Welcome to The Corner Box with David Hedgecock and John Barber. With decades of experience in all aspects of comic book production, David, John, and their guests will give you an in-depth, and insightful look at the past, present, and future of the most exciting medium on the planet—comics—and everything related to it.

[00:24] David Hedgecock: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to The Corner Box. I'm one of your hosts, David Hedgecock. With me, as usual, is my very good friend.

[00:31] John Barber: Coming to you from death's door, John Barber.

[00:34] David: That handsome devil, John Barber. John, do you think that the listeners know how qualified you are to talk about comic books? Before we do that, we do have a special returning guest. Amazing and magnificent, Chase Marotz. Welcome to the show.

[00:47] Chase Marotz: Thanks for having me back. Always good to be here.

[00:49] John: Well, I feel like Chase is a recurring co-host.

[00:51] Chase: I don't think anyone wants to spend that much time with me. I don't even think Lisa wants to spend that much time with me. We talked for an hour unfiltered. Plenty for everyone.

[01:00] John: Yeah. What do you do for the rest of the year then?

[01:02] Chase: I wish I knew.

[01:02] David: Welcome to Married Life, where we talk about how miserable our lives are. Oh, my God.

[01:08] Chase: No, I like my wife.

[01:10] David: Right. 

[01:11] John: Oh, I see. We make them miserable. I see.

[01:13] Chase: She's not so miserable that she'd actually find a notary public to do paperwork about it. That's a […].

[01:19] David: That's a lot of work. Anyway, John, we don't talk about our credentials enough, and I know you don't like to toot your own horn. So, I thought I'd go ahead and toot your horn for you, which sounds awful when I say it that way, but you're an important guy in comic books. I feel like we’ve got to reset. We haven't done that in Season 3, yet. We’ve got to reset. Let's talk a little bit about John Barber for just a minute. John’s shaking his head like, “no, this is awful.” I need our listeners to remember that John is in the Transformer Hall of Fame. It's not a joke. This is a serious thing. John Barber is in the Transformer Hall of Fame, as the greatest writer of Transformer media, across all media, for all time. I think that's what you won it for, or that's why you're in there.

[01:58] John: Stan Bush is also in there. Here's a funny thing about that. What an opportunity you've given me to do this bit that I'm thinking up on the spot. Have you heard the new Bruce Springsteen song? You've heard that.

[02:08] David: The Minnesota one?

[02:09] John: Yeah. Started a wave of protest songs that came out the other week. Can you imagine being such a sh!thead that Bruce Springsteen writes a song about you being a sh!thead. The last time he did that was about AIDS. While I'm here in the Transformers Hall of Fame with Weird Al Yankovic and Steven Spielberg, Stephen Miller is like AIDS.

[02:31] David: There you go.

[02:32] Chase: We're treading on dangerous ice here.

[02:34] David: We derailed before we even got started.

[02:36] Chase: Look, I just want to put that out there now. If anything happens to us, none of us are suicidal, and we're all very happy.

[02:42] David: Yes, 100%. Agree, 100%. I, David Hedgecock, am a happy man.

[02:46] John: I'm too lazy to even have shoelaces.

[02:48] David: Yeah, if you can't even be bothered to have shoelaces, you're definitely not going to kill yourself. John, not only are you in the Transformer Hall of Fame, but you're a former big-wig full editor at Marvel Comics. Not only were you a big-wig editor at Marvel Comics, but you got sick of them, and left them, because you were that cool. You were like, “you know what? This is fine, but I can do better,” and then you did. You became an editor at IDW Publishing, and then eventually, the editor-in-chief. You were an editor-in-chief of a major comic book publishing company. So, I just think people need to know that, when we're talking about this comic book stuff, it is from a place of fandom, and from a true love of the medium, but it also comes from a place of real in-depth knowledge and experience of the medium, from the other side of the fence.

[03:39] John: Are we going to start charging? Is that what you're getting to?

[03:42] David: No, we're not charging for this, John. We're here for the people.

[03:44] John: You’re no […].

[03:46] David: I did some stuff, too.

[03:48] John: Professionally drawn some stuff, right? I mean, you were out there.

[03:51] David: Drew some Disney characters, more than once.

[03:53] John: Yeah, and then also became editor-in-chief at IDW.

[03:56] David: I even made it up to associate publisher at IDW. Then I got some sense in my head.

[04:03] John: Now you have your own company again.

[04:05] David: Yeah, how did I do that? That's where I went wrong. I jumped back into it. Chase, as well. Chase had a whole career in high AAA video games.

[04:14] Chase: Mobile phone video games.

[04:15] David: Okay.

[04:16] Chase: I've been so upset, because many of my video games I thought were gone forever, because the nature of the app store is, once they start updating stuff, they take it down, but I found a YouTube channel that just has full playthroughs of a bunch of games I wrote. So, I've just been checking in on old stories I wrote, and some still hold up. Some are still bangers. 

[04:34] David: Nice. You made a whole career of doing video game stuff, and then for some reason, you jumped out of that, and jumped into comic books.

[04:40] John: […] but you also had a career in film.

