What is the appeal of Golden Age public domain characters?
Fans may rightly ask, and I certainly ask this myself: Why am I wasting time drawing Golden Age public domain characters, especially when I have so many creator-owned characters under IP (intellectual property, i.e., creator-owned projects like Megaton Man and Border Worlds) going begging?
Let me say first of all, the amount of energy I have devoted to GApd characters is paltry—less than one regular comic book issue among the sixty or seventy-five issues I’ve written and drawn in my career, not to mention freelance work, even counting a couple short stories involving only GApd that have yet to see print. Even so, as public domain elements of Victory Folks and Heroine Hotel, those works in their entirety still fall under my trademark and copyright, even if creators are still free to return to the public domain source material and freely adapt as they choose.
First, we need to discuss that source material, which to my mind falls into four categories (discussed below). There are, if the internet can be relied upon, hundreds of costumed characters from the comic book Golden Age (roughly the 1930s through the 1950s), not including generic western, teen, humor, funny animal, sci-fi, detective and other characters. By “costumed character,” the term employed at the time, I mean what we would today call a superhero (or in my own idiosyncratic work, a megahero)—costumed crimefighters, good guys—and a small number of costumed villains. When literary sources like adventure fiction and pulps are included, the list is even longer, including characters like Sherlock Holmes, Dejah Thoris, Dorothy Gale (from the Wizard of Oz) and so on.
[On that subject, see Philip José Farmer for more!]
Costumed characters from the Golden Age of comics that have fallen into the public domain, by and large, are no more or less worthy than similar characters from the Golden Age or were revived. These include the stalwarts of Marvel and DC, which make up the bulk of today’s Hollywood franchise movies: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Flash, Captain America, the Human Torch, Sub-Mariner, and so on. It is worth noting that, had Stan Lee not revived the Timely Comics characters and incorporated them into the new Marvel Comics Group, Cap, Torch, and Subby may well have suffered the same ignoble fate as the GApd characters.
The first of the four categories, and it is small, are the GApds that in my opinion should never have fallen into the public domain in the first place and only did so through bad business decisions or sheer neglect. As Intellectual properties, these characters were as conceptually developed, polished, and professional as any of the Golden Age characters that survived under copyright and trademark, and for the most part are more memorable than many of the stable of Marvel and DC characters that would have been forgotten had editors not undertaken aggressive efforts to revive, reboot, repurpose, and restore every forgettable property in the Marvel and DC back catalog.
Among the GApds in this category are the Black Cat, Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, Daredevil, and Moon Girl, strips or features (as they would have been known at the time as polished and memorable as anything at National or Timely (forerunners to Marvel and DC). The Black Cat, while starting off rough, with her motorcycle and Hollywood reporter milieu developed under Lee Elias into a feature polished enough for the Sunday pages of most American newspapers, were it not for maybe too much leg and cleavage for the American family home. Sheena, while most of her comics were generic jungle yarns, was and remains a household word that Hollywood continues to flirt with, even as PD IP. Daredevil attained the status of a polished and distinctive property that was well-remembered by comic book readers of the day. And the short-lived Moon Girl, despite a convoluted backstory and somewhat indeterminate genre choices (romance? detective? sci-fi?) had killer costume and cut a memorable, iconic figure.
The next category of GApd is memorable but weird; this category is even more narrow, because it consists mostly of the oeuvre of two artists: Fletcher Hanks and Basil Wolverton. Hanks’ Stardust and Fantomah, first celebrated by Art Spiegelman, are costumed characters that somehow got the classic formula wrong, but in such perverse and genre-transgressing ways as to be unforgettable. Fantomah, a voodoo jungle character with a beautiful woman who turns into a skull visage, and Stardust, a masculine cream puff with godlike powers and one of the silliest names in comics, can be be played straight or played for laughs (I know from experience); but reproducing Hanks’ quirky mood of total commitment and deficient skills and even more bizarre imagination is almost impossible. The same is true of Wolverton’s Spacehawk, perhaps more memorable for the villains (much like Hanks) than the actual protagonist.
While the first two categories are extremely narrow, most GApds fall into the third: characters that are simply so generic and so underdeveloped as to be, by and large, utterly forgettable. This includes most of the stable of Fox characters, many of whom were pale imitations of Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon rather than Superman or Batman, or the legion of forgettable patriotic characters, next to which Captain America and the Fighting American (both created by Simon and Kirby) are comparably iconic. The characters in this category are perhaps the greatest resource for the modern cartoonist looking for material to practice on, since they lend themselves to adding something or turning them around in some way and making them one’s own.
Let me say first of all, the amount of energy I have devoted to GApd characters is paltry—less than one regular comic book issue among the sixty or seventy-five issues I’ve written and drawn in my career, not to mention freelance work, even counting a couple short stories involving only GApd that have yet to see print. Even so, as public domain elements of Victory Folks and Heroine Hotel, those works in their entirety still fall under my trademark and copyright, even if creators are still free to return to the public domain source material and freely adapt as they choose.
First, we need to discuss that source material, which to my mind falls into four categories (discussed below). There are, if the internet can be relied upon, hundreds of costumed characters from the comic book Golden Age (roughly the 1930s through the 1950s), not including generic western, teen, humor, funny animal, sci-fi, detective and other characters. By “costumed character,” the term employed at the time, I mean what we would today call a superhero (or in my own idiosyncratic work, a megahero)—costumed crimefighters, good guys—and a small number of costumed villains. When literary sources like adventure fiction and pulps are included, the list is even longer, including characters like Sherlock Holmes, Dejah Thoris, Dorothy Gale (from the Wizard of Oz) and so on.
[On that subject, see Philip José Farmer for more!]
Costumed characters from the Golden Age of comics that have fallen into the public domain, by and large, are no more or less worthy than similar characters from the Golden Age or were revived. These include the stalwarts of Marvel and DC, which make up the bulk of today’s Hollywood franchise movies: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Flash, Captain America, the Human Torch, Sub-Mariner, and so on. It is worth noting that, had Stan Lee not revived the Timely Comics characters and incorporated them into the new Marvel Comics Group, Cap, Torch, and Subby may well have suffered the same ignoble fate as the GApd characters.
The first of the four categories, and it is small, are the GApds that in my opinion should never have fallen into the public domain in the first place and only did so through bad business decisions or sheer neglect. As Intellectual properties, these characters were as conceptually developed, polished, and professional as any of the Golden Age characters that survived under copyright and trademark, and for the most part are more memorable than many of the stable of Marvel and DC characters that would have been forgotten had editors not undertaken aggressive efforts to revive, reboot, repurpose, and restore every forgettable property in the Marvel and DC back catalog.
Among the GApds in this category are the Black Cat, Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, Daredevil, and Moon Girl, strips or features (as they would have been known at the time as polished and memorable as anything at National or Timely (forerunners to Marvel and DC). The Black Cat, while starting off rough, with her motorcycle and Hollywood reporter milieu developed under Lee Elias into a feature polished enough for the Sunday pages of most American newspapers, were it not for maybe too much leg and cleavage for the American family home. Sheena, while most of her comics were generic jungle yarns, was and remains a household word that Hollywood continues to flirt with, even as PD IP. Daredevil attained the status of a polished and distinctive property that was well-remembered by comic book readers of the day. And the short-lived Moon Girl, despite a convoluted backstory and somewhat indeterminate genre choices (romance? detective? sci-fi?) had killer costume and cut a memorable, iconic figure.
The next category of GApd is memorable but weird; this category is even more narrow, because it consists mostly of the oeuvre of two artists: Fletcher Hanks and Basil Wolverton. Hanks’ Stardust and Fantomah, first celebrated by Art Spiegelman, are costumed characters that somehow got the classic formula wrong, but in such perverse and genre-transgressing ways as to be unforgettable. Fantomah, a voodoo jungle character with a beautiful woman who turns into a skull visage, and Stardust, a masculine cream puff with godlike powers and one of the silliest names in comics, can be be played straight or played for laughs (I know from experience); but reproducing Hanks’ quirky mood of total commitment and deficient skills and even more bizarre imagination is almost impossible. The same is true of Wolverton’s Spacehawk, perhaps more memorable for the villains (much like Hanks) than the actual protagonist.
While the first two categories are extremely narrow, most GApds fall into the third: characters that are simply so generic and so underdeveloped as to be, by and large, utterly forgettable. This includes most of the stable of Fox characters, many of whom were pale imitations of Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon rather than Superman or Batman, or the legion of forgettable patriotic characters, next to which Captain America and the Fighting American (both created by Simon and Kirby) are comparably iconic. The characters in this category are perhaps the greatest resource for the modern cartoonist looking for material to practice on, since they lend themselves to adding something or turning them around in some way and making them one’s own.
 |
| Victory Folks from Yeet! Presents #1 (Cost of Paper Comics, 2022). |
Characters in this category, one can imagine, could most easily be revamped and modernized by the mechanism of inheritance: a grandson or granddaughter discovers an old costume and scrapbook of newspaper clippings in the attic (“Grandparent was a costumed crimefighter!”); the heir decides it is their destiny to revive the persona. Most of these characters, in other words, have nothing particularly wrong with them and are no worse many of the garden-variety Marvel and DC characters of the era that have survived.
