruing from some characters that Gaiman had created, in collaboration with McFarlane, for McFarlane's popular Spawn comic series during the 1990s. He claimed that he was a co-creator of the characters, and thus also held their copyright.
But McFarlane claimed that as the writer of Spawn #9, the comic in which the characters first appeared, Gaiman had only provided the ideas. It was he, McFarlane, through his distinctive illustrations and depiction in subsequent issues, who had turned those ideas into actual copyrightable characters.
The Spawn Characters Under Contention
One of the characters was called “Count Nicholas Cogliostro." McFarlane had instructed Gaiman to create a “wisened [sic] sage” to talk to Spawn, the eponymous hero.
Gaiman described the character in a draft of Spawn #9’s script as “a really old bum, a skinny, balding old man, with a grubby greyish-yellow beard, like a skinny santa claus [sic].” McFarlane’s illustrations for the character deviated from Gaiman’s description, as McFarlane felt it made Cogliostro “sound too much like a wino.”
The second character at issue was “Medieval Spawn,” essentially a reincarnation of the Spawn character in a knight’s costume who uses archaic language.
In the legal actions that followed, McFarlane made two arguments why Gaiman was not instrumental in the creation of these characters. The first was that since Gaiman only provided the idea for the characters, his contribution was not an expression significant enough to be copyrighted on its own.