Cover Contest 9/4-9/10: Guest-starring Public Domain Characters

[Greg Hatcher]

Really, I always thought Mickey was PD. So my cover doesn’t count?

There was a fair to mid-size legal kerfuffle about this in the 1980s when Malibu published THE UNCENSORED MOUSE, comics collecting early Mickey Mouse strips that should have been in the public domain, on the theory that as long as Mickey was not in the title or depicted on the cover, they were on solid legal ground. They might have been but Disney sued anyway, and won. Mickey isn't just copyrighted; he's also trademarked, so it gets murky. But that's just one of many times Disney has bigfooted companies who might have been in the right but couldn't afford the legal battle. there have been similar fights about Sherlock Holmes, the Green Lama, and the Lone Ranger, where the respective copyright/trademark holders got angry about specific public domain material getting reprinted or characters getting pastiche'd, but those came later. Disney is the one that fights most of these fights and they generally win by virtue of sheer size. California lawyers are fond of saying, "you don't **** with the Mouse." Each time Disney crushes another small-press guy for 'unfair competition' or 'trademark violation,' it creates legal precedent that further muddies the waters for this sort of thing.