AGXStarseed
Well-Known Member
(Not written by me. To read the full article, please click the link at the bottom of the page)
Some older fictional characters turn up again and again and again: Count Dracula and his foes, Victor Frankenstein, Dorothy Gale and the denizens of Oz. But Western literature's public domain is filled with excellent characters, many who deserve a bit more limelight.
Some of these characters are in the public domain due to the age of their stories or the date of their creators' death; others are treated as de facto public domain because their original publishers are no longer around to enforce their copyright. (Edit: I should clarify that these characters are abandoned because there is no one around to sue for ownership; if a copyright holder wanted to sue for copyright on a character whose stories were last published 60 years ago, they certainly could. A character that you own does not fall into the public domain because you don't enforce your copyright.)
It's also important to note that a character may be considered in the public domain in some regions, but not others, which can make things a bit complicated.
And this is not to say that there are no modern stories featuring these characters. (It's quite difficult to find a popular gothic hero who has escaped Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, for example.) It's just that they haven't enjoyed the same success as their more popular literary cousins. Once-forgotten characters like Black Terror and Miss Fury have enjoyed more modern success, and these characters deserve a chance as well. Don't forget to include your public domain favorites in the comments.
1. Fantomah
Let's start with a weird one, shall we? Fantomah is often billed as the first superpowered female comics hero, making her debut in Jungle Comics in February 1940, more than a year before Wonder Woman left Paradise Island. The original incarnation of Fantomah, created by Fletcher Hanks, is awkward to say the least. After all, she fits cleanly in the white savior trope. Hanks' Fantomah was a blond-haired, white-looking (like many "jungle girls" in Golden Age comics) goddess who lived in the jungles of Africa, protecting the villagers from evil. But her face turned into a skull when she punished evildoers, which is pretty badass.
Now, it might be possible to reclaim Hanks' weird, outsider art character in a less racist, "white lady saves us all" sort of way — or maybe even in a parody of it. (After all, there are some modern cartoonists who have played with the sublime strangeness of Hanks' character Stardust the Super Wizard.) There was a second, less racially-charged version of Fantomah, however, who may be better suited for reinterpretation (but with fewer blond people? Please?). Jungle Comics #29 introduced Fantomah, Daughter of the Pharaohs (with a new artist), a girl ruler of an Egyptian city who battles evil mummies with the help of her black panther companion. It's sad that she lost her skull face, though. Someone needs to bring that thing back.
2. Arsène Lupin
If you're familiar with the name Arsène Lupin, it's likely thanks to Monkey Punch's manga (and Hayao Miyazaki film) Lupin III. Arsène Lupin III is the grandson of Arsène Lupin, the gentleman thief from Maurice Leblanc's novels and stories. A gentlemen thief in the style of Pierre Alexis Ponson du Terrail's roguish Rocambole, Lupin was a generally good fellow who worked on the wrong side of the law with great flair. He even bested Sherlock Holmes (who is also now in the public domain in some jurisdictions), though he tended to have more fantastical adventures, involving plot devices like radioactive stones that turn people into mutants and the Fountain of Youth.
Technically, Lupin isn't so much overdue for a reboot (especially since Lupin III is a comic pastiches) as he is simply due. The stories recently fell into the public domain, and there is some rich stuff to mine. And some creators are already hopping aboard the Lupin train. Gundam artist Takashi Morita recently took on the gentleman thief in a manga series.
If you're more into sadism in your criminal characters, you can always go with Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre's masked villain Fantômas.
3. Carnacki the Ghost-Finder
Thomas Carnacki is the occult answer to Sherlock Holmes. William Hope Hodgson's creation was also a consulting detective, but he uses magic and science to investigate incidents of haunting. His key invention: the "electric pentacle," a device made from wires and vacuum tubes that prevents the user from wicked ghosts. In other words, Carnacki was a bit of a steampunk Ghostbuster.
An interesting element of Carnacki's stories is that the supposed hauntings weren't always enacted by real ghosts. Sometimes, there was a perfectly rational explanation for what was going on. In other cases, though, Carnacki had to employ some early 20th-century spiritualism.
