Favorite Public Domain Characters Thread

Inspired by the current Star Dust thread.

Which public domain characters do you like? Which /lit/ public domain characters should be added to a comic? Working on anything web-comic, short film, etc) with those characters?

Who here likes Phantom Lady?

There's a lot that I like in theory. The problem is that 99% of those comics are straight garbage and damn near unreadable in how banal and stilted they are. X of the Underground, for instance, is great as a concept: female spy who infiltrates the Nazis to basically kill some people and leave a calling card? That's cool. But most of the stories are just an obvious woman in male clothing fooling Nazis somehow while a reporter blows (or damn near blows) her identity to her constant annoyance.

It's much more fun to try to reinvent/reimagine the concepts.

I'm surprised there aren't more webcomics and stuff re-imagining it. There's tons of characters, fresh for the taking.

It seems like most of the ones that do are just guys who want to make a superhero universe of their own but don't want to be bothered to come up with their own characters.

Or in AC Comics' case (FemForce) they just want to draw cheesecake.

I mean, there's lot of ways to make a super-hero universe. One could write a horror story with Star Dust, or make a spy thriller with a modern X of the Underground.

Cheesecake is also a thing, of course.

Why use characters that nobody knows AND that you can't copyright yourself, rather than make up your own characters?

How would you use public domain characters?

For fun.

It's great taking something mediocre and making it better.

...

You can copyright your version of said character like how Frankenstein's monster is public domain but Universal owns the most famous version.

This. It's a ton of fun and provides a unique challenge to try to take something that's silly or poorly made and try to make it feasible and good.

My friend and I do this kind of shit for writing exercises all the time. "Make a cool character based on the rapping dog from the Titanic Animated Musical" or "Create a character based on the YouTube How to Draw Muscle Elves guy". It forces you to think creatively and you often come up with things you wouldn't on your own because you're forced to utilize the weird elements of the character.

>make a spy thriller with a modern X of the Underground
When we had one of these threads earlier this week that was actually one of my ideas but twisting it around a bit. Since usually stuff like that is just "spy's a good guy" or "spy infiltrates bad guys but is at risk of going native" I figured it'd be fun to invert it, especially playing on the original anti-Nazi stuff.

So X would've been an ultra-loyal spook for the fascist rulers of a future mega city/dystopia who infiltrates a gang of freedom fighters/terrorists to sabotage them from the inside with the entire series playing up her increasing worry at the risk of going native as she starts to develop relationships with the freedom fighters. Lots of gray and gray stuff (i.e. guaranteed safety with no freedom vs. freedom with no guaranteed safety stuff). Not pushing any political agenda but just having fun with inverting the concept a little and seeing how that goes.

Goddamn, that costume.

...

Damn she is thicc

There have been a few thread regularly.
There were some god-tier threads around 2016.

Does marvel use public domain characters as much as DC does? I find it really interesting how the Ray is part of the Justice League of America right now and he's the son of a public domain character.

>Does marvel use public domain characters as much as DC does?
No, it's quite te opposite.

Technically speaking, the America title once belonged to a character called "Ms. America" that is public domain, so technically speaking the character America Chavez is public domain. there was going to be a different iteration of her from Image, but nothing ever came of it, they would have been in the legal right. Anyone on here the creative type to make her likable?

>Technically speaking, the America title once belonged to a character called "Ms. America" that is public domain,

Huh? I don't think she's public domain.

Think about it this way. A few years ago Bethesda got into a legal fight with Mojang, the owner of Minecraft, because Mojang wanted to create a game that was titled "Scrolls". Because of this Bethesda thought they were infringing on their market (The Elder Scrolls), so they took them to court. The Judge ruled in favor of Mojang, stating to Bethesda that they couldn't own a single word. So in a legal sense, you can have a character called "Ms. America" just not the same character, but they 'can' share the same name.

Marvel has some. Roy Thomas did a Invaders miniseries in 1993 in which he initially planned to have some less-used Timely superheroes join the Axis. But either editorial said no or Thomas changed his mind, so Thomas used a few public domain Golden Age characters instead (specifically: Dr. Nemesis, Strongman, Spider Queen, Volton, and Human Meteor)

Matt Fraction then decided to use Dr. Nemesis in his X-Men run and I think Spider Queen did get used in an issue of Avengers 1959 by Chaykin. The others haven't been seen since.

Fraction and Brubaker also decided to incorporate Amazing-Man into Immortal Iron Fist years ago, only he's called Prince of Orphans instead. He's still John Aman though. And Marvel may technically own another version of Amazing-Man/John Aman in the form of Malibu's Protectors, which used the pd Centaur heroes as a springboard for their superhero comic at the time.

DC happens to have characters that are in the public domain because at the time they purchased them they didn't know that they may have unintentionally fallen into the public domain.

Based Mark Gruenwald said no. He likes Golden Age heroes to stay pure

Except maybe Thomas Halloway

Yeah, Angel took the short end of the stick. But at least he wasn't Axis member