The fourth and final category are GApd characters that do have something wrong with them, and therefore would require a bit more work. These are characters whose names, backstories, origins, and even costumes have little or nothing to do with one another, don’t match, and simply don’t work to form a cohesive or memorable whole--they aren’t even weird enough to stick in anyone’s mind. These include Satana, Queen of the Underworld—whose bra top, chain mail panties, and other costume elements look like mismatched leftovers from a third-rate circus—and U.S.A., the Spirit of Old Glory—whose mythic, storybook backstory, flag cape, and indecipherable attribute that vaguely resembles the Statue of Liberty’s torch flame but also a strange tulip add up to complete and irreconcilable incoherence.
As for the appeal of GApds to the modern cartoonist, I can only speak for myself. I came to the game rather late, concocting Victory Folks initially as a five-page feature for the benefit of Bill Loebs, scripter, for the pages of Yeet! Presents, a pro-am (professional-amateur) comics anthology that has set the record for longevity in comics publishing history. My thought was simply to pencil five pages of GApds (in this case, exclusively from Victor Fox’s Fantastic Comics), forming a primal Golden Age super-team that Bill would script and Jason Moore would ink.
This project has grown in peculiar ways, with the first installment expanding to ten pages and me scripting and inking half of it, appearing in Yeet! #50, and a second installment with Bill editing, me scripting and penciling, and Jason inking, on the way, and a spin-off eight pager, Heroine Hotel, which will be all me, and including characters outside of the Fox stable.
Of course I was aware of Bill Black’s AC Comics, and in fact bought many of those issues for the reprints of classic Fiction House jungle girls (my own homage, the Phantom Jungle Girl, was the result). I only became aware of Erik Larsen’s liberal use of GApds in The Savage Dragon storyline after work began on Victory Folks, and have since become aware of a veritable cottage industry of amateur and fan-artists rendering their interpretations of GApds online. Returning to the appeal, and again only speaking for myself, I have to speak from experience. In the late eighties, the nineties, and into the early 2000s, even though I broke into the industry and established myself as the writer-artist-creator of Megaton Man and Border Worlds, I found myself backing into a freelance career, mostly with DC Comics (Wasteland), but also Mirage Studios (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), and even more rarely Disney and Marvel.
While the first of these assignments were simply given to me (I never had to “try out” for either Wasteland or TMNT), I found that if I wanted further freelance assignments, I had to offer samples. To that end, I created samples for the Flash, Dr. Fate, and later, the Avengers, Exiles, and several for my favorite comics character of all time, Spider-Man.
Although I did obtain a Flash assignment for Flash Annual #3 scripted by Bill Loebs (a Laurel and Hardy riff featuring Chunk and Guy Gardner), and a Rogues Gallery scene in Secret Origins #41 scripted by Dan Mishkin and Gary Cohn (perhaps my most mainstream straight superhero work of all time) few of these samples yielded anything in terms of paying work (although collectors snapped up the originals and wondered what the hell was wrong with the editors!).
Particularly memorable was the sneer on Exiles editor Mike Marts face when he declared my Wally Wood-Joe Sinnott inking on my samples out of step with current fashion in 2002, and Joey Cavilieri’s dismissal of my Inferior Five pitch around 2005. Such experiences I found so utterly infuriating, they only sent me back to the drawing board to create more of my own IP …
The reason why one had to create samples and pitches for Marvel and DC in order to obtain freelance work is noteworthy. After the 1970s, and the experiences of Steve Gerber and Rich Buckler creating characters that became the subject of ownership dispute (Howard the Duck and Deathlok the Demolisher, respectively), the majors only wanted to see samples of what prospective freelancers could do with stock characters that they fully owned—and by then, Marvel and DC had sufficient stables of characters, and could always buy more, such as Charlton or Malibu. Also, it must be said, editors became increasingly stupid, lacking the imagination to look at the work of an artist and abstract from it and imagine it on a different character.
The point being that, as a veteran of numerous and infuriating failed samples and pitches to Marvel and DC over the years, and the absolutely enraging inability to show the mainstream comics reading public what I could do with essentially banal and trite but established trademarks, the appeal of GApds should be obvious. First of all, the cartoonists can interpret these characters without editorial interference, and present them directly to the public without legal hassles or anyone’s permission. This is creative freedom without the frustration.
