The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

Pádraig Ó Méalóid, a regular contributor to the blog, has, as most of us who know him can atest, been working for several years on untangling the quite convoluted history of just who exactly has had a legitimate claim to copyright on the Marvelman character, a quest which has grown from an essay to a dissertation and is now looking more like being a book in scope and length.  As anyone who’s followed it even casually knows its far from a clear trail and even Marvel’s recent announcement concerning reprinting Marvelman still leaves some folks asking questions as to who actually properly held the copyright to sell rights to Marvel? As Pádraig comments “Currently, both Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, the two most recent writers to work on Marvelman (mostly in his next incarnation as Miracleman), and two of the most honourable and respected men in the field, are of the opinion that Mick Anglo, who created the character for L. Miller & Son Ltd., held copyright all along. It’s not that I wished to disagree with them, but I had always wanted to find some sort of proof that this might have been the case.”

But now on his blog Pádraig reveals some new information he’s discovered: a copyright notice under Michael Angelo’s name on a Young Marvelman page reproduced in an article (see above) entitled The Age of Marvelman in the 1977 book by Mike Angelo, Nostalgia: Spotlight on the Fifties. “So, finally, it seems I have all the proof I need. Young Marvelman the character was created at the same time as Marvelman, and Young Marvelman the comic shared the same numbering as Marvelman, so started its weekly schedule at #25. It follows that Young Marvelman #38, from which the above is taken, was published thirteen weeks in the title’s run, putting it somewhere in May 1954, and from this there would seem to be no other conclusion to be drawn except that right from the very beginning, Mick Anglo was claiming that he owned the copyright on Marvelman and associated characters.” I’m not even going to pretend to know exactly how this all fits into the contentious history of ownership regarding copyright (it’s been pointed out the copyright lettering could have been added for the ’77 reproduction in the book), let alone how it affects possible reprinting (or continuation) of the later Moore-Gaiman Miracleman tales, you should simply go read Pádraig’s blog.