>Both will be public domain in the next decade
so does DC have a back up plan for when this happens?
>Both will be public domain in the next decade
>Both will be public domain in the next decade
so does DC have a back up plan for when this happens?
Only their first appearances. You’ll get none of the most iconic elements to them for another few decades. Can’t even use the traditional S symbol nor the yellow oval Batman one for about as long.
You can have your OC beat up both Batman and Superman and DC can't do anything about it.
People already make shitty fan art of that shit. good luck selling it.
That'll just create a situation where new elements, potentially, become iconic and people could still make more interesting stuff with the original versions than DC can or will with any iterations of these characters
Can’t have Alfred, dude. And the first one you’d get would be the original fat one, not the one you’d actually want.
Fricked up to think Robin came before Alfred.
Robin came before Joker and Catwoman too.
Didn't Robin and Joker came from the same comic
No, they debuted in different issues, but both were out the same year
Robin debuted in Detective Comics #38 in March 1940
Joker debuted the next month, in Batman #1.
Only because adaptations and later retelling have influenced you.
The dynamic duo is the important part. Alfred was just there for dry wit. He was never meant to be Bruce’s daddy figure. Frank Miller is the one who changed it so Alfred came first and even then he died with little reaction in DKR.
Nobody asked
Too bad
>Can't have Alfred
Okay. I'm not saying certain aspects aren't gonna be missed, but if someone used the original Batman and made a gothic noir story with original villains and nice art, it could still be kino without iconic stuff like Alfred or the batmobile.
the batmobile is kind of corny anyway
Batman is corny. Trying to make him super serious is the problem.
you have a point. superheroes are kind of goofy. but i cant help but think of this silly looking car getting stuck in traffic. like there's sort of a limit i guess
Again, if you wanna bring logic into it everything about Batman is corny.
His boomerangs are shaped like bats. He has a whole ridiculous conspicuous costume.
I'm not saying the batmobile isn't corny but would any alternative be better? Batman taking the subway? Calling a cab? Begging Alfred to pick him up in the Wayne family limo when he gets too embarrassed running down the sidewalk getting weird looks after running out of conveniently close rooftops and alleyways??
>I'm not saying the batmobile isn't corny but would any alternative be better? Batman taking the subway? Calling a cab? Begging Alfred to pick him up in the Wayne family limo when he gets too embarrassed running down the sidewalk getting weird looks after running out of conveniently close rooftops and alleyways??
Sound like a sketch they'd do on SNL or something.
>more interesting stuff
We both know that’s not happening
Why? Even if you're cynical and don't think more Batman stories have anything to offer, you have to at least admit that there's tons of artists and writers who could potentially make some Batman stuff that's easily better than what DC does with him. Most of the Batman stuff people already love was created by new artists and writers coming in and adding their ideas to the character. Batman going public domain will just remove the hurdle of DC's moronation
If you were creative you wouldn’t be waiting for a popular character to enter public domain just to write a dumb fan fiction story
Especially when you basically already can copy the characters 99% and do whatever you want now
Waiting or not waiting doesn't matter at all. You have a narrow perspective on creativity too. Batman is popular and there's artists who could and would like to make something cool with him once he's public domain. It's no different than the current structure of new writers updating him for DC. Pd just cuts out all the corpo red tape and politics, allowing any random frick to pump out a good Batman comic.
The first Public Domain Batman might as well be a reskin of the Shadow.
I'm cool with that.
Good, he’d be closer to BurtonBats anyway.
At least this Batman can fricking kill.
You're gonna run out of villains inside a month.
Easy, I’ll just have him fight vampires and demons.
Good choice, he did fight vampires in his first year of Detective Comics, it's not like you can't introduce other vampires
Just avoid making it like DC's Batman vs Dracula stories
>and there's artists who could and would like to make something cool with him
No one is stopping them from doing that. You are only not allowed to profit from your work on him.
It's going to be like Tarzan or Conan, the characters themselves are in the public domain and anyone can use them, but later stories and related characters aren't, and like is saying, it's going to be years, decades even, before all of the important elements and related characters enter the public domain.
