RAPT IN PLASTIC PT. 2

I recently did a quick scan-read of DC's hoary BOB HOPE title just to take stock of the writer's use of Classic Monster characters to goose up the aging franchise. During that same period there appears a superhero whom I don't believe even the most desperate raconteur ever bothered to revive: "Super-Hip." In the character's mundane identity he was a priggish intellectual who frequently got bullied, and one day his resentments transformed him into a Magical Guy who could go and beat up his oppressors. There's nothing noteworthy about Super-Hip except that he could transform into anything, and this was an interesting coincidence because a year after Super-Hip's creation, his creator Arnold Drake got an assignment to script comics' first important shapeshifting hero, Plastic Man.

A second coincidence: on the Classic Horror Film Board I just happened to get into a convo about the exigencies of how DC Comics got ahold of several Quality heroes. I said in part:

DOLL MAN ceased publication in 1953, three years before Quality Comics closed its doors. We know that DC made some sort of deal to purchase Quality properties, but fans can be only sure about three of them. DC continued publishing two Quality titles right away, BLACKHAWK and GI COMBAT. Almost ten years later a rival comics publisher attempted to use the name "Plastic Man" in his faux "CAPTAIN MARVEL" title, and the story goes that this galvanized DC Legal to check things and realize, Hey we own the rights to Plastic Man! 

To be sure, another company had tried publishing Plastic Man in 1963, and some sources say DC shut it down. But if they knew they owned PM back then, why were they in such a rush to exert their ownership in 1966? Why not back in 1963? So DC quickly worked Plas into a May 1966 issue of DIAL H FOR HERO-- dated a month after the publication of CAPTAIN MARVEL #1 by Myron Fass-- and then launched its own Plas series in late 1966.

After that, DC made no more attempts to do any new projects with Quality characters, but they begin reprinting a few strips of BLACKHAWK, THE RAY and DOLL MAN in their reprint books, which was  a tacit assertion of ownership. Finally they explicitly laid claim to six Quality characters by featuring them in a 1973 JLA story and then spinning them off into their own title, THE FREEDOM FIGHTERS. So from then on DC had maintained, when asked about the matter, that they own all Quality characters.

But do they? Naturally no one but DC Legal is privy to whatever deal the company made with Quality. They've revived a handful of other Quality characters for features, but not Doll Man. If the language of the 1956 contract doesn't explicitly say, "DC now owns Doll Man," would the company be able to sue the Full Moon moviemakers?

Of course, their claim may be fully veracious, and they've just never gone to war over the DOLLMAN property because they think it's small change-- which it kind of is.

Oh, and the Eisner estate never owned DOLL MAN at all, any more than other features he co-created for Quality's comics line. Aside from THE SPIRIT, Eisner apparently kept copyright on nothing but a couple of co-features in THE SPIRIT SECTION, like "Lady Luck" and "Mister Mystic," since a few of these saw reprint in a Will Eisner magazine in, I believe, the eighties.

And later:

Though I like the idea of DC just forgetting they owned Plastic Man, it's also possible that someone highly placed at DC discouraged any ideas of reviving Plas when they bought him in the fifties. The hero probably wasn't even selling all that well in his last years, and to enjoy good sales Plas required an art approach inimical to the sort of clean, simple representations DC preferred. Blackhawk was easier; DC just dumped all the political stuff and made the Hawks into guys who battled lots of aliens and costumed villains. By 1960, the year Elongated Man showed up, DC was probably more consumed with the potential of tapping the glories of their earlier years, rather than exploiting things another company originated. 

I can well believe that if anyone even remembered the Plastic Man purchase they didn't inform John Broome, but that was all to the good IMO. Plastic Man didn't belong in The Flash's straight-arrow world, for all that the original Cole adventures weren't just rollicking comedy all the time. I may be one of the few people who liked Arnold Drake's PLASTIC MAN, and I kind of regret not mentioning that opinion to Drake when I talked to him a little at a Comicon in the early 2000s.

And so all that made me a little more interested in what exactly Arnold Drake did in the Silver Age PLASTIC MAN, for which purpose I revived the title of a 2010 essay, RAPT IN PLASTIC, because it was too good a title not to use again.

Part 3 to follow.