Dispute over illustrations | Two Quebecers in battle against Marvel and Disney

The Quebec Superior Court will examine the behavior of the giant Marvel and its parent company, Disney, this Friday to determine whether the global entertainment empire is using abusive tactics to financially exhaust two of its former Quebec illustrators who claim that their superhero concepts were stolen.

“What is the future? There will be no more artists, basically. We are all becoming products of companies,” protests Raymond Lai, who met The Press with his brother ahead of the hearing.

The brothers are in court trying to enforce their copyright over a comic book series called Radix, which they published under their own publishing house in 2001 and 2002. The heroes in their series wore highly detailed, futuristic body armor that was unheard of in the comic book industry at the time, they claim.

“Back then, what was popular was really superheroes: X-Men, Spider-Man, Superman. We wanted to do something different. Not just characters who are born with powers, but rather costumes that give super abilities. A kind of super science fiction that is more realistic. No spandex!” sums up Raymond Lai.

Their work was noticed, earning them increasing fame in the American comic book industry. They were notably noticed by a Marvel executive, who recruited them within the company in 2002 to work on various series, including Thor and X-Men.

Both say it was their work on the futuristic costumes for the Radix series that interested Marvel. “Radix was exactly what they were looking for. Marvel was trying to go in a new direction, change the looks a little bit, and it was easier to turn that into a movie,” recalls Raymond Lai. It was the beginning of Marvel’s heroes being brought to the big screen, which did indeed lead to stylistic changes.

But the brothers didn’t stay at Marvel for long, leaving shortly afterward in the wake of a change of guard in management. A few years later, they say they recognized the armor from their Radix series, which they had never sold to Marvel, in the new visual signature of the multinational’s films.

“The first thing that caught my eye was the poster ofIron Man 3. Even before the movie. It’s clear that they took a lot of elements from Radix to create all these different versions of Iron Man,” believes Raymond Lai.

In 2021, Ben and Raymond Lai filed a lawsuit in the Quebec Superior Court against Marvel and Disney. Their lawyers from the firm Fasken Martineau DuMoulin filed several comparison charts illustrating the similarities between the costumes in the Radix series and those worn by Ant-Man, Iron Man and other Marvel heroes on the big screen. They also provided exchanges purporting to demonstrate that their boss at Marvel was familiar with Radix.

Long procedures

The Lai brothers and their lawyers then claim to have faced a series of tactics by the multinational to drag out the proceedings as much as possible, which would result in significant legal fees.

Marvel and Disney, among others, contested their requests for documents, claimed not to do business in Quebec and not to have received “directly” the revenue generated by the distribution of their films in Quebec. They had to be forced by a judge to disclose certain information on the revenues from said films and their distribution within the Disney empire.

Forced to release some documents of more than 8,000 pages, the companies sent each page in an individual file that had to be opened separately by the illustrators’ lawyers, in an unusual file format.

The documents were “not intelligibly named” and were not even grouped with their annexes, the illustrators argue.

Further documents, hundreds of thousands of pages long, all cryptically identified by alphanumeric codes, were then sent in bulk by Marvel and Disney to the cartoonists’ lawyers.

“The defendants appear to be acting with a desire to drown the plaintiff in procedures and documentation and thus exhaust her financially,” reads a request for a declaration of abuse by the Lai brothers.

They are asking the court to intervene to rebalance the forces in a case that pits “two individuals, creators and artists” against “multinationals with almost unlimited resources who have multiplied procedures and objections that have proven to be based on inaccurate facts.” They are asking that the companies’ conduct be declared abusive and that the court force them to pay the $180,000 in legal fees that this case has generated for them.

Disney and Marvel, which deny any connection between the costumes of its heroes and the old comic series by the Lai brothers, will be able to contest the request this Friday.

The outcome of this round in court could have a significant impact on other artists, believes M.^e Julie Desrosiers, who represents the plaintiffs.

“When we see that some people are asserting their rights, and that the courts are sensitive to that, it certainly sets the tone,” she says.