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Though I hadn't actually planned it this way, I'm ending off with a Modern Age comic based on Golden Age characters.
Okay. Maybe I planned it this way a little bit, but I was already planning on reading the comic before I realized what I'd done. Regardless, an interesting take on some old-school heroes.
Come with me on a bit of a tangent.
Once upon a time, there was no such thing as copyright. Artists simply accepted the fact that scummy forgers would profit on their name. Eventually someone came up with the idea that an author could sell the right to copy works to a particular publisher for a particular amount of time, allowing for a mutually-beneficial relationship to be established, copyright. And after that period of time was up, the arrangement was renegotiated, with rights to the material reverting to the artist. This didn't stop bootlegging, but it did offer an "official" version, rather than what could often be a very bad bootleg (from which we have previously based some of our "official" Shakespearean texts). Once an author was dead, there was set into a law a particular length of time that had to pass, and then that person's intellectual property passed into public domain. Now, the reason for this is that we have no culture without the culture that came before us. This can lead us down a very strange rabbit hole called Deconstructionism, but instead let's just say that without the stories and art of prior cultures to draw upon, we have no culture. This is why it's necessary for art to pass into public domain, so that it might be processed and repurposed by contemporary society, to retell old truths to new audiences. Sounds pretty good to me.
But then along comes corporate ownership. Or crazy estates like Tolkien or Conan-Doyle. Situations in which rather than the intellectual property being associated with the actual intellect that created it, and its eventual demise, the property is associated with an organization that will exist perpetually, for all intents and purposes, restricting the way in which contemporary culture can take a potentially fruitful and interesting idea and reshape it to speak to a new audience. What it unfortunately accomplishes is excessive linkage to the past (the desire for authenticity or continuity with previous iterations of an idea), rather than extensive linkage to the future.
Imagine for a second that the Catholic Church copyrighted the contents of the Bible. Such that every time any reference was made to the contents therein, they had to be consulted and paid, and had the right to refuse interpretations that didn't fit with their interpretation. Literally, every time a Christ reference or image was used, they had final say as to whether it would be allowed or not. That's basically what corporate ownership of a character like Superman involves, regardless of the fact that at some point we'll be far enough from the original creators' deaths that he should become public property, to reshape and re-present. Without external corporate oversight.
All of which leads me to the characters in today's comic. You see the Black Terror up there on the cover? He's a public domain character. I think I have three or four different reinterpretations of the character, from Alan Moore's Terra Obscura, to Darkline's Dark Adventures. When this sort of thing happens to a character, it puts me in mind of the way that I catalogue the character Thor in my database. I make no distinctions between Thors from different publishers and genres. To me, they're all stories about the same mythic figure, further myths adding to his already ancient stories. This is how myths work. They keep getting built upon to service a new audience. Part of the reason that the Bible is so successful is that it's in the public domain. Anyone can use it to tell their story. So, for me, all of these stories of the Black Terror, and his pals, are all happening to the same characters, as part of their myth.
Though, in the text, they're actually the original characters, brought back from being trapped in an urn. It was a pretty good story.
More to follow.
