twitter twitter
email email
flickr flickr

70 Facts You Didn’t Know About Marvel

Interesting feature in the Times online about, as the heading says, 70 facts you didn’t know about Marvel. I’m sure you comic aficionados knew most of these anyway, but it’s worth linking to.

Marvel once owned the rights to the word zombie. As improbable as it sounds, Marvel attempted to trademark the word zombie in comic book titles after publishing Tale of the Zombie in 1973. By the time the trademark was approved two years later, the series was coming to an end. Marvel lost the trademark in 1996 but it wasn’t long before it was once again trademarking the armies of the undead, registering the words Marvel Zombies to protect its comic series of the same name. With DC, Marvel also trademarked the phrase ‘Super Hero’.

Keyword related posts:

  1. On Zombies
  2. Comics: They’re Not Just For Nerds, You Know
  3. Comic Book Stars Hit By Recession
05
Nov 2009
AUTHOR Mark Newton
CATEGORY

genre stuff

COMMENTS 3 Comments
  • Neil

    If you keep mentioning Marvel, they might notice and offer you a gig. They are really big on gathering up authors/screenwiters over the last few years.
    Have you ever been interested in writing a comic and if so who would you want to write? I’ve strangely found with comics that my favorite characters are ones I wouldn’t necessarily want to write. The exception being the X-men but that’s because there are 100s of them to pick from.

  • http://blog.markcnewton.com Mark C Newton

    It’s certainly an interesting question. I’m not sure – initially I’d say yes, I’d love to, but it’s a different art entirely. I’m not all that well-read in comics – my collection of graphic novels stretches to about one shelf – so I couldn’t confidently declare what would be fun to do. Batman would be great, but what’s left to do? I’d maybe like to do something like Jonathan Letham, and dig-up a property that hasn’t been looked at in a long, long while.

    Bit of a cop out answer really…!

  • http://enjai-pearson.livejournal.com/ Neil

    It’s definitely more of a collaborative medium in that the artist can elevate or degrade your story.
    Marvel tends to test new writers out on relatively unknown or c-list characters where you can be a bit more creative so your cop out answer is actually a good one. There’s a lot more editorial involvement in the big characters which i guess is fair enough as you don’t want a multi-million dollar franchise like Batman or Spiderman being screwed over by one writer.

    Vertigo always looks like the dream imprint to me where it’s all creator owned. Some other publishers dabble with it such as image but my general impression is that it’s a tough medium to get into.