4. Ann Radcliffe
This one's a little odd because Ann Radcliffe was actually a real person. Born Ann Ward in 1764, Radcliffe became one of the pioneers of the Gothic novel. Her works tended to follow a certain pattern: an apparently supernatural event would occur, but, ultimately, there would be a rational explanation for the phenomenon. She was a strong advocate of women's rights and the power of reason.
But in Paul Féval's 1867 novel La Ville Vampire, Radcliffe is cast as a proto-Buffy the Vampire slayer. Far from living in a world governed by pure reason, the fictional Radcliffe lives in a world full of vampires — and she's an adept vampire hunter. Féval's novel has Radcliffe attempting to save her friends from the nefarious Otto Goetzi by traveling to Selene, the vampire city. Take that, rational explanations for supernatural phenomena!
This was hardly Féval's only vampire novel. He also wrote Le Chevalier Ténèbreand La Vampire, the latter introducing the vile and charismatic Countess Addhema.
5. Frank Reade
Frank Reade was steampunk before it was cool. Actually, he was steampunk back when people imagined we might someday have steam-powered robots pulling our wagons. (Science fiction critic John Clute coined the term "Edisonade" to describe such stories.) Imitating Edward S. Ellis' 1868 dime novel The Steam Man of the Prairies (which featured an inventor named, quite appropriately, Johnny Brainerd), Harry Enton wrote Frank Reade and His Steam Man of the Plains, which was serialized in Boys of New York, sparking a genre of inventor heroes. There were three more Frank Reade stories, and then a series of juvenile novels by Luis P. Senarens featuring Frank's son, Frank Reade Jr. Apparently, Junior inherited his dad's ability to piece mechanical bits together into improbable machines. You want your airship-building, robot-tinkering steampunk hero? The Reades are at your service — maybe with a bit less colonialism this time around.
Frank Reade and his family enjoyed a bit of a revival in Frank Reade: Adventures in the Age of Invention by Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett (of Boilerplate fame).
Incidentally, Thomas Edison did actually turn up in at least one Edisonade of his own. He leads a group of scientists in the wake of a Martian invasion in Garrett P. Serviss 1898 novel Edison's Conquest of Mars.
Full Article: https://io9.gizmodo.com/10-public-domain-characters-overdue-for-a-reboot-1680918010
Some older fictional characters turn up again and again and again: Count Dracula and his foes, Victor Frankenstein, Dorothy Gale and the denizens of Oz. But Western literature's public domain is filled with excellent characters, many who deserve a bit more limelight.
Some of these characters are in the public domain due to the age of their stories or the date of their creators' death; others are treated as de facto public domain because their original publishers are no longer around to enforce their copyright. (Edit: I should clarify that these characters are abandoned because there is no one around to sue for ownership; if a copyright holder wanted to sue for copyright on a character whose stories were last published 60 years ago, they certainly could. A character that you own does not fall into the public domain because you don't enforce your copyright.)
It's also important to note that a character may be considered in the public domain in some regions, but not others, which can make things a bit complicated.
And this is not to say that there are no modern stories featuring these characters. (It's quite difficult to find a popular gothic hero who has escaped Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, for example.) It's just that they haven't enjoyed the same success as their more popular literary cousins. Once-forgotten characters like Black Terror and Miss Fury have enjoyed more modern success, and these characters deserve a chance as well. Don't forget to include your public domain favorites in the comments.
1. Fantomah
Let's start with a weird one, shall we? Fantomah is often billed as the first superpowered female comics hero, making her debut in Jungle Comics in February 1940, more than a year before Wonder Woman left Paradise Island. The original incarnation of Fantomah, created by Fletcher Hanks, is awkward to say the least. After all, she fits cleanly in the white savior trope. Hanks' Fantomah was a blond-haired, white-looking (like many "jungle girls" in Golden Age comics) goddess who lived in the jungles of Africa, protecting the villagers from evil. But her face turned into a skull when she punished evildoers, which is pretty badass.
Now, it might be possible to reclaim Hanks' weird, outsider art character in a less racist, "white lady saves us all" sort of way — or maybe even in a parody of it. (After all, there are some modern cartoonists who have played with the sublime strangeness of Hanks' character Stardust the Super Wizard.) There was a second, less racially-charged version of Fantomah, however, who may be better suited for reinterpretation (but with fewer blond people? Please?). Jungle Comics #29 introduced Fantomah, Daughter of the Pharaohs (with a new artist), a girl ruler of an Egyptian city who battles evil mummies with the help of her black panther companion. It's sad that she lost her skull face, though. Someone needs to bring that thing back.
