The wild story of a new comic book publisher con artist who bought up popular 90s comics IP

Terrific Productions, LLC announced themselves with great fanfare at San Diego Comic-Con in 2019:

Terrific Production is new publisher Fall 2019. We are staffed by former senior comic book professionals and we are looking for professional artists from film, animation, gaming, video-gaming to break into comic book work. You must have the drive, creativity and passion. We will also review serious non-professionals as our contribution to the Comic-con to help the next generation of artists. Those with the right stuff will be able to receive paid work assignments with Terrific. We are also offering opportunities for trainees that want a chance to help Terrific become a premiere independent publisher.

The company, owned by Andrew Rev, claimed to be the "America's fastest growing comics publisher." It hadn't actually published anything — nor had it announced any specific publication plans — but it did own the rights to Youngblood, a very 90s Rob Liefeld creation that was also the first comic ever published by Image (and arguably kicked off the 90s comic speculator market boom).

That was at least enough to spark my curiosity. I am a comic book fan; and I have written a few comics, and would like to write more. So I followed Terrific Productions on Twitter, mostly out of morbid curiosity. This didn't pass the smell test to begin with, even if it was technically true that they had somehow wrangled the rights to a once-valuable comic book property, so there was some kind of business or legal entity in place.

Their Twitter feed didn't help they seem any more legitimate. It was mostly used as a hype machine with idiosyncratic grammar and lengthy threads that sound like hollow sales pitches. In a way, it was fitting with the 90s speculator comic boom — they tweeted like a 13-year-old boy smashing action figures together and calling it a story.

But at some point, however, I guess I interacted with them, and they DM'd me to talk about work. Here's a piece of our conversation. You can tell I was skeptical from the start — but my writer brain is always morbidly curious about any weird interactions, especially when it promises fortunes and glory in exchange for re-telling a Rob Liefeld story from the 90s that wasn't even good in the first place:

TERRIFIC PRODUCTIONS:

submissions@terrificproduction.com
we have hired 80% of staff who are followers

ME:
Cool

TERRIFIC PRODUCTIONS:
unlike DC and Marvel we expect our artists to know our goals which sets us apart

select folow

follow

and retweet our artist. then send us some scripst - 
subject line - spoke Feb 6th

ok

Tho nice to meet u

ME:
sounds good
ME:

how does a retweet connect to royalties and page rates?

TERRIFIC PRODUCTIONS:
well imagine you drew youngblood

or wrote it

you get more sales when people pick up the boo 

cause they saw some tweet from someone they admire like yourself

with 5000 followers - lets say they buy 500 copies

from 5000

and they do that 4 x

the artists will make more thousands

plus make them feel great so they draw or write better

ME:
So the page rates are dependent upon the artists participating in the promotional efforts?

TERRIFIC PRODUCTIONS:
of course
TERRIFIC PRODUCTIONS:

in this business u get some all royalty

but the books sell 1000

so it converts to mayeb 20-50 a page for all the crreatives

our plans pay higher than marvel

for the same sales

plus we have top characters

im not trying to sell u
just explaining why they want to promote

some have 60,000 before u get extra

ours is vastly better which is why we are such a treat

the big VIP fear see our newer artists gettingas much as they get with far fewer sales

they see that we promote actively

we also have  Terrific Record Group

so you might wish to make  asong with your story

we will promote you there also
ME:
thanks for the explainer!

TERRIFIC PRODUCTIONS:
we take the time to chat with commited pro artists

we just finsihed pencils on supreme 5

but we keep that under wraps so we can shock Marvel

ME:
Who wrote/drew that?

TERRIFIC PRODUCTIONS:
That requires an NDA we have some people who work for people upset that we are disrupting the status quo

we actually had a top guy try to poach or artists

we reveal that on soliciation

if you are talented apply

if you are not ready just retweet us - we will know you

and you get preference

at the big 2 u are unknown

sure an artist might know u but when did they try and get you a job

I'd seen this kind of shit before. It's a ruse I'd figured out after the nth time some similarly sketchy dude reached out to my shitty high school punk band, using similarly shitty grammar and questionable sales practices in exchange for just a little free promo. So I re-accepted that my 10-year-old dreams of re-writing a Rob Liefeld comic were still out of reach, and promptly forgot about this entire conversation.

Then a few months back, Beth Elderkin at io9 published a huge, comprehensive expose on Andrew Rev of Terrific Productions (which I only just got around to reading). And it is absolutely wild. It turns out, some people did take him up on offers after interactions like the one I had. He wasn't kidding about the NDAs, either. Apparently Rev is a guy with a long history of these kinds of scams — since at least the 90s, when he bought Comico, which published popular independent series like Bill Willingham's The Elementals and Matt Wagner's Grendel. The company had fallen into bankruptcy, and Rev — having no other comics experience — swooped in to save it. Kind of. As io9 reported:

[Note: Many of Rev's responses, conducted over email, contained spelling and grammatical errors. We've chosen to present them as-is.]

"I was I'll equipped to take on the revival of Comico- I had no staff. Imagine how I felt having paid their salary and then they treated me as a sucker!" Rev wrote. "With only love of comics and an A in art appreciation in college I went ahead to figure out without youtube or Wikipedia how comics were made. My original goal before I arrived was for us to be passive investors with 1/3 rd of Comico. But the president after he saw he had no obligation personally for his staff salary went and handed me the keys and said he was 'going fishing' this is how my book on the comic industry will Possibly start." io9 was unable to contact the former owners of Comico for comment. 

Reports on the sale from the Comics Journal described Rev as a Chicago businessman and native of Hungary who worked in the direct mail business and had done consulting for Citibank. A 2017 court case involving his ex-wife's property showed he also tried to start a software business in Vietnam around a decade prior but that he made no money from it. Otherwise, Rev is an enigma. He's believed to be 68 years old and living in California, has a small digital footprint, and his life between Comico and Terrific Production is largely unknown. Rev refused to provide or confirm with io9 any details on himself and noted that he expects "nothing personal in this article."

That's a helluva paragraph, right? The story only gets more bonkers from there, especially as Elderkin interviews artists and writers who did agree to work with Terrific Productions, despite the glaring red flags presented by some contractual clauses:

Terrific Production would hold onto half of their page rates until either 90% of people in the United States and Canada were vaccinated against the coronavirus, or 2,500 comic book shops in those countries were fully open again.

[…]

In addition to the covid-19 clause, Casas' new contract included stipulations that put it a few steps short of an exclusive contract. Casas confirmed it banned him from accepting new work from other publishers so long as payments from Terrific Production weren't over 45 days late, and he would have a three-year ban on working for any companies creating similar characters to ones he'd made for Terrific Production. While that might not apply to Casas, since he was making Supreme, Terrific Production has been working on a public domain version of Thor and is currently soliciting new artists for it. It's unclear what the comic entails, but inker Matthew Seaborne said his involved a love triangle between Thor, Hercules, and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.

It's a lengthy article, but it is certainly a morbidly fascinating one, winding through weird financial deals and legal holding tricks like one of those magic cup tricks that people in movies play in parks. There is also, naturally, some weird X-rated comic turns, and lots of contractual IP fuckery to behold. It's something.

Comics, Contracts, and Covid: Inside the Scandal at Terrific Production [Beth Elderkin / io9]

Image via YouTube