[04:44] Chase: I was the manager of creative affairs for IDW Entertainment. This is true. I was an intern at Troma. They had me put on the Toxic Avenger tutu and step on fake heads, and clean the gutters, and stuff, for no money.

[04:55] John: Wow.

[04:55] David: Did you really put the tutu on?

[04:56] Chase: Yeah, I put the tutu on. You can still find it on YouTube. It's the trailer for the unreleased Toxic Avenger 5: the Toxic Twins that they were ostensibly making when I was an intern there, and I was the body double for the actual guy who played Toxic Avenger, but I had to put on the tutu, and then pretend to shove a broom up this guy--You can look him up. His name is Zac Amico. He's a comedian wrestling podcaster now, but I had to shove a broom up his ass, and then step on his head. All for no money, at all.

[05:26] David: That's amazing. I didn't know that. I've learned something new today. Anyway, see how qualified we are, dear listener, to talk about comic books?

[05:34] Chase: And I was just checking this today. I've tried 4,566 unique beers since January 2013.

[05:42] David: Are you keeping a running tab?

[05:44] Chase: No, it's just an app. I can just check in. I can give it a star rating. I rate them all four stars, because they all got me there. Hoping to make that 4,567 this afternoon, once the tiny bubble room finally taps that Pliny the Younger keg. 

[05:58] David: Wow. A peek behind the curtain. This is not the first time Chase has talked about this beer that he's going to be drinking today. It's only 1 o’clock, as we're recording this. Now that everybody knows how serious we are about comic books, and how much we know about the medium, I just feel like we need to do a little reset. People need to know where we're coming from. We're not being braggadocious. I feel like people need to know, when we speak, it's from a place of love and expertise. I think our love is clearly shown. Sometimes, the expertise might be in question. I just want to throw it out there that we do know what we're talking about, probably, but that's not why we're here, John.

[06:37] John: Okay.

[06:38] David: I think I talked about it on the show. I pledged to a Kickstarter for a book called Stardust the Super Wizard, and it was an anthology series done by a bunch of dudes. I wish I could remember the name of the guy who headed the whole thing, but I believe he's a working professional in comic books, as well. This guy had a super love for Stardust the Super Wizard, which was a comic book character from the late 20s, early--I guess 30s, 40s. It came into public domain, at some point. So, he gathered together a murderer's row, really, of talent, and created this anthology of new stories for Stardust the Super Wizard. I've talked about it on the show, maybe this season, but it was a really great anthology. There's guys like Mike Allred in there, just a bunch of really great talent, and the stories are all really fun. Very much worth seeking out, if you get a chance. I even was introduced to an artist in that book that I had never seen before, and was so enamored with his style that I hired him to do some work for me. So, I'm excited to be working with one of those artists. Michel Melki is the artist's name. Got a very Tradd Moore look to his work, but he's not as busy as Tradd Moore. So, I was able to get him.

[07:54] Chase: Just to sidebar a little, do you know anything about Fletcher Hanks, the creator of Stardust the Super Wizard?

[07:59] David: Do you know?

[08:00] Chase: That was a madman.

[08:01] John: Yeah, we talked about his end at the last episode, or two episodes ago, maybe.

[08:05] Chase: Yeah, died frozen to a park bench in New York, just without a penny to his name. He was a wild drunk.

[08:11] David: Yeah. If you read about that guy's life, it's like, “when did he have time to have a family?” Because it seemed like he was crazy, most of the time.

[08:21] Chase: I think the problem that his four kids might say is that he did not have time to have that family.

[08:27] David: There you go. So, anyway, great anthology […], but it got me thinking about public domain. So, there's been some big characters that have popped up in the public domain in the last few years. Mickey Mouse, original Mickey Mouse stuff, Winnie the Pooh, and just recently, in the last year, Popeye the Sailor. Of those tentpole-ish type cartoon or comic book properties, Popeye is the one that's the most interesting to me, because the Popeye strip, it was the Oyl family, or the Oyls, when Popeye was first introduced. It's not even his strip when it's first introduced, but he shows up as Popeye, right from the start. So, the material that becomes available, the version of Popeye that's in those comic strips, it's quickly the version of Popeye that has been around for 100 years. So, it's interesting, Popeye in particular, that he is now available, because you really do have a full length and breadth and depth of that character accessible to you. I think the spinach thing is not quite available yet, or maybe it just has become available, but pretty much everything else, like his relationship with Olive Oyl, and some of the other characteristics about Popeye, in general, including the name, are all already baked into him right away from the strip.

So, I found that interesting, and the thing about public domain, if our listeners don't know, is some stuff goes into public domain a little faster than others, and also, public domain is different from region to region. So, in the United States, I think it's 95 years, but in other countries, it's 50 years, and other countries, it's 100 years. So, while some things might be public domain in the United States, they might not necessarily be public domain in other places, and vice versa. So, I was thinking about that, and 2026 opens up the door to the 1930s. So, you start getting some really interesting stuff in the 30s, and already, just in the recent times, we've gotten, well, we've got Popeye and Friends. So, now we've got Popeye, Olive Oyl, Bluto, Wimpy, TinTin. The original Tintin strips are now available. The comic strip version of Buck Rogers is now in public domain.

[10:34] John: Oh, wow. Didn’t realize that.

