Neil Gaiman is coming back to Marvel and he’s bringing Angela, the character he created for Todd McFarlane’s Spawn and the cause of a major intellectual property rights lawsuit (see "Gaiman McFarlane Settle"), back with him.  The esteemed writer of Sandman and Marvel 1602 makes his return to the Marvel Universe as he brings his Spawn universe creation to the final issue of Brian Michael Bendis Age of Ultron crossover event.  Bendis and Gaiman will also collaborate on Guardians of the Galaxy #5, which will likewise feature Angela. Gaiman, an extremely successful novelist, had already announced that he was returning to comics this year to write a new Sandman arc (see "Gaiman to Write New Sandman Series").

 

The movement of the character of Angela from the stable of Image Comics characters to Marvel is nearly unprecedented in world of contemporary comics.  There have certainly been wholesale transfers of characters from one company to another though they are usually the result of the bankruptcy of one of the companies.  Angela’s transfer, which was spurred by a legal case, hearkens back to the way in which DC acquired the rights to Fawcett’s Captain Marvel after first forcing Fawcett to stop publishing Captain Marvel via a lawsuit that claimed the character infringed on DC’s Superman rights.

 

Marvel’s Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada told The New York Times: "We were looking for a good entry point to tease our fans and let them know she was going to be a major player, and Age of Ultron seemed like the perfect spot."  Marvel’s EIC Axel Alonso added that the release of information about Angela’s appearance in Age of Ultron "was not a spoiler.  Her presence is a bonus, like the post credit sequences in one of our Marvel Studio movies."

 

The fact that Angela will appear in Guardians of the Galaxy is no mere coincidence either with Marvel busily trying to stir up interest in the cosmic aspects of the Marvel Universe, an effort that has been no doubt spurred in part by the mainstream audience’s general disinterest in the sheer un-relatable fantasy of cosmic superheroes that is thought to have been behind the abject failure of Warner Bros.’ big budget adaptation of DC’s Green Lantern.