Simon, as it's against the rules to answer a question/post directed at someone before they have the chance to, I've been waiting for Erik to reply. Now that he has, here is some data I've been looking up for you. I used the site that I posted a link for.

I searched for Erik's orginal statement on how Savage Dragon sells.

Cheap shot.

Chris Abel wrote: ...That's not what Liefeld originally did. He took his unused art from the Heroes Reborn Captain America and made some changes to the art and solicited it as AGENT: AMERICA who coincidentally had a female sidekick and an arch enemy call the Iron Skull. Marvel sued and Liefeld licensed FIGHTING AMERICAN from Kirby and changed the artwork again as an end run around the lawsuit...

Liefeld licensed Fighting American from Joe Simon, but otherwise that's pretty much the way I remember things. I still have a couple of promotional posters with Agent America that was sent to my shop. Those posters have Nazis, a Red Skull look-a-like, a MODOK look-a-like, the female Bucky look-a-like and the Captain America-like sheild on them.

As I recall, Liefled won in the lawsuit filed against him by Marvel only because of that deal with Joe Simon, and that Liefeld had to agree to change some minor things about the character, like the color on the cuffs of Fighting American/Agent America's uniform, and ditching the sheild.

I remember one promo poster with Agent America had the character pointing and saying, "It's not over until I say it's over!" I still think that was Liefeld's way of taking a shot at the lawsuit with Marvel, but I may just be reading that into the thing.

The original FIGHTING AMERICAN was also a humorous title, light hearted and tongue firmly in cheek. If that's what Liefeld's was supposed to be -- well, I shudder at the thought!

John Byrne wrote: When Marvel lets titles come out late, the people on this board get up in arms and complain about a lack of professionalism. But Image canceling a few titles for being chronically late over a decade ago is consistently used as evidence of their lack of professionalism. •• Who said it was a lack of professionalism? The complaint is that Image set themselves up as the Great Champions of Creator's Rights -- then revealed that they were not by canceling late books created by other people. The Seven Little Shits were untouchable.

I'm not sure what Creators' Rights means to you. Based on what you said there--it sounds pretty vague and ill-defined. You seem to confuse Creators' Rights with something else entirely. The fact of the matter is that we did not infringe an anybody's rights. We didn't edit other creators' books. We didn't attach our names as co-owners. We didn't insist on sharing copyrights. These creators owned their work, wholly. All of their rights were intact.

Were different rules applied to others than were applied to us? Absolutely. That's how things work. We owned the company. They did not. You can feel free to take a dump on your own couch if you'd like but it's another thing entirely if an invited guest takes a dump on your couch. If you invite somebody to live with you--it doesn't entitle them to tear down walls and rearrange your alphabetically-organized action figures without asking permission to do so.

[edited to fix the strange funky formatting in Firefox]