[10:37] Chase: Betty Boop, too.

[10:38] David: The original version of Betty Boop, but I don't know if she's called Betty Boop, and she's that dog version of Betty Boop. It's not quite what you want it to be, just yet. Let's see. You've got some really cool music. Dream a Little Dream of Me, Georgia on My Mind, I've Got Rhythm. Some really fantastic books. The Maltese Falcon are in public domain now. All Quiet on the Western Front, the film, I think, is now available. Oh, Animal Crackers, the Marx Brothers film is now available in public domain. I thought it might be fun to talk a little bit about this, and what it means for us as creative people and comic book makers in 2026. The big ones for us, as comic book makers, we're still about 10 years away, but in the next 10 years, John, we're going to get Superman in 2034, the original iteration of Superman. We're going to get Batman the very next year. So, by 2035, you can make your own Superman/Batman comic book. In 2036, Joker shows up, and Captain America shows up in 2036. I'm definitely making a Superman versus Batman versus Joker versus Captain America comic book. That's 100% going to happen, and I'm throwing Bugs Bunny in there, just for fun, because he's also in 2035, and then by 2037, you’ve got Wonder Woman. So, in 10 years, you're going to have access, basically, to the Big 3 at DC Comics, the original iterations of them. It's pretty crazy to think that people are going to be able to make their own Superman comic books in 10 years.

[12:07] Chase: It's even crazy to think that a solid 50% of them are either going to be horror or porn.

[12:13] David: Thanks for coming, everybody. Welcome back.

[12:16] Chase: I'm just saying, every time a character goes in the public domain--Winnie the Pooh goes into public domain, it's like, “oh, you liked Winnie the Pooh as a kid? You want to see him cut up girls? We've been working on it.” People are just--they're all goofed up, dude.

[12:28] John: Yeah.

[12:28] Chase: It's a sick society. I looked it up. They're already working on the Betty Boop horror movie.

[12:32] David: I've been trying to reframe things to be kinder and gentler to my fellow American, in my head. Instead of saying, “they're such assh*les,” in my head, I've been trying to say, “they're so damaged,” in my head, to--I don't know--try to find some empathy.

[12:46] Chase: I said […], they're all goofed up. They're all topsy-turvy.

[12:49] David: Yeah, I like that. That's good.

[12:50] John: Actual question. I know that in reality, a lot of this stuff is a lot more complex than that rule is made to have it be. We live in a country founded by lawyers. There isn't a law that you can point at, and say, “here's the clear and accurate answer to that question.” That's why we have courts, and that's why we have laws written like that, to have courts, and vice versa, and stuff, but Stardust isn't any older than Superman. I just pulled out my I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets! book. All the stories appeared in 1939, ‘40, and ‘41. Nobody was protecting that copyright, or nobody was filing anything.

[13:25] David: Right. I don't think this happens anymore, but there was a time, around 1978, where you had to file to move your property into the new rules, and if you didn't file, it fell under the old rules. I think that's how it worked.

[13:39] John: That makes sense. That's […] something like Night of the Living Dead is public domain.

[13:42] David: Right, because no one filed the proper paperwork, basically, to protect it under the new protection laws.

[13:48] John: I think we've talked about this on the show, and probably everybody knows, but that's where Walking Dead came from. Kirkman had pitched doing a Night of the Living Dead ongoing comic book series, and somebody at Image was like, “just give it a different title, so you can own it,” which, overall, worked out well for him.

[14:04] Chase: Those guys are smart.

[14:05] David: Overall, yeah. I actually didn't know that. I don't remember you ever saying that, John. Maybe you said it on the show when I wasn't paying attention, which is quite often, but I didn't hear that.

[14:15] John: So, that makes a lot of sense. The trademarks don't expire at the same time.

[14:19] David: Right.

[14:19] John: You could have a Superman comic, but you can't call him Superman on the cover.

[14:23] David: That, I'm not clear about. I think you might be right, but you can say “Superman” in the comic book.

[14:28] John: Sure. You can do that already, though. Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan has a character called Superman that's analogous to George Reeves playing Superman on the TV show, but doing something. John Byrne maybe was involved with Kieron Dwyer's mom, with Jimmy Corrigan's mom. That story transposed with George Reeves as Superman.

[14:48] David: That was a super deep cut. So, wait, John Byrne and Kieron Dwyer's mom?

[14:53] John: Yeah.

[14:54] Chase: My favorite description I've ever heard of John Byrne involves his house, and somebody told me his house looks like if you gave an 8-year-old infinity money.

[15:02] John: Yeah. Friend of the show, Mason, has been there with Ryall. He went out there with Chris.

[15:07] David: Having heard Mason describe his throne room here on the show, John Byrne's throne room. I'm just calling it a throne room. Man, his gallery, or his art room sounds--I actually have a slightly newfound respect for John Byrne, because it sounds like his taste in art is impeccable. The guy's got some really choice stuff, apparently, hanging on his walls, according to Mason. So, that's incredible. I love it when artists buy other artists’ work. I love that. I think that's a sign of intelligence.

