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lot of that this year which i noted in april of course this isn t exactly new we ve seen cross overs between marvel and dc dating back to the 1970s and the very earliest comic books were just publishers reprinting comics that had already appeared in newspapers the reason why this type of thing typically happens as i explained back in my december post is because there is a lot of market uncertainty and businesses in general veer more towards options with fewer risks in the case of publishing this means reprinting material there are known quantities for and doubling up on popular ips what this means internally to publishers is that their legal departments are working a bit harder on ensuring they have all the rights squared away and they re usually a little more flexible in negotiations with the other parties involved that s how we finally saw for the first time a reprint of marvel two in one 21 which featured doc savage the character was under license from street smith when the original issue came out in 1976 but marvel couldn t get reprint rights later and so the issue wasn t included in the essential reprint books which otherwise reprinted the entire run of that series but they pushed harder for that and probably capitulated to some additional demands money from condé nast doc savage s current rights holder in order to get a more complete set of the series for the omnibus line what then occurred to me is that there are few other marvel comics that have never been reprinted because of rights issues and interestingly many of them share something in common the two biggest ones i can think of are 2001 a space odyssey and the marvelous wizard of oz both of which were treasury style books marvel did in the mid 1970s based on the movies which are owned by mgm i haven t gone through marvel s full back catalog but i suspect there s a few other comics they did around that time based on mgm properies that have never been reprinted either does the marvelous land of oz have rights issues the story is based on l frank baum s books directly not a movie but it uses some of the same character designs i m not sure how that was handled i don t doubt marvel s lawyers have investigated what needs to happen to bring some of these treasury books back to print for the first time in the half century since their original publication but mgm is now owned by amazon and i have no idea how much hardball they re playing on this kind of thing they no doubt recognize the value of the mgm movie libray itself but how greedy are they around derivative works like these comics maybe the spider noir show opened some legal doors for reprint rights somehow i m sure they re totally different sets of lawyers involved on both sides but there s some discussion going on between marvel and amazon mgm at least but in this era of heightened what can we do that s a sure thing publishing i wouldn t be surprised to see the two companies come to an agreement in the not too distant future here s an experiment i proposed several years back i ve brought it up every four years or so but i have yet to see anyone take this challenge up so i thought i d present it here again is there anything in the original star wars trilogy that necessitates any given character being a certain race or gender i can t think of anything obi wan and yoda could have been female vader could have been luke s mother even the han leia romance could easily be portrayed by either two men or two women everything you think of as masculine or feminine in those movies is strictly a social construct and it would be no problem at all to do color blind casting since all ties to what we think of as racial identity are effectively null and void in a galaxy far far away that got me thinking about how things are portrayed in comics actually everything pretty much gets me thinking about comics there are a lot of the same types of issues in mainstream comics so what would happen if you took an existing comic book story particularly something really well known and gender race swapped characters randomly any number of fan artists have shown what famous characters might look like if they were gender race swapped but that doesn t carry the thought all the way to its natural conclusion there have been a number of stories where characters were gender swapped already the most famous example i can think of offhand is archie 636 from several years ago but by and large the writers here and on the others were quite conscious of the gender swapping and specifically wrote the books to that effect so readers are given a very consciously skewed version of the characters that s why i d be more interested to see some existing stories swapped keep the dialogue and layouts and everything exactly as they were done originally but simply swap the specifics of the illustrations themselves the galactus trilogy the dark phoenix saga the killing joke the death of superman what would these stories look like if everything were exactly the same except characters races and genders were assigned randomly again exact same dialogue exact same actions exact same layouts just swap out the visuals of the character designs i think this would be a fascinating and enlightening experiment rather than letting the writer consciously or subconsciously play to stereotypes this approach would force readers to directly and honestly confront their notions of gender and racial identity why does mrs fantastic sound like an utter bitch when mr fantastic just came off as a bit gruff is gene grey s destruction of the d bari less heinous than when jean grey did it is commissioner jane gordon excessively worried about her son s capture given that he had already proven himself capable enough to fight alongside batwoman does superwoman s fight against doomsday seem needlessly absurd now well even more needlessly absurd in most race and gender swapping experiments we re still stuck with preconceptions developed over years if not decades of social conditioning of what a person should shouldn t act like based on their gender or race writers and artists consciously or not play to those stereotypes and present readers with typically one man s idea of what women would be like if they had masculine traits by eliminating that aspect of the equation and we pretend the original writer was simply writing from a gender race neutral position we can see how those stereotypes are often inadvertently catered to so here s my challenge i would like to see someone go through some famous comic story and randomly assign a gender and race to each character then recreate the story exactly as it was originally presented but using the newly assigned race gender for everybody yup it would be a lot of work but it would spark one hell of a discussion one that we haven t had yet like many people i am mostly familiar with darryl cunningham s work when it comes to non fiction whether he was disproving absurd moon landing conspiracy theories or just relaying the life of a russian dictator he did a good job boiling down some complex elements into a fairly digestable narrative but because i know him from that type of material i was indeed curious to see what he might do with a straight up science fiction story john of the night is the story of the titular john who discovers some ripples in space time that seem to have originated some 3000 years earlier in the 1960s but could obliterate the universe when he goes to