Public Domain Superheroes? 251
SerpicoWasTaken writes "Here is an interesting article about a group of comic book heroes from the golden age that are in the public domain. Apparently, a bunch of golden age heroes were never copyrighted and just faded into obscurity. The article also contains a long discussion of copyright and the public domain. It is an interesting read for all those interested in the public domain." Update: 09/25 17:51 GMT by M : Link removed at the request of the site maintainers because it's killing their server. Update: 09/25 19:02 GMT by M : They've put the document on a static page instead of a cgi script. :)
"Never copyrighted"? (Score:4, Informative)
I thought copyright was automatic. It doesn't need to be registered or anything, it just is.
To become public domain, the copyright must either expire, or be explicitly declared so by the copyright holder.
Re:"Never copyrighted"? (Score:3, Informative)
Copyright is created literally by appending (c) $YEAR $AUTHOR to it. There's no central registry of things that are copyrighted - you're thinking of trademarks (TM).
Re:"Never copyrighted"? (Score:3, Informative)
Today everything you create is automaticly copyrighted. It wasn't always that way though. If I remember rightly until the late 1970's you had to claim copyright in a specific way or it was automaticly public domain. It was easy to do correctly, worst case was $25 plus a few stamps, no lawyer, but you had to do it. (companies would of course use a lawyer)
Laws change, the laws that applied back then count in this case, not the laws today.
Re:"Never copyrighted"? (Score:5, Informative)
This is in contrast to trademark, for which you must always file to get legal protection.
Comic Links (Score:5, Informative)
Greats of the Golden Age Comics [rogers.com]
Golden Years Guide to Reprints (bright page) [tripod.com]
Golden Age comic book reprints [fortunecity.com]
When Works Pass Into the Public Domain [unc.edu]
Octobriana Public Domain Comic [easynet.co.uk]
Native Super Hero Contest [bluecorncomics.com]
Re:"Never copyrighted"? I don't think so. (Score:2, Informative)
Please research your rants before issuing them. The law changed so that works published after 1978 do have automatic copyright. Works published before 1978 entered the public domain unless the author or creator registered them. See this page on BitLaw [bitlaw.com].
The great "Never Copyrighted" debate (Score:4, Informative)
Re:"Never copyrighted"? (Score:3, Informative)
For what it's worth, I thought "(c)" would work, too, until being informed otherwise by a lawyer who specializes in intellectual property.
Here is a copy of the article (Score:5, Informative)
The characters who appeared in Tom Strong #11 and #12, including Pyroman, Miss Masque, The American Crusader, The Black Terror, the Fighting Yank, and Doc Strange (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Tom Strong himself). In the story, "Terror on Terra Obscura," Strong teamed up with Strange to rescue the heroes, who had been imprisoned by an alien of impossible power.
To Tom Strong, the entire mission was somewhat surreal - to him, the heroes that he was helping to rescue existed on his earth solely as comic book characters, something like how the JSA existed as comic characters on Earth-1 to the JLA, back when there was an Earth-1 and Earth-2, or, if you want something a little more metaphysical, the existence of the heroes on the far side of the galaxy percolated through...ideaspace, where it was captured by comic creators on Tom Strong's earth who were imaginauts...or..something...
The heroes are slated to get a return engagement in 2003 when Peter Hogan pens a Terra Obscura miniseries for ABC [with art by Yanique Paquette and Karl Story], utilizing the same characters on the same world. Ideally, interest will be high enough, according to Hogan, in the miniseries that ABC will launch the heroes of Terra Obscura in their own ongoing monthly.
If you're the gambling sort, it's a safe bet that a solid 99% of the readers of the Tom Strong storyline thought that the characters were simply fruits of Alan Moore's imagination, heroes who were shared shades of similarity to "real" Golden Age comic heroes. After all, the proper archetypes were present - the patriotic hero (the Fighting Yank), the science hero (American Crusader), the "dark" hero (The Black Terror, renamed the Terror, who comes complete with young sidekick), the jungle queen (Princess Panther), the monster, the fire-man, and even the talking ape were there.
The thing is, the characters weren't, or at least originally weren't the products of Moore's imagination - the heroes of Terra Obscura were, in fact, real comic characters published in the 1940s by Ned Pines under the Standard/Better/Nedor imprint(s). While the fact does little to change the story, it does raise a question or two. No, DC didn't quietly acquire another stable of comic characters as they had done with the Charlton characters in the late '80s by buying them outright - the Nedor characters are themselves in a unique position in terms of copyright: They are in the public domain, and can therefore be freely used by anyone. As an aside - in the ABC universe, the heroes are located on "Terra Obscura," a unique world which itself is an invention of Alan Moore, and is therefore copyrighted to DC/ABC/WildStorm.
