Posted in: Comics, Valiant | Tagged: david lapham, Harbinger, Jim Shooter, valiant

Jim Shooter and David Lapham Never Received Royalties For Harbinger?

Two days ago, Bleeding Cool ran an article that had been months in the making, regarding Joshua Dysart who relaunched the psychic teenager superhero comic Harbinger for Valiant back in 2012, and who had expressed difficulty getting payments he believes he was promised from Valiant after the sale of movie rights to Harbinger to Paramount. Dysart retweeted the Bleeding Cool article, adding the following; "I'm of the opinion that the spirit of the royalty pool in my contract has been broken & that Shooter & Lapham should be the biggest recipients of money from that pool. I want to see everyone get paid, regardless of contractual legalities" and talking at length about his issues. Which has spun off a number of other claims by other creators against other publishers as well, But we are sticking to the likes of Harbinger right now, or we'll get lost.

As we previously reported, co-founder of Valiant, co-creator of the Valiant Universe and co-creator of Harbinger, Jim Shooter had told us that he had not received any payments for the use of Valiant characters since he left the publisher, even when the Harbinger option was first picked up by Sony in 2015. "Valiant never paid me any royalties reprint money or participations whatsoever.  They never so much as sent me comp copies of reprints of my work. Scorched earth." He was only paid for and received complimentary collections of, the work "for which I wrote new stories, the Harbinger and X-O reprint hardback books… No compensation whatsoever for the reprinted stories."

Today, the other co-creator of Harbinger and creator of Stray Bullets, David Lapham shared with Bleeding Cool his own experience, telling us "As you know, when I was 20, I started my career at Valiant and worked on, created, and co-created many of their original properties including the specific book you asked about, Harbinger. (Which, of course, Jim Shooter and I were the first and original creators of.)  While at Valiant I was told repeatedly by management and ownership that I would participate in the continuing interest and exploitation of these properties in comics and other mediums, even to the point of ultimately being able to vest into an ownership stake in the company. To date I have never received any royalty payments whatsoever from Valiant in regards to any of the properties I worked on, created, or co-created no matter who owned the company or what properties were exploited in the comic book industry and other mediums. The royalty pool was a party I wasn't invited to."

Valiant is launching a new Harbinger comic book series by Collin Kensey, Jackson Lanzing and Robbie Rodriguez in October and the planned film is in pre-production from Paramount.

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