It's not really that absurd, I did an even more basic summary of it in response to the first half of this. Basically Mcfarlane and Gaiman were partners of a sort, had a falling out, hate each other, and have been slap fighting over the rights. Mcfarlane being a money hungry douche of the highest order.canadamus_prime said:
The big problem with Bob's analysis is that he spends a lot of time knocking Angela because he doesn't paticularly care for the character, it, and it's popularity, is pretty much anti-thetical to his entire persona and what he wants to think. The rights to that are not only attached to Spawn, but the character itself has held onto enough of a following where during movies a mere walkthrough by someone who might have been that character got a lot of attention for that reason. What's more I'd argue that while renegade demons and hellspawn are a dime a dozen, you don't see all that many characters with Angelic or Celestrial powers and origins in comparison, and really Angela could be argued to be the reason why the few characters like that that we've seen even exist.
Given that Spawn is pretty much Mcfarlane's biggest success, the entire issue of someone else owning part of the rights based on the old "Image" contracts is awkward especially with his failing fortunes. Someone putting characters added into that continuity into other comics opens some unplesant doors for them to ultimatly claim usage of the rest of his universe and creations.
To be honest I think Bob might have things a little backwards here in that while Marvelman might have been a big deal for a while, he's hardly that well known or popular as a concept. I mean even Bob points out that he's pretty much a "Captain Marvel" knockoff, and while The Big Red Cheese was at one time the world's most popular super hero, he's now kind of a B-lister to the point where in looking at the promotional material for "Infamous" people like me actually had to explain to some people who he even was (who was that boy who is not a boy fighting Doomsday?) and this was here on The Escapist which is pretty much geek central. Angela on the other hand is a character more comtemporary comics fans recognize and who has a degree of enduring fandom leftover from the 1990s and Gen-Xers who liked the character and the universe. With Angela they have something of a build in fan base for an event, with Marvelman I suspect they would have to pretty much sell the character from scratch, and really given that it's a giant Captain Marvel ripoff, it probably amounts to trying to sell a character who despite apperance in a lot of modern media including the DC Animated Universe has pretty much remains a B-lister... except in this case they don't even have the real deal, but the knockoff. It could be done mind you, but it seems like more of a long shot than using Angela for a 90s nostolgia cash-in and perhaps working on the "heavenly" aspects of The Marvel Universe (even if she's a renegade).
Bob's theory seems to be based largely on the fact that Gaiman wanted the Marvel/Miracle-man rights and was willing to give up his Spawn-verse characters for them at one point. However I'd imagine the situation then was a bit differant than it is now, and he didn't have the connection with Marvel, or Marvel it's current movie-based popularity, to turn this into something of a quick, immediate, payday, with some long term prospects. With Marvelman it relies on tapping a nostolgia market which would have been better at the time when this avenue didn't exists, and the very risky venture of rebooting an old, once-popular character for a new audience which is something that tends to backfire with comics as much as it succeeds. Angela is more of a guarantee even in the short term, Marvelman seems to be a dice roll.