Before we continue, a little history lesson is needed on how things got to be the way they are.
A Publisher of Many Names
The heroes which are collectively referred to as "Nedor" heroes were originally published by Pines, who had three names for his publishing company over the years, Standard, Better, and Pines. As a company, Standard began publishing in 1932, and was the king of comics with adjective titles - Thrilling Comics, Thrilling Detective, Exciting Comics, Startling Comics - all were staples of Standard/Better/Pines over the years.
From the early days, Standard employed editor Leo Margulies and Mort Weisinger, who took the ball and ran with it, in 1939 creating series after series, and hero after hero. Alex Schomberg provided dozens of covers over the series' runs. Standard's standard fair for the early '40s was pulp-inspired superheroes, but as Standard couldn't get a good footing against National Periodical Publications' stars of the costumed set, Superman and Batman (as well as the Justice Society) and others, and sales of Standard's hero line slipped, and by 1949, the company dropped costumed heroes, sticking to real-life adventures, funny animal books, and romance comics. Aside from the Nedor heroes, one character of Standard's original comic series remains alive today - Dennis the Menace.
Like many of the comic characters created in the 1940s, the heroes of the Standard line weren't copyrighted. It wasn't necessarily a careless move by the publisher, just a simple business decision. Remember - this was in the days before the phrase "intellectual property" was even coined, and comic book characters were disposable commodities. One was created in order to sell comics to boys, and when its sales started to slip, another was created to take its place. "Progress" was the theme of the day, and no one would have thought to bring back a concept that was perceived to have failed - why return to something that the public clearly had passed on? Thinking of the better world coming tomorrow was the name of the game, and nostalgia had yet to become a pastime for individuals and an income stream for companies. Everyone, from the man on the street to comic book publishers, was looking for the next big thing, and had precious little time to spend on the old thing that no one wanted.
At the same time, creators' right were largely unheard of, and the creators themselves were generally nose-to-the-grindstone workhorses, and no real interest or incentive to try to keep or reclaim their original work or worry about the rights to the characters they wrote or drew. After all, the first comic book fandom had yet to be born, and the first "comic book convention" was decades away. Aside from a few superstars, comic artists and writers were scratching by, and were immensely more concerned with putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their head than securing the rights of ownership for a pulp knockoff they jotted down when the publisher came looking for a comic book hero.
Additionally, the Standard/Nedor heroes were like many, many other heroes of the '40s - colorful, and attention grabbing when they were on the cover of a comic, but ultimately, their stories were pretty pedestrian. No kids were clamoring for fan clubs or decoder rings from the Nedor line, as they were for Superman. Within a few years of the end of their publication, the heroes sank beneath the waves of popular culture, remembered only by a very few.
"Come on Little Chum - We're Going Into the Public Domain!"
With the above influences working on them, in their original form, the Nedor characters were never trademarked, and the stories in which they appeared in have long gone out of copyright (a period which lasted 28 years after publication) and were not renewed. As such, the characters legally moved into the public domain one by one, beginning with Doc Strange, in order of their publication, making it free for anyone to use them.
The public wha...?
For example, Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden has had multiple adaptations, spinoffs and derivative products come out - all of which are legal, from the Secret Garden Cookbook to the most recent movie adaptation, because the work is in the public domain. Anyone can create a work based on the original without having to acquire any kind of rights whatsoever - the work, legally, belongs to all mankind.
An aside - before you go off thinking that governments actually made one law that would ultimately benefit the culture of the planet in a timeless fashion, copyright critics, pointing fingers at recent copyright extensions, such as the Sonny Bono Act (which was lobbied for largely by large media companies, and the validity of which is slated to be argued to the Supreme Court by Lawrence Lessig on October 9th) claim that the number of works entering the public domain has been drastically reduced in the past thirty years, and they're right. The move is seen by many anti-copyright pundits as a move as a culture from valuing the expression of an individual artist to valuing a corporate property.
Ironically, Walt Disney, one of the companies that has lobbied the hardest for copyright extension (ensuring the company will reap the profits from their characters for generations to come) is also one of the biggest beneficiaries of the public domain - from Snow White to Cinderella, Jungle Book (released one year after Kipling's own copyright expired) and much of classical music in Fantasia came from the public domain. Without recent extensions approved by congress, Mickey Mouse would have gone into the public domain in 2004.