[15:36] John: Backing it up, sorry, what I was trying to say was, in Jimmy Corrigan, there's a character roughly analogous to George Reeves as Superman. He plays a character called Superman on TV, and he wears a blue and red suit. He doesn't have the S on the chest, but they refer to him as Superman in there. You've got to imagine that was a fair-use argument that they would have made, had there been a lawsuit about that, or something.

[15:58] David: And that the name Superman can't be trademarked in that way.

[16:02] John: You can use trademarks in a work. You can call--well, sorry, I'm saying you can. An argument could be made in court, and your publisher's lawyers may or may not think that this is an argument they would be willing to have, that it'd be worth the cost of having, or that they would necessarily win, but you can call them Kleenex. You could say “I blew my nose on some Kleenex,” even though that's a trademark, and there'd be a real strong fair-use argument. It'd be real hard to say that you're using it incorrectly.

[16:32] Chase: I don't think Three Doors Down paid DC for that song, Superman, they did, or Kryptonite, or whatever they called it. It was big when I was in 8th grade.

[16:39] John: You're thinking Soulja Boy.

[16:40] Chase: Soulja Boy did that song? It's not even a good song.

[16:43] John: Neither is the Soulja Boy one. My kids know it. They only think it's about Superman. That's not what it's really about, guys. Anyway, this is pre-Disney. The Marvel lawyers seemed like they were itching for a fair-use fight. So, we'd have to go show all the comics to them. Whenever there's something questionable, we'd have to run it by them, and their stance is basically that if you had a real-life thing doing a thing that real-life thing would do, it was okay. So, if Peter Parker went on a late-night talk show as Spider-Man, he could go on David Letterman's show, and David Letterman could be the host, and you could draw the host like David Letterman, and call him David Letterman. David Letterman couldn't be running a diamond heist ring, or something, or he couldn't kidnap Mary Jane to get Spider-Man on there, or something like that, but he's a guy who hosts a TV show, at the time, and he would have guests, and Spider-Man would be the kind of guest he would have.

I remember one time asking if we could have Wile E. Coyote on a screen. We were like, “somebody drew it. It's not a screenshot,” and they're like, “that doesn't matter. A screenshot would have been okay, too,” and let that fly. There's an issue of Ultimate Spider-Man where Peter Parker is carrying a copy of Watchmen, and you can see the copy of Watchmen he's carrying. I think he thinks about reading Watchmen. In the trade paperback, that got deleted, but I don't think that got deleted for legal reasons. I think somebody decided they didn't want to be promoting a DC book, but […].

[18:01] Chase: Maybe Alan Moore cast a spell on them.

[18:04] David: I mean, that would be lit.

[18:05] John: It's a special Alan Moore issue on the cover. I don't know.

[18:09] Chase: Guys, he is one of the two most famous wizards in comics, just so we put that out there again.

[18:14] David: Is the other one Stardust the Super wizard?

[18:17] Chase: No, the other one's Grant Morrison.

[18:18] John: I thought it was Wizard Magazine.

[18:19] Chase: That's why Wizard Magazine isn't here. Wizard Magazine is only the third most famous wizard in comics.

[18:25] John: Wow.

[18:25] David: Wait, you're telling me Stardust the Super Wizard is not even in the Top 3?

[18:29] Chase: No.

[18:29] David: I'm shocked.

[18:30] John: But anyway, I don't know what the practical reality is.

[18:32] David: Yeah, you're right. I think some of that hand-wringing, though, is purposely done by the owners of these properties, to obfuscate the real rules, what they can and can't do. I do think there's a little bit of that going on. They purposefully try to muddy the water, so that the end result is like, “I'm not sure, so I'm just not going to do that.” It feels […].

[18:56] John: Yeah. There's a difference between having, in your book, somebody say, “oh, man. You're like Jay Gatsby,” compared to straight-up doing the story of the Great Gatsby, giving him cyberpunk motorcycles, or something. What if you gave him an Akira bike, a cyberpunk motorcycle, something like that? So, he's Popeye the Motorcycle Man.

[19:15] David: I hope the head of Netflix is listening right now, because you're going to get hired immediately.

[19:18] John: They're just going to steal it. Public domain. Well, okay. So, this is one that I think was interesting, because I was looking at some of the stuff that was coming up. One of the things that's coming up in public domain is the Universal Studios Frankenstein and Dracula are going to be coming into public domain.

[19:37] David: Yeah, next year, I think.

[19:39] John: Yeah, and that's pretty neat, until you start to be like, “wait a minute, but Universal can't actually use the likeness of Boris Karloff as Frankenstein, because they don't own all the pieces of that.” The licensed version of Frankenstein that they show is actually the fourth actor to play the Frankenstein monster, because the Boris Karloff Estate owns the rights to the Boris Karloff face. So, sometimes there's toys or special collaborations that have the Boris Karloff look, but that's not the standard Universal licensed one. That's a separate licensing thing. I feel like, what do you have left? All this, they've let the other stuff go public domain, because you have a bunch of Frankensteins that have bolts on their necks, and have green skin, or whatever, even though they’re black and white movies. I was excited about that, and I'm like, “what does that actually mean? What are you going to be able to do with that?”