They basically have that time in which to make the official DC versions associated with a sort of seal of quality in order to make people WANT to go out of their way for an official Superman or Batman product instead of some cheap knockoff. Which means they really, desperately need to stop comic writers damaging the properties as much as they've been doing in recent years.
Superman is complicated. Somehow the 1940s cartoons by Max Fleischer is claimed to be public domain, but doing anything with them will get you tangled up with other copyrighted versions of Superman. It's good enough for Wikipedia and Archive.org which hosts them.
The cartoons ended up in the public domain because they got sold to a different rights holder at the time, who ended up selling to someone else, and so on and so forth. By the time DC tracked down who owned them it was too late to get the copyrights on them renewed.
It will be shit versions of
>what if horror Superman
>what if horror Batman
Creative people don't need the crutch of a well known characters to produce content, only bottom feeders do.
I dare a 3rd party writer to come up with worse shit than Superman Red/Superman Blue, that time Superman got raped by Russians, or Superman: Earth One.
You can't write a worse Superman story than what already exists without it becoming a parody.
But DC already makes those
>It will be shit versions of
>what if horror Superman
DC already did a bunch of those
>Spiderman doesn't become PD until 2058
Marvel must be feeling real smug.
It will take a while yes, but on the other hand Marvel is quite fricked when the that day comes since Amazing Fantasy introduced pretty much 80% of everything that makes Spider-Man who he is to this day from the very start, unlike Superman and Batman who went through many years of addendums to their characters to make them more appealing.
The day Spider-Man becomes public domain, anyone will have a sizable pool of a concept to do plenty with Peter, only certain characters would be out of reach for more years.
Most other Marvel properties will be in a similar situation to Batman and Superman where it could take 2-3 decades for all of the things people actually like to become public domain, but with Spider-Man virtually everything important except Venom and Carnage will go into the public domain within a few short years of Spider-Man himself, most of the core supporting cast and villains are frontloaded into the first 20 issues, and most of the other important ones are there before #50.
>Miles is so relatively modern, PD Spider-Man will be free of him
>a Superman with a different design and missing several powers
>a Batman who was just an off-brand Shadow
>both missing major supporting characters
Should be sooner. These shit companies are propped up by good ideas people had like a lifetime ago. Imagine where DC would be if anyone could make Batman like Dracula or the Greek Gods are. They'd go out of business.
>Imagine where DC would be if anyone could make Batman like Dracula or the Greek Gods are
I've been saying that for years. Plus, unlike with official stuff where bad decisions made by hacks can persist in the continuity for years, similar shit decisions made by independent adaptations could just be safely ignored from the overall mythos.
I doubt if DC will continue existing the next decade.
I can see that by 2030 either Warner or Disney execs will finally take a long hard look at their respective comic divisions, at how little money they make vs how much damage their writers are doing to the company's intellectual property, and downscale one of the Big 2 to just a glorified reprints department, while outsourcing the characters to smaller comic publishers, with strict restrictions on what you can and can't do to characters (no race changes, no turning people into gays, no using superhero stories as your political soapbox, etc), once it happens to one of them, the other will likely follow, and the whole industry could collapse as a result.
I do too and I said it in another thread. Neither WB nor Disney are too big to fall and comics are going to be the first causality.
>superman and batman become public domain
>gay porn multiplies
you can do that now though cause it would fall under parody
Why does it even matter? What's more can even be done with these characters who consistently had books for almost a century now.
The original Batman been public domain for decades, you can now call him Batman when you sell him.
>Every hack tries to make their own Batman comic and they all fall into the void and make nothing because people want the "real" Batman
>Public Domain Bat-Man: Year One
>No Alfred
>No Robin
>No Joker
>No Batcave
>No Batmobile
>No Bat-Signal
It's Batman and Commissioner Gordon vs Doctor Death and the Mad Monk and that's literally it.
Year Two is where things get interesting.
>Gordon and Batman vs Dr Death and the mad monk
Sounds based. Batman needs a break from fighting the same bozos over and over again in a traditional superhero style. He needs more detective stories that emphasize his latent gothic aesthetic.
Especially since the superhero trend is over along with shared universes. Batman needs to go more supernatural with his world.
Zaslav won’t let that happen