The only creator who seems to be able to get away with using trademarked characters freely is John Byrne—his ElseWhen will be the subject of another blog post at some time.
Infuriating, small-minded editors aside, drawing GApds has an undeniable nostalgic charm—most GApds are stillborn, undeveloped properties, actually published during the heyday of comics’ Golden Age, but existing on a conceptual level of most fourth graders. In fact, most of the nameless or forgotten creators of this material had neither exceptional skill nor exceptional talent, and the imagination behind most of these characters is on the level of a fourth-grader. Returning to GApds is like returning to a moment in history and restoring its evolutionary history—a history that might have been had business decisions, more talented contributors, reader popularity, and other stars fallen into alignment.
Also, despite the bland, generic origins of most GApds, most of the original editions are now priceless collector’s items—truly rare since most newsprint from that era was recycled during World War II paper drives—and the original art is in most cases even more scarce and invaluable. This makes drawing GApds, from a cartoonist’s perspective, a pseudo-desirable item for original art collectors. Since they can’t own an original drawing of a GApd, a modern interpretation or recreation of a pseudo-iconic Golden Age character may be the next best thing.
To reiterate a point I made before, while anyone can freely adapt and interpret GApds, still those interpretations are protected by copyright. My drawing of the Black Cat is wholly mine, © Don Simpson 2022, all rights reserved, although you are free to draw your own version. And Victory Folks™ and Heroine Hotel
™ are my own distinctive trademark, and whatever other works I choose to include GApds become completely my IP.
The fourth and final category are GApd characters that do have something wrong with them, and therefore would require a bit more work. These are characters whose names, backstories, origins, and even costumes have little or nothing to do with one another, don’t match, and simply don’t work to form a cohesive or memorable whole--they aren’t even weird enough to stick in anyone’s mind. These include Satana, Queen of the Underworld—whose bra top, chain mail panties, and other costume elements look like mismatched leftovers from a third-rate circus—and U.S.A., the Spirit of Old Glory—whose mythic, storybook backstory, flag cape, and indecipherable attribute that vaguely resembles the Statue of Liberty’s torch flame but also a strange tulip add up to complete and irreconcilable incoherence.
As for the appeal of GApds to the modern cartoonist, I can only speak for myself. I came to the game rather late, concocting Victory Folks initially as a five-page feature for the benefit of Bill Loebs, scripter, for the pages of Yeet! Presents, a pro-am (professional-amateur) comics anthology that has set the record for longevity in comics publishing history. My thought was simply to pencil five pages of GApds (in this case, exclusively from Victor Fox’s Fantastic Comics), forming a primal Golden Age super-team that Bill would script and Jason Moore would ink.
This project has grown in peculiar ways, with the first installment expanding to ten pages and me scripting and inking half of it, appearing in Yeet! #50, and a second installment with Bill editing, me scripting and penciling, and Jason inking, on the way, and a spin-off eight pager, Heroine Hotel, which will be all me, and including characters outside of the Fox stable.
 |
| Heroine Hotel, forthcoming. |
Of course I was aware of Bill Black’s AC Comics, and in fact bought many of those issues for the reprints of classic Fiction House jungle girls (my own homage, the Phantom Jungle Girl, was the result). I only became aware of Erik Larsen’s liberal use of GApds in The Savage Dragon storyline after work began on Victory Folks, and have since become aware of a veritable cottage industry of amateur and fan-artists rendering their interpretations of GApds online. Returning to the appeal, and again only speaking for myself, I have to speak from experience. In the late eighties, the nineties, and into the early 2000s, even though I broke into the industry and established myself as the writer-artist-creator of Megaton Man and Border Worlds, I found myself backing into a freelance career, mostly with DC Comics (Wasteland), but also Mirage Studios (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), and even more rarely Disney and Marvel.
While the first of these assignments were simply given to me (I never had to “try out” for either Wasteland or TMNT), I found that if I wanted further freelance assignments, I had to offer samples. To that end, I created samples for the Flash, Dr. Fate, and later, the Avengers, Exiles, and several for my favorite comics character of all time, Spider-Man.
