Comic Book Plus Forum
About The Comic Books We Have => Comics Not Allowed => Topic started by: Aussie500 on December 05, 2006, 11:27:15 PM
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Most would know these are not public domain, but thought l would mention them. If anyone with spare time would like to actually compile a list of all the different imprints of these companies it would be helpful, otherwise l will do it eventually
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by imprints do you mean the smaller companies that DC has absorbed, like All-American? it gets a bit complicated in that DC bought out certain characters and titles from companies like Quality and Prize, but didn't purchase the companies themselves, and published the purchased titles/characters under the DC label.
There's strong corporate ties to smaller companies like ACG, but that has more to do with the distribution company Independent News which was owned by the same people, but was run as a totally separate company. Independent News invested in several other comic publishers in order to ensure a steady flow of product in their pipeline, but DC was the only one that they owned outright, I believe.
Marvel is a different situation, as Martin Goodman used so many different corporate names. I believe that the Overstreet Guide has a pretty good list of all those corporate entities, up to the 60s at least.
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So, reading between the lines: Atlas, Timely and the like are off limits? I guess they count as Marvel. Someone was looking for issues of Astonishing and I thought they might be here, but evidently they're not.
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Atlas and Timely are sadly off-limits here yes.
:-[
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Virtually every comic published by National Comics / National Periodicals / DC Comics -- whatever you want to call them is easy to identify by one of the DC bullets on the cover. They started to appear in early 1940 and went through a bit of evolution, but are there. They were missing (replaced by a similar bullet) on the All American titles during those companies' brief split. For a brief time in the late 50s or early 60s there was a somewhat different bullet on some of the Romance and Humor books. There may have actually be a somewhat independent company (Signal maybe?). These were not Golden-Age though.
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Marvel has been diligent in renewing their predecessors' books' copyrights, just like DC has. While you might occasionally find a single issue that doesn't seem to have a renewal, it's probably safer to assume that the fault lies with the Copyright Office's transcription rather than Marvel's lawyers, for the most part. So it's not that it's the site's policy saying no to Timely; it's that Marvel still owns the copyright of almost all the Timely (et al) books.
The only real exception to this has been when DC acquires rights to outside characters (rather than absorbing the company, as with All-American). In those cases, DC never owned the copyright to the books, and so couldn't renew them. I don't believe that Marvel has ever done anything similar.