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ACT_OF_CREATION
September 30, 2008
October 12, 2008
The general slant of "Men of Tomorrow" is MEN_OF_TOMORROW
that Siegel and Schuster were creative
geniuses who were cheated of their just Other creators, when
rewards -- but even just using the trapped into a bad
evidence presented in the book, it looks deal they cut when
like Siegel was a one hit wonder, and his they were young,
one hit was just not that brilliant a job: have shown a pattern
of quitting and
Superman was born of: striking out again
o a name from an advertisement for Doc Savage with a new creation
o a Philip Wylie novel with heavy ideas removed that they own
o the secret identity of Zorro and Pimpernel unambiguously.
o the visual form of the comic strips: "Tarzan",
"Buck Rodgers", "The Phantom"... Siegel tried this,
but could never
There isn't much you TIGHTS get a follow-up
can point to about to work.
"Superman" that seems SUPER_CAMP
fabulously new. Maybe that
GLADIATOR says something?
DOC_SAVAGE
The hugely popular "Captain Marvel"
comic was shot down legally as a
mere imitator of Superman, but Philip Wylie, though, was unable
Superman then lifted ideas from to succeed with his lawsuit --
"Captain Marvel": the original
Superman jumped, ala the Hulk, Why are we supposed to
"Captain Marvel" was first in flight. consider Siegel the
ultimate source, the true
And notably, by today's creator and not Wylie?
standards, "Captain Marvel"
would just seem like another
superhero comic, hardly
close enough to Superman for
a law suit.
Who does it second is what matters
for the foundation of a genre,
but only after the genre is established
does it become hard to claim priority.
It's hard to feel there's any
justice behind this American
Way of suing everyone.
It's the ultimate triumph of
Superman: he defeated the
Gladiator, he defeated Captain
Marvel, he even defeated his
creators (for a time)... It occurs to me that I don't even know
what possible basis there could be for
any of these suits: certainly not
"copyright" infringement, we're talking
about ideas here, not words. Trademark,
perhaps?
I suppose I need to learn more about
this: if you want to understand the
art, you need to understand the biz,
and hence the law.
Just for the hell of it:
Consider the possibility that
Superman was just a fluke,
Siegel and Schuster were And also consider the contrary:
anointed by a lighting strike
that might easily have chosen Siegel's contribution may indeed have
someone or something else. been tiny, but it may also have been
critical -- the sort of thing that
may seem obvious in retrospect, but
only in retrospect.
What alternate
realities might
exist?
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