Merch And Licensing Deals: Lessons From A 40 Year Comic Book Creator — Stephen L. Stern

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

Film Courage: How did you get started in licensing?

Stephen L. Stern, Comic Book Author/President of Storyboard Graphic Novels: As I mentioned earlier, we get this enormous publicity in USA Today. Within a day or two I get calls from a number of licensing agents. The only one whose name I’ll mention is the guy I went with, Mark Freedman, who had a company (it’s still in existence) called Surge Licensing. Mark a few months earlier had picked up a little account called the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and they rode that everywhere because [of] the cartoons, the movies, all the licensing.

Mark said to me Steve, I really like Zen. Would you like me to be your licensing agent?

I was pitched by a few others but I liked Mark. He was from Long Island in New York. We had that kind of bond and went with Mark for several years. He handled all the licensing and that thus became the two video games from Konami, which was the Game Boy and the NES game, Nintendo Entertainment System and the Just Toys…