So - how does all of this apply to the Nedor heroes? Well, as alluded to previously, they didn't just go into the public domain, and ABC/WildStorm isn't the first comic publisher to publish them - or even the only publisher to currently publish them. The Nedor heroes have bubbled up a few times in the decades since their journey into the public domain, from Ace Comics and First Comics to Eclipse and currently, AC Comics.
The Point Is: No One's Fighting
Before moving on, it must be stressed that none of this is a matter of publishing legality - everyone, from AC to WildStorm to anyone reading this article could legitimately and legally create and publish comics starring any of the Nedor heroes that are based on the original materials from the '40s. There's the rub - the characters have to be based directly upon the original versions which appeared in the comics. From there, things get a little more...legal.
For example, take The Black Terror. Created in 1941 by Richard Hughes and David Gabrielsen, the character first appeared in Exciting Comics #9 in 1941. Both AC and ABC took the base character, The Black Terror, and modified it (in different ways), and renamed it The Terror (AC, after naming their version, later renamed theirs "The Terrorist"). Both were based on Nedor's The Black Terror, but were modified in unique ways by the respective publishers. Likewise, Beau Smith's version of the character, published by Eclipse (and co-written with Chuck Dixon and illustrated by Dan Brereton) used the name, but was worlds away from the original version. The character also showed up in the '80s in versions published by Ace Comics, and in Roy Thomas' Alter Ego comic series at First Comics.
In Smith's case, the desire to use the Nedor hero as a starting point for his own take was a result of childhood memories. "When I was a kid, my dad gave me a couple of old coverless Black Terror comics that he had as a kid," Smith said. "There were in the attic at my grandma's attic. I got hooked on the cool looking character with the skull and crossbones on his chest. I always wanted to do something with the character after that.
"He was in the public domain, and I had a high concept crime/alternate universe idea
that I had been saving up, and this was the perfect opportunity for it. I called my buddy Chuck Dixon and we decided to write it together. We changed the basic background of the character and did our own. As a result of what we did with the original concept, Chuck and I have the rights to the story and the characters as they appeared in our three issue run....names and all that."
Smith said he wasn't sure if Eclipse owned any of the rights to the characters, or if Todd McFarlane acquired the rights to his and Dixon's version of the Black Terror when he purchased the Eclipse assets. Smith did write a new story with the Black Terror while he was with McFarlane Productions, which was illustrated by Clayton Crain, but to date, McFarlane has opted not to publish it.
Smith wasn't the only creator with a soft spot in his heart for the characters - as mentioned previously, the pool of Nedor characters had been dipped into by Roy Thomas and ACE Comics, but in 1988, publisher Bill Black brought back a host of public domain characters, including many of the Nedor heroes for use in AC's Femforce series, placing them in new series, as well as reprinting original stories.
Over the years, AC Comics has taken the initiative to seek out and preserve many Golden Age comics and heroes, painstakingly retouching and correcting the art from the original comics - since no original art still exists - to produce reprint editions. As stated on their website, AC's reprints of public domain Golden Age comics is threefold:
1. To help preserve the history of the American comic book.
2. To make material available to collectors who have been priced out of the Golden-Age collecting market.
3. To introduce Golden-Age material to a new generation of comic book readers.
AC has also endeavored to compile information about the creators of the Golden Age comics - as much as it is available - and publish the information in various magazines, including Men of Mystery, which featured the Nedor heroes in a special edition.
Again, given the time period in which the work was originally created, many creators were never credited with their work, and in some cases, attribution of the creation of Golden Age characters is only anecdotal in nature.
Along with reprints of the original characters, AC has written the Nedor heroes as continuations of their Golden Age incarnations, maintaining the same general concepts and secret identities, but have also made some alterations in terms of costumes and names. The changes AC has made in the Nedor characters made done in order to make their versions distinctive in order that the publisher could copyright their stories, as well as protect their looks, just as Smith and Dixon did with their version of the Black Terror, and ABC has done with their versions of the characters.
To date, AC has been publishing the Nedor heroes (both on their own and as supporting characters) for going on twenty years, a run nearly double the original run the characters enjoyed in the '40s.
As the covers in this article show, the Terra Obscura storyline in Tom Strong #11 and #12 isn't the only connection between the Nedor line and WildStorm's ABC line - in 1942, Nedor launched America's Best Comics #1, a title which brought together Nedor's top three characters, Fighting Yank, Doc Strange, and the Black Terror together between two covers. And of course, there is that similarity between Doc Strange and Tom Strong, noted by Strong in issue #11 - the two could be brothers. It was a similarity Moore himself noted in an interview with Previews, but said that while he was inspired the America's Best Comics title as a name for a line, the similarity between the two characters was a complete coincidence.