2. Arsène Lupin
If you're familiar with the name Arsène Lupin, it's likely thanks to Monkey Punch's manga (and Hayao Miyazaki film) Lupin III. Arsène Lupin III is the grandson of Arsène Lupin, the gentleman thief from Maurice Leblanc's novels and stories. A gentlemen thief in the style of Pierre Alexis Ponson du Terrail's roguish Rocambole, Lupin was a generally good fellow who worked on the wrong side of the law with great flair. He even bested Sherlock Holmes (who is also now in the public domain in some jurisdictions), though he tended to have more fantastical adventures, involving plot devices like radioactive stones that turn people into mutants and the Fountain of Youth.
Technically, Lupin isn't so much overdue for a reboot (especially since Lupin III is a comic pastiches) as he is simply due. The stories recently fell into the public domain, and there is some rich stuff to mine. And some creators are already hopping aboard the Lupin train. Gundam artist Takashi Morita recently took on the gentleman thief in a manga series.
If you're more into sadism in your criminal characters, you can always go with Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre's masked villain Fantômas.
3. Carnacki the Ghost-Finder
Thomas Carnacki is the occult answer to Sherlock Holmes. William Hope Hodgson's creation was also a consulting detective, but he uses magic and science to investigate incidents of haunting. His key invention: the "electric pentacle," a device made from wires and vacuum tubes that prevents the user from wicked ghosts. In other words, Carnacki was a bit of a steampunk Ghostbuster.
An interesting element of Carnacki's stories is that the supposed hauntings weren't always enacted by real ghosts. Sometimes, there was a perfectly rational explanation for what was going on. In other cases, though, Carnacki had to employ some early 20th-century spiritualism.
4. Ann Radcliffe
This one's a little odd because Ann Radcliffe was actually a real person. Born Ann Ward in 1764, Radcliffe became one of the pioneers of the Gothic novel. Her works tended to follow a certain pattern: an apparently supernatural event would occur, but, ultimately, there would be a rational explanation for the phenomenon. She was a strong advocate of women's rights and the power of reason.
But in Paul Féval's 1867 novel La Ville Vampire, Radcliffe is cast as a proto-Buffy the Vampire slayer. Far from living in a world governed by pure reason, the fictional Radcliffe lives in a world full of vampires — and she's an adept vampire hunter. Féval's novel has Radcliffe attempting to save her friends from the nefarious Otto Goetzi by traveling to Selene, the vampire city. Take that, rational explanations for supernatural phenomena!
This was hardly Féval's only vampire novel. He also wrote Le Chevalier Ténèbreand La Vampire, the latter introducing the vile and charismatic Countess Addhema.
5. Frank Reade
Frank Reade was steampunk before it was cool. Actually, he was steampunk back when people imagined we might someday have steam-powered robots pulling our wagons. (Science fiction critic John Clute coined the term "Edisonade" to describe such stories.) Imitating Edward S. Ellis' 1868 dime novel The Steam Man of the Prairies (which featured an inventor named, quite appropriately, Johnny Brainerd), Harry Enton wrote Frank Reade and His Steam Man of the Plains, which was serialized in Boys of New York, sparking a genre of inventor heroes. There were three more Frank Reade stories, and then a series of juvenile novels by Luis P. Senarens featuring Frank's son, Frank Reade Jr. Apparently, Junior inherited his dad's ability to piece mechanical bits together into improbable machines. You want your airship-building, robot-tinkering steampunk hero? The Reades are at your service — maybe with a bit less colonialism this time around.
Frank Reade and his family enjoyed a bit of a revival in Frank Reade: Adventures in the Age of Invention by Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett (of Boilerplate fame).
Incidentally, Thomas Edison did actually turn up in at least one Edisonade of his own. He leads a group of scientists in the wake of a Martian invasion in Garrett P. Serviss 1898 novel Edison's Conquest of Mars.
Full Article: https://io9.gizmodo.com/10-public-domain-characters-overdue-for-a-reboot-1680918010