[20:26] David: The source material for that stuff has already been in public domain for ages, right? So, you try to get an original copy of the movie, clean it up, digitize it, and make a really cool high-end collector package of those films.

[20:40] Chase: I don't know if this is insider […], or what, but Troma had a side business where they would do that. They would take old films in the public domain, clean them up, and put them on DVDs, and then sell them on a different website that wasn't the Troma […].

[20:50] David: Really?

[20:51] Chase: It was the f!cking Library of American Film, or something, they called it. I forget, but yeah, we had to pack a lot of those packages.

[20:58] David: Inside Troma Films.

[21:00] Chase: It gets quite messy there. It either gets messier than you think, or just as messy as you would think, depending on […].

[21:08] David: The thing that's got me questioning what's going to happen is, again, I'm looking 10 years from now. So, the discussion is probably way too early, but literally, you're going to have all these different comic book characters available to you. Big top-tier comic book characters are going to be available to play with, and then you've also got this advent of AI, and I'm just like, “the level of fanfic that is going to happen once this stuff is available is going to be insane.” I wonder if it's going to--That combination of such big tentpole properties. I guess nothing happened with Mickey Mouse, but I feel like Disney had gone a long way to distance themselves from Mickey Mouse before the property ended. They stopped emphasizing Mickey Mouse as the mascot of Disneyland and the Disney properties. They moved away from that, in a way, I feel like. Maybe it's just me, though. Maybe I just don't pay enough attention to what's going on with Disney, but if you're DC Comics, you can't do that, man. If you're Netflix, you can't distance yourself from Superman. You've got to make 30 Superman films between now and 2036.

[22:13] Chase: It's only that original Superman, right? So, the iconography that we associate with Superman wasn't until the S Shield, and stuff. They still have that for, what, probably another decade. You're dealing with the Superman and the little ballet slippers, with the sans serif S on the Shield, who can only leap over a building and punch domestic abusers in the mouth. It's not like the Superman that DC made a billion dollars with.

[22:37] David: Yeah, but we talked about this in the Treasury Edition. We got the Treasury Edition of Action Comics #1, this gorgeous, oversized, large format print edition from the early 70s that DC Comics did. Page 1 of Action Comics #1 lays out all of Superman's origin, right there, man. The whole thing is there on Page 1, and it establishes a lot of lore, and I think any clever creator could go in, and if I can call him Superman, and I can use a semblance of his costume, and I can use that origin story that's on Page 1 of Action Comics #1, which is a really brilliant origin page, I don't need anything else, man. I'm off to the races.

[23:21] Chase: I guess, I wonder, too, though, the public domain Superman, I would hesitate to say, they'll probably never make one of the seminal Superman works, though. It is just fan fiction. At a certain point, you can make it, but can you make the average consumer care about it more than they care about the officially licensed stuff that already has a ton of money and talent to throw behind it?

[23:42] John: What might be interesting would be, if you did a story like Planetary, or something, where it's pulling all these analogs of old heroes--League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I'm sorry, that is literally the exact thing I'm thinking of. That original version of these characters could show up. Instead of it having to be a Doc Savage-like character, it could have literally been Doc Savage.

[24:02] Chase: I guess even Watchmen is, what, the Charlton Comics characters, riffing on them, but again, they own the copyright. So, that wasn't a public domain thing.

[24:09] John: Yeah, because Alan Moore originally had this idea for Watchmen, and was trying to attach it to a different superhero universes. He thought it needed an existing superhero universe to tell the story. Originally, it was the DC Thompson characters in England, but eventually his daughter and her husband wrote as Albion. They did a story using those characters, but that was the first thing I think he pitched it as. Anybody could have made their own analogs of the Charlton characters at that distance, I guess. The weird chicken and egg thing that came in there, I guess, would be that they said, “okay, we own these characters. We're not going to let you use them. Make up your own characters, but do the origins in the comics,” which is what made Watchmen great. It probably wouldn't have been as great if you had to have been aware of the Steve Ditko question to follow the story arc of them, right?

[24:52] Chase: Yeah.

[24:52] John: But it would have been interesting, if you'd just had that ability. If you'd just, like, “okay, all the Charlton characters are public domain. I could literally just pull them in here, and tell Watchmen with those characters. I can call it Watchmen, because that's not a Charlton character. […] the trademark to Watchmen, because I just invented it.”

[25:07] Chase: I suppose there's a good and bad side to anything, because at this point, by the time they're public domain, I mean, they've been a character for damn near a century. You can consider them a modern American myth by, I think, even this point. Freeing that from the ligatures of corporate approval process, and letting people really dive into what these characters mean to them, and see if it can connect. I don't see how it's a bad thing, creatively, certainly.

[25:30] David: Yeah. What happens when a semi-retired Grant Morrison says, “I don't need to work for DC ever again, or Marvel ever again. I've got one great Superman story in me,” and then he does his own Superman story that he owns? Do you think people are going to line up for that? People are going to line up around the block for that. Especially, if Frank Quitely's on board, right? All-Star Superman, but it's the version that they want, without corporate interference.

[25:55] John: Yes, but I think it would prevent me from doing that. It'd be the same thing that made calling it Walking Dead a smarter choice than calling it by the public domain movie. You're not going to be able to make a Superman TV show off of that.

[26:05] David: Because of the trademark?

[26:06] John: Because of the trademark, because there's a lot of momentum behind Superman at Warner, or at DC. Who are you going to sell that to? Also, if Netflix winds up owning Warner Brothers, who are you going to sell these things to? Where are you going to publish that?

[26:22] David: There's not going to be one place to sell anything in ten years, […]

[26:28] Chase: Maybe that'll be David Ellison's revenge for not getting the DC characters. He’ll just buy all the public domain DC properties.

[26:35] John: Throw them up on Paramount+.

[26:37] Chase: Paramount+, yeah. Your home for DC as well later. I don't even care, at all. I'm not mad.

[26:44] David: The thing that I see DC Comics doing to protect themselves from this stuff recently is really interesting. They got Dan Jurgens and Mike Perkins to do the Bat-Man: First Knight.

[26:57] Chase: I read the first two issues. It's pretty good.

[26:59] David: It is a very good book, and in fact, the second mini-series of that is cleverly titled The Bat-Man: Second Knight. It's basically a retelling of the origin story of Batman, but he's got the purple gloves, the look, and the image. So, now, if somebody wants to use the Batman that's going to be in public domain, is there an argument for DC to say, “hey, that's too close to our Bat-Man: First Knight character?” So, I don't know. It's going to be interesting.

[27:28] Chase: They're certainly going to try. I mean, that is the problem of the court system. Oftentimes, it's not necessarily the letter or the spirit of the law, but who has enough money to drag things out further. I say this as somebody who is related to and knows a lot of lawyers.

[27:46] David: You guys got anything else on public domain?

[27:48] Chase: I'm interested to see it play out. I just feel like I keep making the joke, but I do think just a lot of the most high-profile public domain projects have unfortunately seen these lazy cash grab horror movies. I mean, they did it for Popeye. They did it for Winnie the Pooh. I guess what I hope, as these prominent characters come into the public domain, will somebody do something good and interesting with them? I guess I haven't seen that yet, where somebody takes a public domain character, and really makes it work, where it's like, “wow. They brought something new and essential to this character, using the freedom they've had to do it.”

[28:18] John: I don't think that's happened with Winnie the Pooh, but I think that happened with Frankenstein. I think that happened with Dracula.

[28:23] David: I would submit, John, though, that the stuff like Frankenstein and Dracula were in the public domain much earlier, because they were under the old rules of public domain. I think therein lies the problem that, Chase, I think you might be grappling with right now, in that “why would you want to use these characters that are 100 years old to do anything with? Why not just move on?” Because the public is not grappling with the issues of 1930. We're in 2026, and the things that we're talking about and dealing with, the issues that we're dealing with, and the things that are relevant to us, and relevant to our entertainment, it's too far apart. So, if we had the rules as they were established, long ago, which was life of the creator plus 20 years, or whatever it was, you'd have a very different dynamic happening with these properties. Imagine that Superman and Batman were available in 1970. We're 10 years away from the Superman movie in 1970, and those things have been available to the public. It'd be wildly different. I think that's why, as a society, we're not diving back into some of this stuff as it becomes available, because it's just so long that it's just not interesting anymore.

[29:33] Chase: Guillermo del Toro just did the Frankenstein movie, which was great. So, I feel like I've just shot my own argument in the foot by thinking about it for a few minutes. I guess, will somebody do something like that with Popeye, or does it have to be a classic novel, or something that people can put a new spin on? Maybe that removal is beneficial, because why would you need the most interesting Popeye ever, when the Popeye we all love is still easily accessible? There's a whole generation of people still alive who grew up with that version they like, whereas everybody who grew up with the original Dracula novel as their first intro to Dracula is very dead, and there've been a ton of iterations since then, by people who were inspired by it, and had new filters they wanted to put it through. Do we need the 25 filter of Mickey Mouse when they're still doing sh!t with Mickey Mouse, in the present, under the official umbrella? I guess. Yeah, I don't know.

[30:24] John: […] the opposite of what you're saying, point, though, too, David, is there isn't a pause between when Batman came out and when the most recent iteration of Batman came out. Batman's been continually published for this entire length of the copyright. There's more Batman product now than there ever has been, and that's not true of Jay Gatsby. The Fitzgerald Estate wasn't continually putting out new adventures of Jay Gatsby every month since then. That's a weird twist to it. Dracula is probably a really good case to look at, though. The original Universal movie was licensed.

[30:57] David: I think the author was still alive.

[30:58] John: He was dead, but he died not super long after Dracula came out as a book. The time was not very long. The distance between Dracula the book coming out and Dracula the movie coming out is less than between Ninja Turtles getting invented and now. It just wasn't that huge […].

[31:14] David: Right. It's much closer. I feel like we talked about this. The time gap is much closer than we realized.

[31:21] John: Nosferatu ripped off the Dracula stage play, really, the Dracula story, and it got sued, and it's only through luck that that movie still exists, because legally it wasn't supposed to. All copies of it were legally demanded to have been destroyed. As good as Frankenstein was, there was an even better Nosferatu movie last year, I think, or the year before--I guess, the year before, and that's real weird, because Nosferatu was immediately public domain, because it was illegal to exist.

[31:47] Chase: Is the message that the right creative team can do anything with a character to make it good?

[31:53] John: I mean, all of those are reimaginings of it. The Hammer Dracula or Hammer Frankenstein is pretty far away from the Mary Shelley Frankenstein or the Bram Stoker Dracula, but I find them really entertaining, and I really love them. Somebody builds out Taste the Blood of Superman, and its weird take on what Dracula was, but the other problem, though, is that there's not going to be a take on that, because you have the Homelander.

[32:16] Chase: Right. Yeah. Is the problem we've already had so many reimaginings of Superman, even when he's not in the public domain? We have Hyperion. We have the Homelander. We have all of these different, “What if Superman, but evil?” “What if Superman, but old?” It's all these Superman-adjacent things that are clearly a nod to the character, but they didn't need public domain to do that. They just did it.

[32:38] John: Yeah. I do think pulling some League of Extraordinary Gentlemen situation would be an interesting way to go--I don't know--throwing the Superman into the mix of that stuff. You know what's an interesting one, what's a fun one? I haven't read it yet, but the new Rocketeer series that John Layman 's writing, Rocketeer meets Popeye and TinTin in it.

[32:59] Chase: Oh, really?

[33:00] John: It's always the thing about Rocketeer is, the original Rocketeer, he meets The Shadow and Doc Savage, but they can't call him Doc Savage, and they can't call him The Shadow, but now he just can straight-up meet TinTin in the land of the Soviets’ TinTin.

[33:12] David: That's cool. That's just getting solicited now. Is any of that out?

[33:16] John: I don't think it's out yet. I was excited. I thought that was a clever way to approach Rocketeer, and I didn't even think about it until now. What a clever way to use that public domain stuff.

[33:26] Chase: Yeah. I take small credit in every Rocketeer series that IDW is still putting out.

[33:30] David: As you should.

[33:30] Chase: I'll tell our listeners why, because back when Twitter used to not be a hellscape run by Nazi child p*rn robots, it was a fun place to talk about comics, and Steven Mooney made a joke on Twitter about how much he wanted to draw the Rocketeer, and we had the license, and we weren't doing anything with it. So, I hit him back, and we started an e-mail, and then I spent six months being the most annoying person around the office about it possible, until people finally greenlit it, I think, to placate me, and because they felt bad for me, but then it actually moved units, and they kept making more books afterwards.

[34:02] David: Nice. Good job, man.

[34:03] Chase: I'm thanked in the intro of his book. That is true.

[34:05] David: Impressive.

[34:06] John: I don't want to get into it. I still wake up with nightmares about the Rocketeer, sometimes. There is a thing that haunts me to this day.

[34:14] Chase: I remember that thing.

[34:15] John: Yes.

[34:15] Chase: Yeah, that thing's a secret, though. We can't talk about it.

[34:19] David: We can't talk about that one. Mr. Marotz, did you have an agenda for the show? Did you come on with any purpose? What's going on with you, man?

[34:31] Chase: I just like to stop in, sometimes.

[34:32] David: What are you reading these days?

[34:34] Chase: I just finished Joe Sacco's The Once and Future Riot, which I thought was very good. I love Joe Sacco, and then I have Craig Thompson's most recent one on my nightstand to restart, because I finished the first two chapters, but then my wife borrowed it and read it, and loved it. Yeah, Ginseng Roots. He's a magician, dude. You say any book, and he just whips it up.

[34:53] David: It was literally within arm’s reach, Ginseng Roots.

[34:55] John: I'm going away next weekend, and I was like, “what do I need to read?” I'm like, “oh, yeah. I haven't read this, yet.”

[35:02] Chase: Yeah. So, that's on my agenda, but right now, I'm reading a book about the history of the Gnostic Gospels, which is actually very fascinating.

[35:07] John: Interesting.

[35:08] Chase: They were these forbidden gospels, hidden in a clay pot in Egypt in the year 300, and then a farmer stumbled onto them during World War II, and it was all these books of the Bible that during the early days of the church, the church said like, “these ones? No.”

[35:24] David: Caffeine with the Mormons like, “it's okay now.”

[35:28] Chase: It hasn't gotten so much into the content yet. It's just the history of them being found, and the weird antiquities dealers they had to go through to get them to places where they could be translated, and it's fascinating, but it's also a great book for when I want to go to sleep at night, because it makes me very sleepy.

[35:43] John: One of the things that really helped the translation of that is that all the works were in the public domain.

[35:49] Chase: From the year 300, that's true. They were public domain for a very long time.

[35:52] John: Yeah.

[35:53] Chase: And I wonder how much literature this has happened to, not to digress too much, but the wild part is the farmer who found them, these books survived for 1500 years buried in a clay pot, and then the farmer who found them, he's like, “these are just useless.” So, he gave them to friends. He tried to sell some of them. Couldn't get any money. His mom […] some of them for fuel.

[36:13] David: Are you serious?

[36:14] Chase: Yeah. They survived that long to barely survive being found.

[36:20] David: Oh, man. The world is full of slightly-below-average people.

[36:25] Chase: It is, but in good news, they tap my keg.

[36:28] David: What are you even doing here anymore?

[36:31] Chase: I just want to hang out, chit-chat.

[36:33] David: The show is over. Yeah, I've been reading a comic book that doesn't have any pictures, recently, as well. I've been reading the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. It's dumb fun, but I'm really enjoying it. It feels like an anime just waiting to happen. I started it at the beginning of January, and I'm on Book #7, I think, now. They're fun. They're light, easy, breezy reading. I definitely recommend them, especially if you're a fantasy Dungeons & Dragons-y cat. Pretty good series. I'm enjoying it a lot. I was really disappointed to read that Spider-Girl has been canceled. That's a bummer. So, I don't have any Spider-Man books now. That's pretty much it, for me. I'm out. They canceled my Spider-Boy, and then they canceled Spider-Girl. I wasn't really grooving on Spider-Girl as much, though. So, it's not as heartbreaking as losing Spider-Boy.

[37:24] Chase: Was this the May Mayday Parker Spider-Girl, or a different Spider-Girl?

[37:27] David: No, this is a new Spider-Girl that was introduced in Spider-Boy. She's got mimic powers of some sort. If she sees another superhero exhibiting power, she can do whatever they can do, and she just landed on keeping some Superboy/Spider-Man powers, and she's also a ninja, I think. It's a fun little series, but it's missing something. The heart of the Spider-Boy book had, this one doesn't have, but I don't know what to read at Marvel right now. I’m just reading old Marvel comic books right now. I feel really old, because I'm like, “the stuff from 1976 is so good,” and I'm not reading a single thing from 2026 right now.

[38:08] Chase: I'll probably take this to go drink beer with, but there's this giant warehouse in Portland where they just sell disorganized old comics for whatever. You bring it up to the register, and you're like, “how much does this one cost?” You're like, “whatever,” I found this Doctor Strange/Doctor Doom graphic novel by Roger Stern and Mike Mignola. It was $5.

[38:25] David: Have you ever read that one?

[38:26] Chase: No, I just brought it home. I'm going to take it and go drink beer with it.

[38:29] John: I think that's the best thing Roger Stern ever wrote. I mean that only positively.

[38:34] Chase: No, I mean, I like Roger Stern quite a bit. I'm very excited for it.

[38:39] David: This is Doctor Strange & Doctor Doom: Triumph and Torment, right? That's the title, and I think that's the one where Doom enlists Strange to help him go to hell to get his mother's soul back. Is that that story, John?

[38:50] John: They have a big contest for the next Sorcerer Supreme, and then that happens, yeah.

[38:56] Chase: Awesome. If either of you ever make it up to Portland, dude, that place is so fun. Stuff is organized loosely by alphabet, but there's a section where it's $5 […] on a big sign above it, and then it's just tons of comics. You’ve really got to go digging, but there's some treasures in there.

[39:09] David: Nice. Yep, you found one.

[39:11] John: I asked Ralph Macchio, “who in the world thought of putting Mark Badger over Mike Mignola?” Because it works great, but man, what a crazy thing that was.

[39:22] David: Yeah, but it does work great. We've talked about Mark Badger on the show before. He's a very eclectic taste, but every time I see his stuff now--even then, I always bought it, and I really liked it. Yeah, we lost our cool back-issue diving comic bookstore. We had a place here in San Diego called SoCal Comics.

[39:43] Chase: Zach Boone told me that it closed.

[39:45] David: They shut down. I guess they were raising the rent, and the owner, he was looking for a reason to retire, and I guess that was the reason. So, I'm bummed. I don't know where to go now for my habit. I know there's a couple of good stores in San Diego. I don't know which one of those stores is the back-issue bin store. Maybe, it's a Kamikaze.

[40:04] Chase: Zach was telling me that Comics ‘n Stuff bought all of SoCal's back issue inventory. I think that La Mesa one, last time I was in there, had a ton of back issues. I would guess that's probably where a lot of that inventory ended up.

[40:14] David: Yeah. Interesting. Boys, anything else? I think we've done a decent business. I don't know. It was a weird discussion.

[40:19] John: I suggest everybody just wait 95 years and then listen to this somewhere else.

[40:25] Chase: This is the time capsule episode. We're going to schedule this to come out 95 years from today.

[40:30] David: I think everybody should just wait 95 years and then redo this for themselves.

[40:35] John: Yeah.

[40:36] David: Some cool horror or p*rn spin on it.

[40:39] John: You know what? By then, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen itself will have been public domain for 20 years. So, you could have us teaming up with the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

[40:48] David: Please.

[40:49] Chase: In a pornographic horror thriller.

[40:50] David: All right. Thank you for coming to The Corner Box. As John said last week, you've been Corner Boxed. I think that's what you said. I threw up a little in my mouth when you said it. Anyway, thanks, everybody, for listening, and we'll see you all next week. Chase, thank you for joining us. It's always a pleasure to have you. Always incredibly insightful, and always have something intelligent to add to the conversation. Thank you. With that, dear listener, we will talk to you in seven short days. We will be right back. Don't you worry. Bye.

This has been The Corner Box with David and John. Please take a moment and give us a five-star rating. It really helps. Join us again next week for another dive into the wonderful world of comics.