For Moore aficionados, his account of later discoveries after creating both Tom Strong and Promethea come as little surprise, and fit into the creators' theories about ideaspace and the fact that he occasionally runs off and prays to a snake god...or...something under his house. "I didn't know there was The Book of Promethea by Hélène Cixous, or things like that," Moore told Previews. "I didn't know John Kendrick Bangs had written a bunch of stories about a place very much like the Immateria when I made Sophie Bangs the secret identity of Promethea. All of these things are delicious coincidences. I even found a character created from about 1910 in a series of novels published by the Boy Scouts of America about this ultimate Boy Scout named Tom Strong. It's just great! If you're hitting the right kind of vein of archetypal stuff then things like this will just happen. I'm just tapping into something. It works out."
In a recent interview with Newsarama, Moore expanded upon his decision to use the characters. "The original idea for the whole thing came when somebody, it may have been Rick Veitch, told me that there had been, back in the '40s, an America's Best Comics which I wasn't aware of," Moore said. "I thought it was a striking coincidence that we had America's Best Comics, and there was a series by the same name in the '40s. I asked [ABC editor] Scott Dunbier to check it out and see if he could find out anything about this comic, and whether there were any interesting characters.
"For all I knew, it might have been a Western comic book, but I asked him to tell me if there were any interesting characters, with an eye to possibly reviving them if they were sort of old, forgotten characters, in the current America's Best Comics as a kind of instant 1940s continuity. I left it with Scott, and he got back to me, along with some other people who sent me covers from the original comics - it was then I realized that Doc Strange looked very much like Tom Strong - he had the same kind of bizarrely muscled physique. He wore a red t-short, and these jodhpurs, and boots. I realized that we wouldn't be able to do a character with the name Doc Strange [due to this upstart company called Marvel, which had created a character named Dr. Strange in the interim]. I though that maybe we could change the name to Tom Strange, because at that point, I though that point his first name had never been given. I found out later that it was Hugo, so I think that the current orthodoxy at ABC is that his name is Thomas Hugo Strange."
Moore said that originally, the plan was to use the characters only for the two-part "Terra Obscura" storyline which would explain where Tom Strange came from - it was a story that needed a world populated with heroes. "I came up with the Terra Obscura idea, which I thought was an interesting variant on the notion that this is a planet which is in the same dimension as ours, and is an exact duplicate, just elsewhere in space," Moore said. "I started to research as many of the Nedor heroes as I could. Jim Steranko was a great help - he dug out loads of old articles which filled in a lot of details for me, and we did the story from there.
"That was originally going to be all we were doing. Then, Pete Hogan, after having just done a pretty splendid job on the Tesla Strong special was looking for something else to do. He suggested that, because there was such a lot of positive feedback and interest on the web regarding the Terra Obscura characters that he wondered about doing a miniseries. It sounded good to me. Pete and I have been working together on this, and it's coming along well.
"Initially, it was an idea if there was an interesting character in this 1940s, America's Best Comics we could kind of bring him back in the present day and pleasantly confuse readers as to whether America's Best Comics really did exist in the 1940s," Moore continued. "It was more that than anything - we'd exploit the coincidence and sort of pretended that we had this backlog of characters that stretched back to the 1940s."
The Perils and Promise of the Public Domain
By becoming part of the public domain, the heroes of the old Standard line of comics are part of the cultural heritage of the United States and world, just like Thomas Nash's versions of Santa Claus and Uncle Sam, and nearly all the classical music in the world. As such, they can be used by current creators as source material who would be "standing on the shoulders of giants" as it were to create their own, new works.
According to public domain advocates, what AC and ABC (and previously, Eclipse and others) are doing with the old Nedor heroes is exactly why material should go into the public domain, that is, the original works can be freely built upon to further enhance the cultural landscape of the world. Okay, so whether or not FemForce and Tom Strong #11 and #12 enhance the cultural landscape of the world is arguable, but again, AC and ABC are doing exactly what they're supposed to in regards to works in the public domain - using them as source works, and either re-presenting them or building upon them to tell new stories.
It's exactly what Borders or Barnes & Noble do when they publish and release their own editions of classic literature - or, for that matter, what Alan Moore did in creating League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. That said though, working with properties from the public domain, especially when using them as a foundation to build upon comes with its own problems due to the simple fact that anyone can do it. If one publishing house starts up a version of say, Pyroman (a Nedor hero) with writer A and artist B, a publishing house down the street can do their own version of Pyroman with writer C and artist D.