inform his boss though he almost instantly finds himself at the wrong end of a several starships that blow his station into smithereens while he and his daughter are able to escape the immediate execution they have to race to keep ahead of john s boss s attempts to get rid of him we learn of the war that was started by a group who believe the destruction of this universe will lead to the birth of a new and perfect one and that when it comes to magic belief is more important than reality with the help of his daughter john is able to thwart the universe s greatest assassin and ultimately save everything except perhaps himself i read the story before reading any background on it i had no idea what cunningham s intentions were or how he approached this compared to his non fiction work about a third of the way into it i recall getting the strong sense that it reminded me of jack kirby s fourth world obviously there s little in the way of visual similarity but the storytelling felt like cunningham was relaying some of his core ideas about the fundamental nature of mankind life and even reality itself through an action packed story much like kirby had done in the fourth world it s not pontificating and there are in fact several fight scenes which just allow silent storytelling to take place with no monologuing or anything i got the strong sense that like kirby cunningham was building up a story around ideas that he couldn t quite express directly and sure enough he expressly notes in the back matter that kirby was a direct inspiration for some of his effort in the book what i also liked was cunningham was able to casually throw in corrections to common storytelling problems when it comes to science for example at one point john leaves his daughter through a time portal and assumes she ll be able to build her own time machine to find him and even though it takes her a month to do so she shows up almost immediately and that notion of time being you know relative remains consistent throughout the story unlike many who play fast and loose with those kinds of ideas because their creators can t think of a decent way to generate tension otherwise i m looking at you back to the future despite the shade i m throwing there cunningham does not do that he doesn t call out any one story or franchise for being wrong about how any of that works in fact he s got any number of easter eggs to other time travel alternate reality stories from star trek to red dwarf and from the wizard of oz to the prisoner there s a slew of background nods if you want to stop for a where s waldo style hunt on the whole i thought it was a really interesting story despite the protagonist being kind of an asshole we get a backstory explaining why eventually but it s just an explanation not an excuse he s still an asshole even to his own kid which interestingly she recognizes and acknowledges but continues to live with him anyway but seemingly not in a toxic sort of way strangely but john ultimately does play the role of the hero not only to the universe but also to his daughter and her mother so as a reader you still have good reason to cheer him on and seemingly as a bonus cunningham just so happens to include a lot of his ideas about the nature of reality in the process john of the night should be in shops on september 2 2026 but you can obviously pre order it now it retails for 19 99 us and is being published by avery hill an advance review copy was provided to me by the publisher one of the things that s struck me about older comics is some of the cross media attention they were given i think many fans are at least nominally familiar with some of the serials that were produced using superman captain marvel captain america and others but less well known are the radio programs that were popular around the same time the adventures of superman of course is one of the more well known largely by virtue of the titular character s popularity he was arguably one of the first cross media phenomenon the old fleischer cartoons are certainly well known as are the serials and later tv show so i think fans readily roll the notion of a radio show under that umbrella he was in all media so of course he would have a radio show but i don t know that fans today understand the importance and impact radio had back in the day unlike comics radio programs could be listened to collectively and were a communal activity in a way that many other media certainly other media of the day couldn t be so to have a character make the transition from comics to radio was a big deal culturally on par with getting a blockbuster movie today besides superman other comic characters that got their own radio programs included batman blue beetle flash gordon blondie popeye blackstone archie dick tracy gasoline alley li l abner little orphan annie skippy terry and the pirates mark trail buster brown and the gumps to name just a few perhaps surprisingly considering how little is spoken of them in comic circles they continued to be popular up through the 1950s what s striking to me is that any of them maintained any level of success at all after all comics are very much a visual medium and radio very much is not therefore you not only lose the visualizations provided in the strips but the nature of the storytelling needs to be changed significantly think about that sequence from action comics 1 where superman comes up to a locked room and the governor s assistant dares him to knock it down the subsequent panel shows superman doing exactly that but without any dialogue or sound effects while that sequence could be translated into a radio format it would require some re working for the non visual medium i wouldn t mind seeing more writing analyzing how various comics were able to make the transition versus how many simply applied comic strip characters to what were essentially existing radio scripts here are this week s links to what i ve had published recently kleefeld on comics how i make comics review https ift tt zi97tyg kleefeld on comics some rat queens thoughts https ift tt jkgnlfc kleefeld on comics mitsumasa anno https ift tt c4d1egh kleefeld on comics kill six billion demons paratexts https ift tt kcvqy9y kleefeld on comics juneteenth comics https ift tt a9xpbfe juneteenth is a federal holiday here in the us but you d barely know it from reading the comics page these are all the comics and two of them argueably aren t actually comics that i ve found this morning mentioning the day older posts home now available bloomsbury comics studies webcomics by sean kleefeld blog archive 2026 147 june 23 environmental origins removing some rights barriers sean s swap challenge take 4 john of the night review comics to radio weekly recap juneteenth comics kill six billion demons paratexts mitsumasa anno some rat queens thoughts how i make comics review weekly recap the bird s eye kids go shopping seuss political cartoons concerning numbers what art do i look for the beast review weekly recap reflection on mainstream respect electric timing and jack kirby as officer day how much research is too much times like these review may 26 april 26 march 27 february 20 january 25 2025 307 december 26 november 25 october 27 september 26 august 26 july 27 june 26 may 26 april 26 march 26 february 23 january 23 2024 287 december 19 november 22 october 27 september 25 august 25 july 25 june 23 may 23 april 24 march 23 february 25 january 26 2023 271 december 21 november 25 october 26 september...