Those who have been reading my blog know quite a bit about one of my favorite early heroes, Dr. Occult. He was a suave private detective with every bit the charm of a Dick Tracy type, added with the mysterious fog of the supernatural.While most detectives were dealing with drug pushers and kidnappers, Dr. Occult was off battling demons and vampires. In fact some would say he's a major inspiration for the current Vertigo hero John Constantine. Except not British.
What I haven't mentioned though, is the strange and interesting tale of how Dr. Occult is both a DC character and a Marvel character. Let me explain:
Back in 1936, comic creators John Mahon and Bill Cook left DC comics in a dispute over not being paid for their work (god forbid that!). However, they did not go off into the quiet goodnight, no sir. Instead they acquired financial backing of their own and decided to beat DC at their own game. National Allied Comics had its first major rival: The Comics Magazine Company.
In those days, there was no "writer loyalty" or exclusive contracts as their is now. So many of the talent that the Comics Magazine Company ended up hiring were also working for National Allied, including the legendary team of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. This is how the whole mess started.
Siegel and Shuster created the character of Dr. Occult within the pages of More Fun Comics. This new company wanted some of those same stories, so the name was changed to Dr. Mystic and he appeared in their eponymous "Comics Magazine".The strange thing is, Siegel and Shuster treated these two characters as one and the same. A story would start in one comic, and finish in the next comic, no matter what company released said comic or what name the Dr. was using at the time. You could say that this was one of the first examples of an inter-company cross-over!
Of course, even though these comics managed to create some very memorable characters (such as the very first masked hero "The Clock") they never achieved the financial success of their rivals. So eventually, companies were merged or sold, and the copyrights of characters changed hands quite a few times.
Comics Magazine Company was merged with Ultem Publications, minus a few of the characters like The Clock, which were sold to Quality Comics. By 1938, Ultem went under and was sold to what would eventually become Centuar Publications. Taking the greats like Dr. Mystic, and creating new characters like Amazing Man, they managed to publish stories up until finally dying out in 1944. After that, for all intents and purposes, these characters were gone forever.
Until 1992 that is. Enter Malibu Comics! By this time all the characters from Centaur Comics had passed into the public domain so a few comics companies tried to revive them. The most notable one was Malibu, who took several Centaur characters and put them on a team called The Protectors. It lasted 20 issues and then died, but the practice of reviving classic public domain characters lives on to this day.
And so we come to the end of this story. Comic lovers know that the comics industry crashed in the mid-90's from collector speculation, and with it fell Malibu Comics. They were chopped up and sold to Marvel, who have continued to ignore the characters that they now hold the rights to. It will never happen, but a "Dr. Mystic" character could exist in the world of Marvel, and his past creates a link to the world of DC in a way that is rarely seen.
Well, that's all I have to say on that matter. I hope you enjoyed my rants on comic industry copyright craziness, but if not, don't fret. Next time I'll be back to the formula of reading those "classic" comics, and separating the "gold" from the merely "old".
Until next time comics fans, stay golden.
No comments:
Post a Comment