It's interesting how things seem to come together. Recently a couple of things have converged for me in a way that highlights the issues we've been discussing. If nothing else, the following story serves as yet another example of what Lessig is talking about.
As I believe I've mentioned before, I'm a comic book nut -- have been since I was a wee slip of a thing. Just this past week I finally got around to reading Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a fictional account of the early career of a writer/artist team during the Golden Age of comics (which ran from the late thirties through the mid-fifties). I've also been reading the big coffee-table biography of Jack Kirby (who co-created, among other things, Captain America, the Fantastic Four, and the Hulk). I'm sure it stands to reason given the nature of comic book art (or, as I suppose I really ought to start calling it, graphic fiction), but I somehow never realized how important the concept of intellectual property is to the industry.
Chabon's novel tells how the title characters, writer Sam Clay and artist Joe Kavalier, created a comic book superhero specifically to capitalize on the success of the National Periodical Company (later to be known as DC, after one of its most successful titles, Detective Comics, in which, incidentally, Batman was introduced in 1939), who had created a pop culture phenomenon in 1938 with the introduction of Superman in Action Comics #1 (the obvious sidebar here is that the actual creators of Superman, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, owned none of the rights to their creation and reaped very little of the monetary rewards that made their employers rich). Now, despite the fact that the character created by Kavalier and Clay --the Escapist -- bears very little resemblance to Superman (they're both super-powered costumed crime fighters), National/DC, in the novel, sues the company that owns the Escapist (not the creators, which is an important point) for copyright infringement. This is based on actual events: National/DC actually sued the publishers of Wonder Man, Master Man, and of course Captain Marvel; though, so far as I know, they were unsuccessful in the case of Captain Marvel, who is quite clearly a Superman knock-off, and who is still very much with us (largely because DC finally bought the character in the 1960s).
Although National/DC was by far the most successful comic book publisher of the thirties and forties, and certainly the most prolific with regard to the creation of costumed superheroes (from 1938 to 1941 they introduced, in quick succession, Superman, Batman, the Flash, the Spectre, Dr. Fate, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Aquaman, the Atom, the Sandman, Hourman, Hawkman, and Wonder Woman, as well as several others not nearly so well-known), they were only one of a number of comic publishers in New York, all of whom were eager to jump on board the bullet train of Superman's popularity. And the relationships that developed strike us today as rather incestuous: Superman inspired Captain Marvel and others, Captain America (introduced in 1941 with a blockbuster cover illustration that showed him punching Hitler in the face) was the source of a whole battalion of similar patriotic heroes, Aquaman is a direct descendant of the Sub-Mariner. Batman brought together elements of earlier heroes from literature and radio like Zorro, the Shadow, and the Green Hornet, and even inspired National/DC to create an obvious knock-off in the figure of Green Arrow (another billionaire playboy with a mask fetish and a taste for revenge). And speaking of Batman, when Robin was introduced in 1940, suddenly every superhero had to have a sidekick (Green Arrow had Speedy, Captain America had Bucky, and so on). Superman and Batman had secret identities, so everyone else had to have one too.
The point? Superhero comics -- comics generally -- developed in the way they did because everyone was copying everyone else. The whole superhero genre was born because all these creators and publishers were busily trying to outdo each other. If the culture of fear we live in now had existed 70 years ago, it's hard to imagine that there would have ever been a Golden Age of comics, or a Silver Age (it began in the mid-fifties when DC started re-imagining old characters like the Flash and Green Lantern, and continued in the early sixties when Marvel introduced the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, among others). I can't imagine that a character like Captain Marvel would ever have been permitted to continue -- he's too clearly a Superman ripoff. Come to that, Batman clearly steals from Zorro, the Shadow, and the Green Hornet, so probably he would have had to go. The mingling, borrowing, and outright stealing that went on in the late thirties and early forties was exactly what allowed the genre to develop with such variety and creativity.
Okay, so I'll get to Kirby later....
5 comments:
Yes, not to mention influences from/on comics from "outside" -- such as Wonder Woman, from the Amazons of her homeland to Gloria Steinem's feminist reimagining. Sufferin' Sappho!
Thanks for this great overview. I know very little about comics (though I love some of the cartoon/film adaptations), but wanted to know more about what Lessig was getting at on 26-27.
I do have a few questions. Has this trend of copying continued to the present or is done in a less obvious way? Or are comic book artists left to rewrite the same superhero characters under the same names? I know a lot of the graphic novels/fiction are not necessarily about saving lives and fighting evil, but in terms of the superhero genre--has it all been done already? And doesn't all this past and present copying help establish the conventions of the genre?
I would say yes, all these guys in the thirties and forties were in fact creating the genre. Nowadays, comic writers and artists -- certainly those employed by the Big Two (DC and Marvel) -- are mostly working with established characters that are owned by the companies. Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman (the so-called Trinity -- yes, people really call them that) are the property of DC, and the editors on the staff are responsible for how those characters (and all the others, the Flash and Green Lantern and, well, just all of them, there are so many now) are handled. There are certain things you're just not allowed to do -- Superman is not suddenly going to become the same kind of dark brooding figure as Batman, and Batman is not going to become the big blue Boy Scout. Artists have had a lot of fun over the years playing with the characters, and you get relatively regular "reboots" that are designed to update the characters, but generally speaking they have to do so within certain editorial constraints.
Both DC and Marvel tend to be pretty protective of their characters, but that doesn't stop them from screwing things up in spectacular fashion: Marvel (through the machinations of editor Joe Quesada) has spent the last two years completely destroying everything they had built up since 1962 (including doing things like breaking up the Fantastic Four and killing Captain America). They are eating crow now and desperately trying to put everything back together. DC has made a specialty out of regularly reinventing their entire universe with what they call Crises (they had one two years ago, and they've spent all the time since then building up to the next -- and supposedly Final -- one).
So I guess you could say that, in the mainstream comics of the two biggest companies, creators are certainly free to create new characters, but they are mostly working with long-established ones, and they are usually pretty limited in terms of how extreme they are allowed to be with them. On the other hand, independent companies (like Dark Horse, which is the biggest of them) made its name by publishing what they call "creator owned" titles, allowing artists to create and retain the rights to their characters -- and here we're talking about things like Frank Miller's Sin City and Mike Mignola's Hellboy. Even for independent publishers, though, this seems to be the exception rather than the rule.
Oh, and by the way, Ehrengard, with respect to Wonder Woman -- it's true that she is an early comics icon of the feminist movement (one whose adventures were most recently written by Jodi Picoult), but I would submit that there is another, slightly earlier, and just as important: Lois Lane.
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