Although I did obtain a Flash assignment for Flash Annual #3 scripted by Bill Loebs (a Laurel and Hardy riff featuring Chunk and Guy Gardner), and a Rogues Gallery scene in Secret Origins #41 scripted by Dan Mishkin and Gary Cohn (perhaps my most mainstream straight superhero work of all time) few of these samples yielded anything in terms of paying work (although collectors snapped up the originals and wondered what the hell was wrong with the editors!).
Particularly memorable was the sneer on Exiles editor Mike Marts face when he declared my Wally Wood-Joe Sinnott inking on my samples out of step with current fashion in 2002, and Joey Cavilieri’s dismissal of my Inferior Five pitch around 2005. Such experiences I found so utterly infuriating, they only sent me back to the drawing board to create more of my own IP …
The reason why one had to create samples and pitches for Marvel and DC in order to obtain freelance work is noteworthy. After the 1970s, and the experiences of Steve Gerber and Rich Buckler creating characters that became the subject of ownership dispute (Howard the Duck and Deathlok the Demolisher, respectively), the majors only wanted to see samples of what prospective freelancers could do with stock characters that they fully owned—and by then, Marvel and DC had sufficient stables of characters, and could always buy more, such as Charlton or Malibu. Also, it must be said, editors became increasingly stupid, lacking the imagination to look at the work of an artist and abstract from it and imagine it on a different character.
The point being that, as a veteran of numerous and infuriating failed samples and pitches to Marvel and DC over the years, and the absolutely enraging inability to show the mainstream comics reading public what I could do with essentially banal and trite but established trademarks, the appeal of GApds should be obvious. First of all, the cartoonists can interpret these characters without editorial interference, and present them directly to the public without legal hassles or anyone’s permission. This is creative freedom without the frustration.
The only creator who seems to be able to get away with using trademarked characters freely is John Byrne—his ElseWhen will be the subject of another blog post at some time.
Infuriating, small-minded editors aside, drawing GApds has an undeniable nostalgic charm—most GApds are stillborn, undeveloped properties, actually published during the heyday of comics’ Golden Age, but existing on a conceptual level of most fourth graders. In fact, most of the nameless or forgotten creators of this material had neither exceptional skill nor exceptional talent, and the imagination behind most of these characters is on the level of a fourth-grader. Returning to GApds is like returning to a moment in history and restoring its evolutionary history—a history that might have been had business decisions, more talented contributors, reader popularity, and other stars fallen into alignment.
Also, despite the bland, generic origins of most GApds, most of the original editions are now priceless collector’s items—truly rare since most newsprint from that era was recycled during World War II paper drives—and the original art is in most cases even more scarce and invaluable. This makes drawing GApds, from a cartoonist’s perspective, a pseudo-desirable item for original art collectors. Since they can’t own an original drawing of a GApd, a modern interpretation or recreation of a pseudo-iconic Golden Age character may be the next best thing.
To reiterate a point I made before, while anyone can freely adapt and interpret GApds, still those interpretations are protected by copyright. My drawing of the Black Cat is wholly mine, © Don Simpson 2022, all rights reserved, although you are free to draw your own version. And Victory Folks™ and Heroine Hotel
™ are my own distinctive trademark, and whatever other works I choose to include GApds become completely my IP.
Finally, there is the reason suggested by the wording of the title of this post. British artist Richard Hamilton’s 1956 collage, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, which gave the Pop Art movement both its name and satirical ethos (exploited to such great effect subsequently by Americans Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein). Just as those artists skewered the banality of generic romance, war, and superhero comics imagery, GApds offer fertile ground for pop satire in the twenty-first century. As genuine examples of genuine Americana at its most overlooked, GApds can hardly be beat.
While I don’t expect GApds to form a major part of my career going forward, I consider it part of the tradition and heritage of comics—in much the same way baseball has incorporated iconography from the Negro Leagues and previous Major League franchises in its contemporary visual culture.
_________
Read the Ms. Megaton Man Maxi-Series! New prose chapter every Friday!
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While I don’t expect GApds to form a major part of my career going forward, I consider it part of the tradition and heritage of comics—in much the same way baseball has incorporated iconography from the Negro Leagues and previous Major League franchises in its contemporary visual culture.
 |
| Richard Hamilton, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, 12" x 12" collage, 1956. |
Read the Ms. Megaton Man Maxi-Series! New prose chapter every Friday!
If you’re on Facebook, please consider joining the Ms. Megaton Man™ Maxi-Series Prose Readers group! See exclusive artwork, read advance previews, and enjoy other special stuff.
___________
All characters, character names, likenesses, words and pictures on this page are ™ and © Don Simpson 2022, all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted.
Great post Don, thank you!
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