GOLDEN AGE TITLE PROGRESS! COLTS AND SAINTS! INGRAM WINS! Monday’s Blog
Welcome to Monday’s Tuesday’s Mega Comics Group Updates!
Well, this is a new record for late updates! 🙂 Monday caught us a little off guard. We had a lot to do and was out of the offices for most of the morning. Mark Poe, our resident Publisher-In-Training, had posted on Twitter that we would get this post later in the day but the mountain of work just seem to grow yesterday until we simply ran out of time. “A day late and a dollar short” is often the case around the ol’ Mega Comics Bullpen! Please excuse us and except this special Tuesday edition to make amends. 🙂
Progress on the Golden Age Heroes book continues… But slowly! 😀 We’ve discovered this project is a little bigger to get started than we had thought! Of course it has not helped that a certain Publisher-In-Training, who shall remain nameless here, has changed his mind a few times about how to go about this. Suffice it is to say, we’re still not quite ready to start the new Golden Age title. But, we can give you a little update. We’ve decided to call the title Mega Spectacular and, as of this writing, the idea is to feature 100 pages of reprints from the Golden Age of Comics, similar to the old 100 Page Super Spectaculars which DC Comics put out in the ’70’s, but ours will feature some of the heroes who have been homeless for a number of years now. Homeless meaning these stories are in the Public Domain, which means anyone can publish them.
Why is that? The copyright laws for publications require renewal in a certain span of years. Some of the publishers of these early works had gone out of business or else abandoned the titles for more profitable ventures, so many were never renewed. In addition, since copyright and trademark laws are different, some of the characters names, such as Daredevil and Captain Marvel were not renewed according to trademark laws and so other publishers used the names for entirely different characters. So the Original Captain Marvel cannot be marketed using his name because the name is trademarked by Marvel Comics. However, he can be referred to as Captain Marvel in the pages of any title he appears in because that portion of the book falls under copyright law rather than trademark law. Confused? So are we! 😉
Want to be more confused? From searches we, and others, have done it appears most of the Original Captain Marvel Family adventures’ copyrights were never renewed by the time required and many are now in the Public Domain. So anyone can publish those old stories.
Now, in the comics industry everyone knows that the name Captain Marvel was not renewed by Fawcett and the trademark fell into the hands of Marvel Comics. DC Comics reportedly bought all the rights to the characters for the Captain Marvel Family. But the dates this was done has been in dispute. Some say DC licensed the characters from Fawcett then finally bought them out completely. The question is however, if the copyrights for most of the Captain Marvel Family adventures were not renewed and are now in the Public Domain, how could the Captain Marvel Family characters NOT be in the Public Domain as well. What difference would it make? Well, if the characters are in the Public Domain then anyone, NOT just DC Comics, could publish NEW Captain Marvel Family adventures. We are and have been looking into the matter. If anyone has any reliable information about this we’d love to hear from you.
The Colts and the Saints are 13-0! Still 3 games in the regular season but who can beat these guys. Indianapolis and New Orleans seem unstoppable. Both teams have been down to the point of losing and somehow have pulled it out with a win. Still, as the New England Patriots proved a couple years ago, you can win every game and still lose in the playoffs, even the Super Bowl! So like the man said, “it ain’t over, ’til it’s over!”
Mark Ingram wins the Heisman Trophy! Wow! We were shocked! As the ol’ Mega Bullpen gathered ’round the tube Saturday night we figured it would be a slam dunk win for Colt McCoy, Senior Quarterback for the Texas Longhorns, who was also in the running last year and finished second to Oklahoma’s Sam Bradford. Tim Tebow, Colt McCoy, Mark Ingram, Toby Gerhart and Ndamukong Suh were the finalists for college football’s most prestigious player of the year award this year. Last we heard McCoy was leading in the votes but somehow by the end of the race it went down to the Running Backs and was only 5 votes apart between Ingram and Gerhart. Mr. Ingram, as he has done all year on the ball field, managed to break the tackles and score the points! Kudos to Alabama’s first ever Heisman Trophy winner! Sheesh! It only took ’em 75 years to win one! 😉
Any questions or comments? All are welcome.
Check out the previous posts for Mega Tales! CU Wednesday!
