Hey everyone. It’s your Friendly Neighbourhood Previously Editor here with an update on all the news in the comics and entertainment world from the last two weeks.
Starting with a fair amount of sad news, unfortunately.
Buichi Terasawa, creator of the manga series Space Adventure Cobra has died, reports the Anime News Network. He was 68 years old.
Joe Matt, cartoonist and Peepshow creator, died suddenly at the age of 60. The news was announced by Matt’s friend and collaborator, Matt Wagner on Twitter.
Hey gang…it's with a heavy heart that I have some extremely sad news to share. My longtime pal, occasional collaborator and fellow pop-culture junkie…Joe Matt has suddenly and unexpectedly passed away. As many of you know, Joe and I first met when we were both students at pic.twitter.com/WMOY8566rN
— Matt Wagner (@MattWagnerComic) September 19, 2023
To commemorate Matt’s career, The Comics Journal published an interview with him from the 90s. You can read it on their website.
We send our deepest condolences to Terasawa and Matt’s family and friends.
The comic book world was thrown into a bit of a frenzy when Bill Willingham announced that his catalogue of Fables comics, published by DC-Vertigo, was going to be available in the public domain. Willingham stated that it was because DC had violated contracts and that Fables had fallen into “bad hands” at DC. Additionally, he wrote about wanting to reform copyright law.
DC didn’t take long to issue a statement of its own, noting that the Fables series is owned by DC under US copyright laws. DC also hinted at a possible lawsuit against Willingham.
This entire situation is interesting, to say the least. While it’s good to see a creator stick it to the corporates, there are other questions that arise. What happens to the artists who worked on Fables? If the series is in the public domain, they don’t get royalties. That hardly seems fair (unless they’re already being stiffed because of DC contracts). Popverse has a good breakdown of the Fables copyright issues.
And lest we forget, Fables itself is based largely on stories and characters in the public domain, so what is Willingham trying to say with this move? We also can’t ignore that Willingham has had a less than stellar past—he’s been deeply unpleasant to women in comics multiple times.
For now, we watch as the situation unfolds.
I’ve had a tough couple of weeks, and I’ve been reminded repeatedly to be kind to myself. I’m going to give the same advice to you, wonderful readers. You really never know when the most unexpected things will happen (sometimes good, but so often bad). Give yourself a break, be kind to yourself, and reaffirm your positivity (I know it’s hard). We’ll get through this, somehow.