In such a setting, the market would determine which version of the character survives, based on everything from quality of the product to the marketing each publishers attempt. One publish could win out over the other and make millions while the other fails, despite the time and effort expended.
While neither Dunbier nor anyone from AC Comics chose to go on record, sources confirmed that, despite the legalities of each company's use of the characters, the smaller publisher is mildly annoyed at ABC's apparent ongoing use of the characters.
Also, in today's world where the creator of a property has come to be considered in higher regard than in years past, there is a danger in a property such as the Nedor heroes entering the public domain and then being revised or revisited by a creator such as Alan Moore or Peter Hogan, and that is that the original creators of the work may be forgotten or overlooked. Already, the specific creator pedigree of many Nedor heroes is unknown, lost in the mists of time and churning of the 1940s' publishing industry.
As stated above, many readers of Tom Strong #11 or #12 would automatically assign the creation of the Terra Obscura characters to Moore - after all, the guy did create heroes that were a shade away from the Charlton heroes for Watchmen, why couldn't he just do it again?
As a result, the original creators of the characters are lost to the mists of time - technically, as they should be, as part of becoming part of the public domain, but perhaps unfairly so in the view of fans indoctrinated in the creator rights battles of the past decades.
The public domain, in the eyes of its advocates, is a necessary part of the cultural landscape of America - something that the founding fathers outlined - something that allows a vigorous and growing culture without the restrictions of royalties. For every pro argument, there's a con, mostly from copyright holders.
For example, if Disney and other media companies would be unsuccessful in extending the term of copyright extension, Mickey Mouse hits the public domain in 2003. Legally, Universal could produce a line of Mickey Mouse cartoons based on the original appearance of the character from the 1928 Steamboat Willie, and anyone could package and sell the original Steamboat Willie cartoon - all without credit or payment to Walt Disney.
The challenges of public domain don't just affect the Nedor heroes - there are dozens upon dozens of Golden Age heroes who are currently in the public domain waiting for their chance at a second shot or re-presentation, or to be completely forgotten, their histories, creators, and adventures lost forever.
Re:"Never copyrighted"? (Score:1, Informative)
-- Posting anonymously because I'm using somebody else's computer and don't remember my damn password!
Re:Free Steamboat Willie! (Score:3, Informative)
There are two DVDs of these cartoons. One of them is all of Fleischer's cartoons, and the other are later works by Future Studio after Fleischer left else.
You can normally pick them up for about $10, well worth it if your a fan of the old cartoons.
Max Fleischer's Cartoons:l /-/dvd/1572523034/glance/102-2261467-1390511 [amazon.com]
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detai
Future Studio's Cartoons (Post David Fleischer):2 524537/qid=1032963126/sr=1-5/ref=sr_1_5/102-226146 7-1390511?v=glance [amazon.com]
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/157
Collection of all 17 episodes together (cheaper seperately):5 943389/qid=1032963126/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3/102-226146 7-1390511?v=glance [amazon.com]
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/630
Note: If you don't like Amazon you can pick them up almost anywhere that sells DVDs.
Free Mickey Mouse! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:"Never copyrighted"? (Score:2, Informative)
Of course, if you want to be *sure*, and it's important to you, use the real logo, or spell out the word, and you won't be spending money later on being the test case...
Re:Copyright expires... not with DRM (Score:3, Informative)
My wife points out that even once something has gone into public domain doesn't mean it is easy to get a hold of. Take music from Mozart, Bach, etc. Really the only way to get sheet music for them is to pay some company a whole lot of money to get their "arrangement" of the score.
A lot of the same thing happened with these classic movies. A company had in its posession a copy of say "The Immigrant" by Charlie Chaplin. They drop in revised intertitles, or a new musical score (silent film remember) and copyright the new work.
I know people have mentioned it before, but the Library of Congress should also act as a time capsule for materials without DRM protection so that when copyright does run out, there acutally is a chance for these things to pass into public domain like the law requires.
Jeff
Re:Free Mickey Mouse! (Score:3, Informative)
Spider Robinson had something to say about extending copyright. I think it's still relevant.
http://www.tale.com/titles-free.phtml?title_id=39
Watchmen (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Watchmen (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Watchmen (Score:3, Informative)
Comic Book Artists Magazine has a great interview with Moore about the Charlton characters and how they relate to Watchmen. http://twomorrows.com/comicbookartist/articles/09