The Fred Hembeck Files!Proud Robot ProductionsProud Robot Productions

Elongated Man and Plastic Man
The Strips

Martian Manhunter & J. Hex New!

Superman and The Flash New!

Justice League of America

Jonah Hex

Green Lantern

Batman

Green Arrow and The Flash

Hawkman

The Flash

Shazam!

Gotham City Police Dept.

Johnny Thunder and Shazam!

Batman, Green Lantern,
and The Flash

Man-Bat

Metal Men

Pete Ross and Lana Lang

Superman & J'onn J'onzz

Charles M. Jones

Batman and Robin

The Flash and Zatanna

Jor-El and Lara

DC Prez Jenette Kahn

Deadman

Clark Kent and Lois Lane

The Haunted Tank

Superman and Lois Lane

The Unknown Soldier

The Vigilante

The Private Life of Clark Kent

Green Arrow and Black Canary

Sgt. Rock and Easy Company

Witching Hour

Green Arrow, The Human Target,
and Superman

Super Friends

Lois & Clark

Green Arrow & Black Canary

Superman & Jimmy Olsen

Gravedigger

Batman & Shazam!

Justice Society of America

Phantom Stranger and
Phantom Girl

Batman and Robin

Black Lightning

Private Life of Clark Kent

Green Arrow and The Warlord

Eclipso / Mr. Mxyzptlk

The Flash & Adam Strange

Aquaman

Lightning Lad & Chameleon Boy

Justice League of America

Wonder Woman

Zatanna and Professor Zoom

Firestorm, the Nuclear Man

Swamp Thing

Gotham City Police Dept.

Bizarro World

The Atom

The Flash and The Mirror Master

Two-Face

The Batman and the Joker

Lex Luthor and Brainiac

The Flash

Enemy Ace

Green Arrow & Black Canary

Hawkman & the Flash

The Phantom Stranger

Legion of Super-Heroes

Green Lantern

Hawkman

Batman and Red Tornado

Green Lantern and the Flash

The Creeper

Robin, the Boy Wonder

Justice League of America

Legion of Super-Heroes

Elongated Man and Plastic Man

Superman Family

The Flash and the Spectre

Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen

Deadman

Hawkman & Hawkgirl

Starman

Wildcat & Dr. Fate

Batman & Robin

Mon-El

Plastic Man

Bob 'Answer Man' Rozakis

Batman & the Flash

Green Arrow & Green Lantern

The Atom

Batman & Robin

Coming soon

Jimmy Olsen & Lois Lane

Steve Trevor

Superman

Steve Savage

The Flash

Johnny Thunder

Sgt. Rock & Easy Company

Scalphunter

Johnny Cloud

Green Lantern

Lois, Clark & Jimmy

Plastic Man

Perry White & Jimmy Olsen

Martian Manhunter

Madame Xanadu

Bruce Wayne

Krypto

Swamp Thing

Fred Hembeck


Elongated Man and Plastic Man
Uploaded March 21, 1999

Comic books have a long and rich history of characters featuring similar powers and abilities, as this strip suggests. This can be particularly common between different publishing companies, where there can be a substantial economic incentive. Money! That's what I want...

Let's start with the pantheon of pliable people. These are the guys who can stretch their body parts (yes, all of them) into all kinds of shapes and contortions. The nominees are (drumroll, please):

  • Plastic Man (created by Jack Cole in 1941, for Quality Comics)
  • Mr. Fantastic (created by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby in 1961, for Marvel Comics)
  • Elongated Man (created as a comrade-in-crimefighting for DC's 'The Flash')
  • Elastic Lad (created as one of many Jimmy Olsen gimmicks, again for DC)

How can the companies get away with something like this? Well, it's like this - each of them has a different origin story and source of powers (except for Elastic Lad and Elongated Man, but thats OK because they both belong to DC). Plastic Man had been a petty crook, shot by his partners and dunked in some weird kind of industrial waste. The gunk got into his wound, and gave him his powers. In the process of nailing his ex-partners, he discovered he enjoyed playing on the other side of the cops & robbers game.

Mr. Fantastic and three partners catapulted themselves into orbit in an effort to beat the commies to outer space. You think I'm joking, right? Wrong. Check out this crazy dialogue, man, from Fantastic Four #1:

BEN GRIMM (to Reed Richards)

You know we haven't done enough research into the effect of cosmic rays! They might kill us all out in space!

SUE STORM

Ben, we've got to take that chance...unless we want the commies to beat us to it!

Anyways, cosmic radiation gave the foursome their funky powers. Makes you wonder about all those Apollo missions now, doesn't it?

Elongated Man got his powers by nagging an assortment of Indian swamis and carnival acts into revealing the source of their contortion abilities. If I remember this correctly, they directed him to the sap of the 'gingold' tree, from which he distilled a concentrated extract. Hey, DC! Here's a plotline for you - the Elongated Man gets shut down by the FDA!

Elastic Lad, one of Jimmy Olsen's alter egos, got his powers by drinking a synthetic laboratory version of Elongated Man's gingold extract. This sort of reminds me of the kid in kindergarten who used to eat paste. Remember him? There was one like that in every school.

DC neatly ducked the rights infringement issue posed by Elongated Man and Elastic Lad by buying up the Quality Comics stable of characters, including Plastic Man.

Occasionally - and here's where I give full faith and credit - people at different companies will have the same idea, more-or-less simultaneously. From all accounts, DC's Swamp Thing and Marvel's Man-Thing are examples of this phenomenon, with both hitting the stands in 1971. Len Wein and Berni Wrightson created Swamp Thing as a murdered biochemist being resurrected by the swamp in which his body was thrown. Marvel's Man-Thing was...ok, I'm not entirely sure, but I think he used to be a scientist, too, and then he become this big swamp monster. The Swamp Thing was hugely successful; the Man-Thing wasn't. This just goes to show that it's not merely the idea which becomes successful, but rather the implementation. More than anything else, this probably accounts for why there have been so few copyright suits filed in the comic book industry over the years.

On a related tangent, Marvel Comics Editor-in-Chief Bob Harras posed an interesting challenge a while back in one of those in-house propaganda pages. Responding to someone's suggestion that a different company had lifted ideas from a Marvel book, Bob invited readers to nominate other similar infringements. Ok, here's a couple you might want to consult the lawyers about, Bob:

  • DC's Legion of Super-Heroes is clearly a rip-off of Marvel's Imperial Guard

  • Gardner Fox must have based his so-called Justice League on Marvel's Squadron Supreme

I'm not even going to get into how Dave Sim obviously had the Marvel character S'ym in mind when he created Cerebus the Aardvark.

One final note: I raised a point in the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.comics.misc a while back in a discussion about Miracleman, and the ownership confusion that surrounds the property. Way back when, DC Comics sued Fawcett Comics out of buiness over Captain Marvel being a carbon copy of Superman. Since Miracleman was created as a brazen copy of Captain Marvel, does this mean that DC could lay a claim against the former? Food for thought.

- NP


The copyrights, trademarks and publication rights to Fred's cartoons belong to DC Comics, Marvel Comics, and Fred Hembeck where appropriate. Proud Robot Productions graphics, site design, cartoon re-coloring and commentary copyrights belong to Neil Polowin and Proud Robot Productions.

Proud Robot Productions