Strips

Rich Bellacera xephyr at cwnet.com
Tue Aug 19 00:11:29 CEST 2003


Gary Leach:

> It appears that the Disney comic book license no longer 
> covers the reprinting of comic strips - that's now a 
> license in itself.

Argh!  Now it will be longer than ever before all those old Bill Walsh,
Floyd Gottfredson, Al Taliaferro, Merrill de Maris, etc. strips ever
see print again!  Not only do you have to fight for decensorship, but
pay EXTRA for licensing... *sigh*

I guess it's no different than Paramount creating a different license
for every Star Trek series as a seperate franchise (Classic Star Trek,
Deep Space Nine, each individual movie, Voyager, the animated series,
etc. all have seperate licensing fees when a comic book company wants
to create a series based on one, they can only use characters and aspects
of them that exist in THAT particular license.  If, they want Kirk to 
meet Janeway, they have to pay for the license for both Classic &
Voyager, and then get permission from Paramount to do the crossover!).

I wonder if Disney has created a seperate licensing fee for each film
too, so we will never (thankfully) see Captain Hook in a Mickey Mouse
comic without the comicbook publisher having purchased the Peter Pan
license first? :-)

Still, I am saddened by the news concerning the Strip licenses.  Its
so sad that places like Italy get all these great books full of reprinted
materials such as all the old Panchito and Carioca newpaper strips or
Gottfredson strips published in a single volume, and here in America,
where they were originally created, they are lost to us perhaps forever.

*sigh*

Rich Bellacera
xephyr at cwnet.com





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