Women Are Writing Science Fiction!

The back-copy writer for Margaret St Clair's Sign of the Labrys, published by Corgi in 1963, seems to be finding it genuinely difficult to believe that women can write SF.

Cathal Ó Sándair's Réics Carló

Cathal Ó Sándair was about the most popular author in the Irish language in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, but is largely forgotten today. He mostly wrote short chapbook-sized pulp adventure stories for younger readers, across all sorts of genres. His most popular series by far was that featuring the adventures of Réics Carló, a sort of Irish Sexton Blake detective character, whose escapades often featured aspects of the fantastic.

Here are the first five adventures of Réics Carló, with their wonderful bright covers.

Eachtraí Réic Carló - Uimhir a h-Aon
Na Mairbh a d'Fhill

Eachtraí Réic Carló - Uimhir a Dó
An tEiteallán Do-Fheicthe

Eachtraí Réic Carló - Uimhir a Trí
An Curpán sa Trúnc

Eachtraí Réics Carló - Uimhir a Ceathar
Dúnmharbhú i bPáirc an Chrócaigh

Eachtraí Réic Carló - Uimhir a Cúig
Uathbhás i mBrú na Bóinne

Marvelman Copyright: Same Comic, Different Gun

At the end of November 2009 I posted an entry here called Marvelman Copyright: I Found My Smoking Gun, where I stated that I’d found evidence of a copyright notice by Mick Anglo Ltd in a very early issue of Young Marvelman. This seemed to indicate that there was evidence of Mick Anglo at least claiming some sort of copyright entitlement to the group of characters as early as May 1954, right at the beginning of the nine year run of the title. As at least partial justification for my discovery I said this, “Of course, it is just possible that the copyright notice was added at a later date, like when Anglo was preparing Nostalgia - Spotlight on the Fifties for publication, but I think this is unlikely, as he would have been more careful of its positioning, rather than having it being slightly cut off, as it is on the page that's in the book.”

But I was wrong.

The first indication I got that I might have been a bit over eager was when I received an email from Derek Wilson saying, “ I have a copy of YM #38 and the copyright notice is not in the frame as shown in the Nostalgia - Spotlight on the Fifties book.” Derek Wilson knows a thing or two about Marvelman, having provided an introductory article for TwoMorrow’s recent Marvelman issue of Alter Ego, which is more or less reproduced here on the Crikey! website. After everything I had said about conservative approaches to information and backing up any claims with further research, it seemed that I had all the while been digging my own trap, and blithely walking into it...

So, further research was called for. I needed two things. Firstly, I needed my own copy of Young Marvelman #38. Although the person who wrote to me sent me a photograph of the page in question, I very much felt that I wanted to have empirical first-hand knowledge of everything I had referred to, so went looking for a copy of YM #38 on the internet, and was lucky enough to locate one quite easily. The other thing I wanted to find was another copy of Mick Anglo’s Nostalgia - Spotlight on the Fifties. My original copy of this was not actually the first edition published by Jupiter Books in 1977, but a later edition published by Universal Books in 1985.In the eight years between 1977 and 1985 Marvelman had been revived in Dez Skinn’s seminal Warrior magazine, so I felt it was important to be completely sure of all the dates of the appearances and non-appearances of the copyright notice. Again, I found a copy of this quite easily, so I’m now in a position to address the whole think once again, this time with more accuracy, hopefully, and also with even more pictures.

So, to go back to where I started, Michael Anglo’s Nostalgia - Spotlight on the Fifties - originally published by Jupiter Books in 1977, and republished without any changes by Universal Books in 1985 - contained this page from Young Marvelman #38:



I drew especial attention to the top right-hand panel:



I particularly wanted to highlight the copyright notice written on the right-hand side of the panel:



And that was my smoking gun. Except that it wasn’t.

Here’s the cover of my very own recently purchased copy of Young Marvelman #38:



And here’s a scan of page two of that comic:



(If you think I’ve been scanning things off centre, by the way, I haven’t. The artwork is really that far askew on the page. But I digress...)

And here’s a scan of the top right-hand panel:



So, no line claiming copyright, and the lack of that line completely undermines my earlier theory that Mick Anglo had attempted to claim at least some sort of ownership of the Marvelman characters very early on. Indeed, the indicia from Young Marvelman #38, which you can see here, states, amongst other things, that “All stories and illustrations are the copyright of the publishers...”

So, where did the notice come from, and why would it have appeared? The first think I wanted to know was, was it Mick Anglo who added the inscription to the page? Here’s the cover of the 1958 Young Marvelman Annual:



Down in the bottom right-hand corner of this there is a line of handwritten text, which says -Mick Anglo Ltd (London) - , as you can see here:



You can compare this to this signature from the page in Nostalgia - Spotlight on the Fifties:



At the risk of once more going out on a limb, I’m going to say that it’s the same hand doing the lettering in both cases, and I’m also going to suggest that the person doing the lettering is Mick Anglo himself. As far as I know, he did a lot of lettering for the comics produced by Gower Street Studios, and who else would be likely to add a copyright notice to his art after it had been used? So, is there any reason that this notice, appearing in a book in 1977, might have any significance. Well, yes, I rather think there might well be.

In this post on Steve Holland’s excellent Bear Alley, Holland says:

Alan is perfectly correct in saying that the publisher -- Len Miller & Co. (Hackney) Ltd. -- didn't go bankrupt. However, it did go into voluntary liquidation. The decision was made at a meeting of directors on 21 June 1972 and the company was officially wound up on 24 September 1974. From my non-lawyerly perspective, that means that any copyrights held by the company did not go into the hands of a liquidator or trustee in bankruptcy to be sold off as an asset of the company. It was a decision made by the directors (Florrie Miller, Arnold Miller and Doreen Lewis), debts and wages were paid off and the company was shut down. The contents of a warehouse full of old unsold copies of magazines was sold off; a British dealer by the name of Brian Jepson bought a lot of it and others may have tapped into the same source. That's why you can occasionally find mint condition Miller comics, although that's increasingly rare these days.

So where did that leave the copyright of Marvelman? The question that needs answering is: when a company shuts down voluntarily, do the copyrights held by that company remain with that company despite the fact that it no longer exists, or do the rights revert to the original creators, or do they become public domain?

This is why I find the date of the publication of Anglo’s Nostalgia - Spotlight on the Fifties so intriguing. L Miller & Co. Ltd went into liquidation in 1974, and three years later Anglo publishes a page of Young Marvelman artwork from 1954 with a copyright notice added to it. Miller’s copyright was now no longer in effect, as a nonexistent company can’t own anything, so Anglo is the next in line, it would seem, and certainly would have seemed so to himself, I imagine. And the copyright notice appears in the original edition in 1977, as well as in the later edition in 1985, meaning that Anglo was claiming this for himself in 1977, five years before Marvelman’s reappearance in Warrior in 1982, so was not motivated by the desire to capitalise on the character’s success there. It can only be that Mick Anglo wished to reclaim his own creation, even if, as seemed likely at the time, there was no likelihood of it ever reappearing, and the liquidation of L Miller & Co allowed him to, more or less legitimately, do this.

So that’s what I’m putting forward this time: Mick Anglo attaching a copyright notice to old artwork for a 1977 publication is even better proof of his claim on the Marvelman copyright that if the same copyright notice had originally appeared in 1954. I will have more to say on all of this at a later point...*

(*In the original article I also alluded to the fact that all of this springs out of research for what might become a book. This is something I can now confirm. In the summer of 2011 MonkeyBrain Books will publish what I’m provisionally calling Poisoned Chalice: The Extremely Long and Incredibly Complex Story of Marvelman. I am, to say the very least, extremely excited about this, and much of 2010 is going to be spend immersed in research for the book, as well as actually writing it. I’m already about ten thousand words into it, and I’ve absolutely no idea how long it’s going to be in the end, but long it certainly will be. It’s entirely possible that there’ll be more posts here of sidebar issues arising out of that research, though. But this post is probably the last one that will deal directly with material from the book itself.)

Day of the Triffids

My wife Deirdre has several paperback copies of John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids, and this seems as good a time as any to scan them and put them online.


Penguin Books, 1961, Cover Price 2/6


Penguin Books, 1963, Cover Price 3/6


Penguin Books, 1970, Cover Price 5/- 25p


Penguin Books, 1981, Cover Price £1.25


Penguin Books, No Date Given, Cover Price £4.50


Crest Books, June 1962, Cover Price 50c

There are other collections of covers for Day of the Triffids, of course, including the excellent Art of Penguin Science Fiction, but the covers here are special to me, because they're the ones in this house.

I once had a first edition of Day of the Triffids, with a really badly battered dust jacket, which I managed to melt the ink all down the back of while trying to remove Sellotape marks with a nail varnish removal pad...

Gladiator Vs Superman

While researching the history of Marvelman, I found myself going back quite a bit farther than just to the point where Mick Anglo and Leonard Miller created the character in 1953. I actually ended up going all the way back to 1930, and the publication of Philip Wylie’s novel Gladiator. Why? Well, If Marvelman is based on Captain Marvel, and Captain Marvel in turn is based on Superman, then I wanted to spend a little time looking at the allegation that Superman was, in his turn, supposed to be based on Hugo Danner, the protagonist in Philip Wylie’s Gladiator. This became the first chapter of my book, and I present it here for anyone who’s sufficiently interested to read it.


Gladiator Vs Superman


The 1949 Avon paperback publication of Gladiator

Gladiator, published in 1930 by Alfred A. Knopf of New York, was Philip Wylie’s third published novel, although it was his first completed one. He’d written it in 1926, at the age of twenty four, under the title of Titan, but he didn’t want to publish a science fiction novel as his first book, and waited until two other more mainstream books, Heavy Laden (Knopf, 1928) and Babes and Sucklings (Knopf, 1929), appeared before finally allowing Knopf to publish it, in a somewhat different version than the original from 1926. The book features the life story and adventures of Hugo Danner. While still an unborn child in the womb, Danner is injected by his father, scientist Abednego Danner, with a serum that gives him superhuman strength and abilities. The young Danner discovers he can run at extraordinary speeds, and is extremely strong, and later finds that his skin in unbreakable, and that he can withstand bullets. This had really never been done before, surprising as it now seems. Previously, if there was a super-strong character, it was due to their circumstances. For instance, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars was super-strong because he was in the weaker gravity of Mars, and John W. Campbell's Aaron Munro, the protagonist of his 1934 novel, The Mightiest Machine, was born on Jupiter, so was very strong when he came to Earth. Hugo Danner was different, though. He was a superhuman human being, which was a completely new concept to 1930s science fiction.

Although it didn’t sell particularly well in its original hardcover run, prompting Wylie to leave Knopf for what he saw as their lack of publicity for the book, Gladiator was apparently a bestseller in its day, and was reviewed widely, not only in professional papers, but also in the fan press, and was well known to the science fiction fans of the time. There was even a film based on the book, Columbia Pictures’ The Gladiator, in 1938, starring Joe E. Brown and June Travis. There are two reasons these days, however, that the book crops up. The first, lesser, reason is because a copy of Gladiator can be seen on Hollis Mason’s shelves on page nine of issue one of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen (DC Comics, 1986). The other reason it is spoken of is because of its apparent influence on a young Jerry Siegel, writer and co-creator of the world’s comic book first superhero, Superman.

Superman, co-created by writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, first appeared in Action Comics #1 in June 1938, published by Detective Comics Inc., a fore-runner of National Periodical Publications and DC Comics. The Superhero had been invented, and the world of the American comic book would never be the same again. Virtually overnight it became a huge seller, and is running to this day, with uninterrupted publication for over seventy years. A vast amount has been written over the years on the history of Superman, and by people substantially more qualified than I, so I’ll confine myself here to what is directly relevant, which is the allegation that Wylie’s Gladiator was a significant and substantial influence on the creation of Superman.


Sam Moskowitz's Explorers of the Infinite

The origin of the allegation that Superman was based on Hugo Danner was Sam Moskowitz’s Explorers of the Infinite (The World Publishing Company, Cleveland, 1963), where he stated on page 278, “In March 1930 the Book League Monthly, a paperback book club, offered its readership a selection filled with some startling situations: a man who could lift weights of four tons with ease, leap such distances that he almost seemed to fly, shed machine-gun bullets as a bridegroom sheds rice, rip bank vaults apart as though they were papier-mâché, or break a charging bull's neck with a side-handed cuff. The book was Gladiator by Philip Wylie. Most of today's readers will probably recognize the character: Superman, of course - the original.

A few years later, a Cleveland cartoonist Joe Schuster [sic] and his author associate Jerome Siegel would borrow the central theme from Gladiator, even paraphrase some of the dialogue, to create one of the most popular cartoon adventure strips of our time and no one would dream the idea had once been the basis of a serious novel.”

Philip Wylie’s biographer, Truman Frederick Keefer, also seems to agree. In Philip Wylie (Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1977) he states on page 48, “One of the main challenges to Wylie in writing Gladiator was the need to devise spectacular feats for Hugo to perform and then to make them seem probable. Our exposure to the Superman comic strip unfortunately obscures the originality of many of these inventions, which, according to Wylie, as well as recent scholars [presumably referring to Sam Moskowitz], were "borrowed" from Gladiator. Hugo hurtling across a river in a single leap, bounding fifty feet straight up in the air, holding a cannon above his head with one arm, killing a shark by ripping its jaws apart with his bare hands, felling a charging bull with a fist between the eyes, lifting an automobile by its bumper and turning it around in the road - all of these were, in 1930, fresh and new and very exciting to read about.”

Even the current publishers of Gladiator get in on the act: the back cover of the Bison Books edition, published by University of Nebraska Press in 2004, includes this, “An enduring classic in speculative fiction and the reported inspiration for the original comic hero, Superman, Gladiator is a melancholic tale of a boy set apart because of his unique gift and his lifelong struggle to come to terms with it.”


Gerard Jones's Men of Tomorrow

There are persistent claims that Jerry Siegel had reviewed Gladiator in the second issue of his fanzine Science Fiction: The Advance Guard of Future Civilization, published in November 1932, most recently seen in Gerard Jones’s Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book (Basic Books, New York, 2004) where he says on page 78, “The second issue [of Science Fiction] already had less to offer, except for one short piece that recorded Jerry's collision with a world very different from his own, one that sent his fantasies spinning in a new direction and pushed him closer to his first truly new creation: a review of Philip Wylie's Gladiator.”

And later, on page 80, Jones says, “When other fans called Jerry's attention to Gladiator in 1932, it had already been on the shelves for two years. Wiley had had two more books published and was deep in his first big novel, Finnley Wren. He'd have cared nothing for a young science fiction fan's love of Gladiator (and would no doubt have been shocked to learn that eight years later he'd be preparing to sue that fan for plagiarism).”

Finally, there’s this on page 346, “In Gladiator we find a clue to much that is mysterious about the shifting tales of Superman's creation. Siegel flatly denied that Wylie's novel had influenced him in any way, despite the timing and the striking similarities that would seem to leave no doubt of Gladiator's role. His denial seems to date from Wylie's threat to sue him for plagiarism in 1940 - Siegel reportedly even signed an affidavit attesting to it - and appears to have been a self-protective act.”

Unfortunately, despite this last piece being in the Notes on Sources section at the rear of Jones’s book, there is no source given for any of Jones’s allegations, either of one work’s influence on the other, or of the threat of litigation.


Action Comics #1

There are also persistent rumours that Wylie threatened to sue National Periodical Publications, the publisher of Action Comics, for infringement of copyright, as seen in the quotes above from Gerard Jones’s Men of Tomorrow. In a 2008 online article on io9.com, called Superman Takes on Other Superheroes - In Court, writer Lauren Davis says, “In 1940, Wylie threatened to sue Siegel and National comics for plagiarism of his work. Although nothing ever came of the suit, Siegel did sign an affidavit claiming that Gladiator was not an inspiration for Superman, although Siegel had reviewed Wylie’s novel in a 1932 issue of his fanzine, Science Fiction.”

Another online article, Will Murray’s Gladiator of Iron, says this, “Jerry Siegel is said to have denied ever reading Gladiator. There are rumours that Philip Wylie threatened to sue DC Comics for copyright infringement in the early 40s. DC management had Siegel produce a point-by-point refutation of the charge. No suit was filed, as far as anyone knows. Rumour has it that Wylie backed down when he discovered his publisher had neglected to copyright Gladiator in the first place.”

However, as usual, no source is given for either of these claims, and a substantial amount of searching on my part has completely failed to find any verifiable evidence of either of them. And I’m not even going to try to chase down the allegation that Gladiator was never copyrighted in the first place, although this may just be a misplaced and mangled version of the later allegation that the copyright on Superman was abandoned by its owners.

And there, if you like, I rest the case for the prosecution...

On the other hand, there are sources that assert that Gladiator wasn’t an influence on Superman at all, or at least not as much as was being claimed by Moskowitz and those who came after him. In Science Fiction Studies #95 (SF-TH Inc, DePauw University, Indiana, March 2005) Gregory Feeley writes, “The claim of paraphrased dialogue would seem decisive, but a comparison of the two texts shows no such similarities. It seems unlikely that Moskowitz examined either the original 1938 Action Comics - not readily available in the early 1960s - or went back to check newspaper archives for the 1939 syndicated strip from which the earlier version was abridged. Moskowitz, who gives no source for his contention, is notorious for uncritically accepting what the writers he takes as his subjects tell him, and the biographical sketches in Explorers of the Infinite and Seekers of Tomorrow are largely hagiographic.”

He also says, “Keefer interviewed Wylie extensively over a period of years, and he provides as much scholarly information as his subject is likely ever to get. He notes that Wylie strongly believed that Superman was largely based on Gladiator. Keefer, a competent scholar, cites Moskowitz’s claim, but notes that Moskowitz’s source was a telephone interview with Wylie. Moskowitz’s assertion thus has no independent basis, and Keefer offers no argument to support it, although he does cite a private correspondence from a third party as supporting Moskowitz.”

The “private correspondence from a third party” mentioned above is probably J. Randolph Cox’s letter of January 30th 1970, as mentioned on page 159 of Keefer’s book, in the Notes and References section.

With regard to the claims of litigation by Wylie against Siegel, Feeley has this to say, “Wylie was rich and famous - and, as the admiring Keefer shows, very combative - in the late 1930s, but he seems never to have brought suit for copyright infringement. (The early litigation surrounding the copyright of Superman, in which its publisher figured as both plaintiff and defendant, has been widely discussed by comics historians.) By the time he spoke to the credulous Moskowitz in the early sixties, Wylie was an embittered alcoholic, with a long history - evident in his non-fiction, and acknowledged by Keefer - of exaggerating to make his points. The claim of paraphrased dialogue seems to have its origin there, and has been repeated (unchecked) ever since.”

The unsubstantiated claim that Siegel reviewed Gladiator can also be called into question. Science Fiction historian Jerry Weist apparently went through long-time SF fan Forrest Ackerman's complete collection of Siegel's fanzines without finding any mention of Philip Wylie at all, let alone a review of Gladiator. (I can’t find my source for this, I’m afraid, meaning it is for the moment unsubstantiated as well, but I saw it written down somewhere recently, and made a note of it at the time, and I’ve every reason to believe it’s correct.)

The other regularly repeated assertion about Siegel is that he always claimed not to have read Gladiator, as can be seen in various quotes above. The truth is that, as usual, I can’t find any actual verifiable source for this, one way or another. I can’t find him claiming he didn’t read it, but I can’t find him claiming he did read it, either, or any reference to him ever being asked about it, one way or another. If fact, there’s so much supposition and unverified claims surrounding this story that even my own account of it here is necessarily filled with words like allegedly, apparently, and supposedly. I’ve quoted whatever sources I can find, but in a lot of cases even these sources are vague on the sources of their own assertions. It’s obvious to me that some of the people writing about this wrote things that they wanted to be true, and didn’t let the lack of factual evidence get in their way. Gerard Jones’s somewhat breathless prose is a good example of someone not letting the lack of facts get in the way of a good story. It’s also obvious that Gregory Feeley didn’t have a lot of time for Sam Moskowitz’s abilities as a popular culture historian, so even there one needs to filter what he says in light of this.

Of course, none of the above proves that Siegel didn’t read Gladiator, either, and I’d have to say, for myself, that there would seem to simply be too many similarities between the two works for him not to have done so. Both characters were super-strong, virtually invulnerable, and could out-run trains. If Superman could leap tall buildings in a single bound, then Hugo Danner before him has leapt across wide rivers, and could jump fifty feet up in the air. Both broke their cribs as babies. Both kept their abilities a secret, both join football teams at one point, both spent at least some of their time forging their own brand of social justice, hunting down the likes of crooked politicians and mine-owners and making them reform their ways. Both intervene in their respective World Wars, Danner in the first, and Superman in the second. It is not just the similarities in abilities, either, but the similarities in how they dealt with those abilities, and what they chose to do with them, that make it almost a certainty, at least in my own opinion, that the young Jerry Siegel not only read Wylie’s Gladiator, but was profoundly affected by it. At one point, as a child, Danner says to his father, "I can do things, dad, it kinds of scares me. I can jump higher’n a house. I can run faster'n a train. I can pull up big trees and push 'em over." This could just as easily be a young Clark Kent speaking to his adoptive father Jonathan, right there.

Undoubtedly there were other influences on the creation of Superman. Jerry Siegel certainly admitted having read the Doc Savage stories, for instance, although he prevaricated somewhat in actually admitting anything beyond that. He said at one stage, when asked if Doc Savage was an influence, “Of course I read Doc Savage at that time, but that is so long ago that I can't really intelligently answer that question,” but a number of early Superman plots are apparently lifted straight from the pages of Doc Savage Magazine, and the fact that Savage’s actual first name was Clark, the same as Clark Kent’s, would seem to suggest that at least some form of influence was at play. Although, at that, Joe Shuster claimed that the name actually came from Clark Gable, the film actor, so once again there’s room for doubt. Other influences, according to Siegel, included the John Carter stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the films of actor Douglas Fairbanks Senior, as well as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, after which the city in the Superman stories is named.

An interesting point in the above is that both Wylie and Siegel regularly compared their creations to, amongst others, Hercules and Atlas, who also make up the second and third letters of the acronym SHAZAM (S the wisdom of Solomon; H the strength of Hercules; A the stamina of Atlas; Z the power of Zeus; A the courage of Achilles; M the speed of Mercury), the magic word that transforms Billy Batson into Captain Marvel. In this case, however, this is presumably less to do with any sort of influence or plagiarism, and more to do with the fact that, in pre-Superman days, the most obvious sources for comparisons to super-strength and other more-than-human abilities were to be found in mythology, rather than anything more contemporary.

But that was all about to change.

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Bibliography
Books:
Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book, Gerard Jones (Basic Books, New York, 2004)
Philip Wylie, Truman Frederick Keefer (Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1977)
Explorers of the Infinite, Sam Moskowitz (The World Publishing Company, Cleveland, 1963)
Gladiator, Philip Wylie (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1930)
Gladiator, Philip Wylie (Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press, 2004)

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Periodicals:
Science Fiction Studies #95, Gregory Feeley (SF-TH Inc, DePauw University, Indiana, March 2005)

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Online Articles:
Superman Takes on Other Superheroes - In Court, Lauren Davis
Gladiator of Iron, Will Murray

Marvelman Copyright: I Found My Smoking Gun

I've been spending quite a bit of time this year in finally getting down to writing an article about the history of Marvelman, something I've been threatening to do for at least the past six years. I say article, but it's much more likely to be a book at this stage, as I've just reached the point at which L. Miller & Son Ltd. are publishing reprints of Fawcett Comics' Captain Marvel comics, and I'm already nine thousand words in. I have nine chapter headings at the moment, with titles like From Gladiator to Superman, From Superman to Captain Marvel, From Captain Marvel to Marvelman, and so on. At the very end of the piece, I have a chapter called Who Owns Marvelman?, where I'm going to attempt to address the issue of who actually does own the character.

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. I've seen a few mentions in articles about Marvelman that state that Anglo had inserted copyright notices into some of the Marvelman comics pages he produced for Miller, but in the absence of any actual proof of this, I was inclined to be cautious. In the course of the six years that I've been researching this article, I've accumulated a lot of bits and pieces in various books and magazines about Marvelman, and not all of them are wholly accurate, and I've tried to take a conservative approach to what I'm writing, so if I can't find a reliable source for a piece of information, I'm not inclined to included it, and I cite my sources as much as possible, except for information that seems to be well known, and that isn't in dispute. So, if I couldn't find some sort of proof for myself, I was just going to have to ignore it.

There is one claim that's worth mentioning, before I move on: in the second edition of Matthew H Gore's The Origin of Marvelman (Comics Monographs Vol. 1 No 1, Boardman Books, 2006 & 2008), there is a reproduction of a copyright notice that reads, Mick Anglo Ltd. © 1958, which is explained thus: "Anglo's claim to Marvelman is based on copyright statements like the one reproduced above. Reportedly taken from Marvelman and the Ghost of Old Backwoodsville in Marvelman #297 ..." I have a few problems with this. Firstly, the fact that the author says, "Reportedly taken from..." means that he seems to have only seen a photocopy of the copyright notice, rather that the full story that the notice comes from. Secondly, this notice comes from quite late in Anglo's involvement with the character. The creation of Marvelman took place in late 1953, with his first appearance being in February 1954, in the confusingly numbered Marvelman #25. Although Miller was publishing Marvelman comics until 1963, Anglo ceased produding them in 1959 or 1960. So, a copyright notice from 1958 might only prove that Anglo belatedly decided to lay claim to the character, before finally leaving it altogether soon afterwards. Although of course to mitigate against that is the fact that Miller did actually publish the comic with Anglo's copyright notice in it. In any case, the whole thing is unclear, and not really the kind of unambiguous proof I was looking for.

Which, finally, brings me to the main subject of this post! As I said above, in the course of my researches I have accumulated quite a number of books and magazines. One of these is Nostalgia - Spotlight on the Fifties by Michael Anglo (Jupiter Books (London) Limited, 1977). This is it:

This contains an article called The Age of Marvelman, which tells of Anglo's involvement in the creation of Marvelman, and some more general information about his early years working in comics, and the book is well worth find a copy of if you can just for this. The article is accompanied by some illustrations, and while looking at these I noticed something that I hadn't noticed before. Here's the cover of Young Marvelman #38, which is reproduced in Nostalgia - Spotlight on the Fifties:

And here's a comics page that's reproduced in Nostalgia - Spotlight on the Fifties, which is obviously related to the cover illustration on Young Marvelman #38:

Here's a close-up on the top right-hand panel:

And here's a further close-up, and a 90 degree turn anti-clockwise, of the writing on the right-hand side of that panel:

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. Of course, it is just possible that the copyright notice was added at a later date, like when Anglo was preparing Nostalgia - Spotlight on the Fifties for publication, but I think this is unlikely, as he would have been more careful of its positioning, rather than having it being slightly cut off, as it is on the page that's in the book.

This is it. This is my smoking gun. I cannot tell you how excited I was once I put all the pieces together in my head and realised what I'd found. It gives a whole new focus to my article book. Now all I need to do is find myself a publisher...

The Obligatory First Post

I have decided I need a blog, above and beyond the few I already have on LiveJournal, so here it is. I have plans for this, which I hope will actually come true...