Go, Read: The Trouble With Titles

I enjoyed Brian Cronin's straight-forward article here on the fact that a title recently announced by Skybound, the Image imprint that features the titles spearheaded by writer Robert Kirkman, has an antecedent at the publisher Valiant. Cronin's article seem very thorough to me, and provides a significant bit of historical context.

There are several intriguing elements to this for me.

The first is the main thrust of the article, that there could be a legal challenge, meaning that there's a limbo-like period where this stuff gets sorted out -- I find the thought of people weighing their options here fairly fascinating, as I don't know what there is to consider.

The second is something the article mentions, that the on-line publication of the original Outcast title may facilitate a more significant legal claim to use of that title. That's something I hadn't considered as this materials grinds its way out of back-issue bins and back into a storage drive somewhere.

The third is more implied, and is something I've pondered a bunch. How many titles are there for genre works like this? I mean, if I were to write a satirical play about a Superman figure, I have no idea what that guy could be named that hadn't been used in some significant capacity by someone in the past -- mostly the recent past. Ditto a concept title for, I don't know, a mystery featuring a time-traveler. So many comics titles cover similar territory, and are informed by either broad genre concepts (like this one, seemingly) or very specific character archetypes that revolve around a few properties. As we've known since Marvel's long-ago challenge floated in the direction of The Rocketeer based on a very minor set of Marvel characters, this can become an issue. I'm interested to see how this might work itself out over the next decade.
 
posted 4:50 pm PST | Permalink
 

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