Fawcett Comics

~ the eulogy ~

Fawcett Publications was a magazine house before it was anything else. Wilford Fawcett started it in 1919 with Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, a joke magazine sold to soldiers, and built it into a stable of titles through the 20s and 30s. The comics division came in 1939, a year after Action Comics #1, and it was a direct answer to Superman.

Whiz Comics #2 carried the first Captain Marvel in February 1940. Bill Parker wrote him and C. C. Beck drew him: a newsboy named Billy Batson who said the word Shazam and turned into an adult superhero in a red suit. The reader was the kid, not the man, which no other superhero comic was doing at the time. Within four years Captain Marvel Adventures was coming out every two weeks, selling around 1.3 million copies an issue and fourteen million across 1944, and beating Superman's own book.

National Comics, which became DC, sued in 1941 on the claim that Captain Marvel infringed Superman. The case ran twelve years. Fawcett won the first round in 1951 on a technicality: McClure Newspaper Syndicate had failed to put proper copyright notices on the Superman newspaper strips, and the district court held the copyright abandoned. National appealed. In 1952 Learned Hand wrote for the Second Circuit that the Superman copyright was valid after all and sent the case back for a trial on whether particular Captain Marvel stories had copied particular Superman ones.

Fawcett did not go back to trial. On 14 August 1953 it agreed to pay National $400,000 and to stop publishing Captain Marvel and every character attached to him, permanently. The comics division wound down through the autumn. Captain Marvel Adventures ended with issue 150, cover-dated November 1953.

~ the dossier ~

~ bigger than superman ~

The sales gap was not marginal. At the Golden Age peak Captain Marvel Adventures was the best-selling comic book in the United States by a wide margin, on a biweekly schedule no other superhero title could sustain. The Marvel Family grew to take in Mary Marvel and Captain Marvel Jr., Republic Pictures made a serial out of him in 1941, and the character had the kind of reach DC spent the next thirty years quietly assigning to Superman instead.

That commercial success is what made the lawsuit worth twelve years. National was not defending a principle. It was defending the top slot in a market it expected to own, and by 1953 it had that slot anyway, because superhero sales across the whole industry had collapsed after the war and publishers were converting to crime and romance titles. Fawcett looked at the cost of a second trial against a business already shrinking on its own and took the deal.

~ twelve years of it ~

National Comics Publications v. Fawcett Publications is one of the longest-running cases in American comics and it settled almost nothing about superheroes. The 1951 ruling turned on whether a newspaper syndicate had printed a copyright line correctly, and the 1952 appeal reversed it on the same narrow ground. Learned Hand's opinion was careful to say the question of actual copying had never been tried, and the settlement meant it never was. The record therefore holds no finding that Captain Marvel was a copy of Superman. What it holds is a payment of $400,000 and an agreement to stop.

~ what dc bought afterward ~

Fawcett sold what it could. Charlton Comics picked up several completed stories and some of the characters who were not covered by the settlement in 1954. Fawcett Publications itself carried on fine without a comics arm, running Fawcett Books and the Gold Medal paperback line for another two decades before CBS bought the company in 1977.

DC licensed Captain Marvel from Fawcett in 1972, nineteen years after suing him off the newsstand, and bought the character outright in 1994. By 1972 the name was gone. Marvel Comics had registered Captain Marvel as a trademark in 1967 while DC was not using it, so DC could publish the character but could not put his name on a cover, and the book went out as Shazam!. In 2011 DC gave up the fight and renamed the character himself.

~ the name that came back wrong ~

Captain Marvel never reached Turkey in the Fawcett era. There was no distribution for American comic books here in the 1940s, and what filled Turkish newsstands in the decades after were Tommiks and Teksas, local editions of Italian western strips. The first version of Billy Batson to arrive here in any quantity was the 2019 Shazam! film, which is to say he arrived under the trademark of the company that had sued his publisher out of the business, carrying a title that exists only because a third company took his real name while DC was not looking. Whatever Fawcett built in 1940, none of it made the trip.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »