Marvel Is Selling Rob Liefeld’s Legacy While Erasing His Writing Credit
The New Mutants Omnibus Vol. 4 arrives in August 2026. It covers Rob Liefeld’s run on the title. Cable, Deadpool, and Domino all debuted in that run. The book sold at numbers it had not seen before Liefeld and has not consistently seen since.
Marvel’s solicitation lists Liefeld as cover artist and penciller, not as writer.
Liefeld posted on social media: “Pull up a chair for story time with Rob. Yes, many of you across all the socials have in fact sent me this solicitation from Marvel for my New Mutants omnibus collection.” He then documented, in public, that the writing credits on a book his scripts made commercially viable do not include his name.
Tom Brevoort, Marvel’s Senior Vice President and Executive Editor, made it worse. He stated publicly that former Marvel president Bill Jemas renamed the X-Men titles specifically to stop paying Liefeld royalties. Jemas changed the book titles to break the contractual triggers tied to specific series names. The rename was a financial strategy. Brevoort confirmed this as institutional fact.
Cable is in two Fox films and has been a recurring presence in Marvel’s theatrical universe. Deadpool has generated over $2.6 billion at the global box office across three films. Both characters first appeared in the pages of New Mutants during Liefeld’s run. The omnibus selling that run lists him as a cover artist.
Brevoort runs the editorial operation producing this solicitation. He is also the SVP who described AI as “pretty fun to use” and said creative workers trying to limit its use in their industry are “likely to be in vain.” The same executive confirming that Marvel once renamed books to avoid creator payments is now overseeing the credits package for the omnibus of those books.
The history behind this goes back to 1992. Liefeld was among the eight Marvel artists who founded Image Comics after years of working under a structure that gave them no ownership of what they created. The Image exodus produced the third-largest comics publisher in American history. It happened because Marvel’s work-for-hire contracts gave the company permanent ownership of every character, every costume, every villain, while the creators received page rates and, in some cases, royalties tied to specific title names that could be renamed away.
Liefeld has publicly called out Marvel’s leadership for years. He celebrated Dan Buckley’s departure from the company in May. His current complaint is specific: a publisher is listing his visual contributions to a book while omitting his writing contributions, on an omnibus selling his creative legacy.
What do you think Marvel owes the creators who built its most commercially valuable IP? Let us know in the comments.
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That right there, is slimy. Marvel truly are slimy.
This will sound controversial, however, I don’t care about this. He is the guy who refuses to give credit to Fabian Nicienza for those characters too and attributes everything to “his genius”, he also stabbed his Image co-workers in the back in 96’ and screwed his friend over when that horrible “Heroes Reborn” initiative began.