The Interplay Between Perpetual Copywrite And The Comics Code
This blog post will be about the issue of copywrite / trademark ownership, and the interplay with comic book censorship. Although this isn’t about the censorship you might be thinking of, specifically if you’re in the Regression portion of the left. Rather my issue is how there had been a dearth of Literary Genres until the very end of the Comics Code Authority era. Specifically, the sheer absence of other genres, at least in the form that comics take today.
Much of the hesitation I’ve had for producing comics, has been the perception that American comics were mostly about super heroes. Specifically despite how many authors / creators there are in existence, it seemed like there were only a few different characters, will considerable cross over when it comes to producing content for Trademark characters.
For those who don’t know, I have never been a fan of the superhero genre. Everyone knows the history of the comics code at this point, so it’s not worth expanding on here. If you’re curious about it, look up Wertham, Seduction Of The Innocent, and the comic books scares of the 1950s. However there is another factor I feel like is worth exploring: Marvel and DC for a very long time had extremely bad copy write practices do to the fact that they could conceivably license out characters they own, because the original creators of characters signed bad agreements. The ramification being part of the catalyst for Creator-Owned Comics. ( I prefer the term single-creator comics, as I feel like it’s more accurate for what I want. )
Other articles on the internet will mention a lack of “cultural diversity” in American comics, but to me the more pertinent issue is the lack of genre diversity: and to me this is largely do to the prevalence of the Comics Code Authority being ran by the very same companies that had perpetual copywrite / trademarks. So they had absolute power over determining how got licensed to create IPs. So you had a lot of creators forced to sign shady deals with publishers that would fire them off projects, and hire new creative teams for characters not originally created by them.
So a limited variety of literary genres in comics was largely perpetuated by the fact that until the 90s, Marvel and DC were the only games in town. With the exception of Alternative and Underground comics. People focus so much on the Diamond monopoly, and not the near monopoly status of the Big Two publishers that that dominated the comics industry until just ten years ago. I only started reading comics sometimes around 2013 when I started getting temporarily board of Manga.
And I feel like bad contract agreements exacerbated the problem.
( Not including newspaper strips, which is kind of its own thing. )