Say hello to new things such as the smokeless Popeye and other around the world innovations!
Monday, 8 February 2021
Bicho Do Mato: Characters
Thursday, 4 February 2021
Jungle Dramas with wild men and women
Tuesday, 2 February 2021
The Yoichiro Minami Catalogue: Books
Friday, 29 January 2021
The Yoichiro Minami Baruuba Books
Saturday, 23 January 2021
The case against extensions of both Copyrights and Trademarks
As always the case, a majority of both entertainment corporations and middlemen abuse an idea and its extensions, to the point of their subsequent works becoming outright train wrecks. Another scenario is that both profit from an idea for a short while and sit on it very abusively for a long time, even hundreds of years after an actual live creator creates it for both, or has sold it to both and passes later on.
Then, there is the fairly agitating problem with visibly orphaned and abandoned works. Not only are such orphaned and abandoned works not in the public domain, they don’t have any of the original human owners left remaining. Fortunately, some of these works are already in the public domain for most nations, regardless of how recent their public domain status is, while various others have become what I can call ‘adopted works’.
A surprisingly good (though rarely reported) example of a franchise being adopted by a huge fan of pulp fiction is the Kaspa series, much of which has only recently been released in an online paywall by its current owner, the Cajun editor Camille Cazedessus, aka Caz, while only the first two were being released within the original author’s lifetime. However, I am not allowed to scan the books as they are on the paywall much of the time, and I also only own the first Kaspa sequel instead of the original. Not helping is that the first two published Kaspa stories aren’t becoming public domain until 2036 in much of the world. That, and the franchise’s titular character being both registered and trademarked by said current owner, so nah.
Another awesome example is Isamu Of The Wilderness, which originated as a prototypical graphic novel series distributed by Shueisha in the early 1950s. Unfortunately, such a graphic novel series consists of only three bland volumes, mostly due to Souji Yamakawa being a considerable perfectionist who begrudged a lot about the (somewhat wrong) executive meddling. Only in 1971 did a much more popular (and technically superior on all levels to the original) manga version appear in Weekly Shōnen Jump to last for three years. It was Souji who was gradually softening his still demeaning stance on manga, just by the time that Noboru Kawasaki met his own idol and thereafter drew the manga version, while Souji himself wrote it all along the way of the Rio Grande River. The manga itself spawned a considerably much lighter and softer, denser and wackier anime version made by the esteemed anime studio TMS entertainment, a few decades before it got acquired by video game giant Sega. By the time Souji Yamakawa died a week before Christmas Day 1992, Noboru Kawasaki technically owns his own studio, while Shueisha still owns and distributes the rest of it.
Thursday, 21 January 2021
Meet Zenith!
From the JJ Nevins site.
Zenith the Albino, in case you don't know, is one of many enemies of Sexton Blake. This site aims to provide some information about him. (The images above and below, by the way, are taken from Savoy Books' site on Zenith, and are copyrighted by them.)
Zenith, as I said, is an enemy of Sexton Blake. If you aren't familiar with Blake, you should really go my page on him (the link is given right above) to familiarize yourself with Blake and provide the context for the following. If you are familiar with Blake, well, go to the page anyhow, you might learn something.This coincidence made an impression upon my mind, and when I needed a central figure not quite so banal as Blake for the Union Jack series, I re-created this albino fellow 'moulded nearer to the heart's desire.'
From this encounter came the immortal Zenith. Jack Adrian, in the Sexton Blake Wins anthology, describes Zenith nicely: snow-white hair, leprous skin, pink-irised eyes; his opium-soaked cigarettes, ivory-headed swordstick, melancholy disposition (in this, not unlike his creator), and the bizarre habit (considering he was an eternal fugitive from the police) of wearing, even in broad daylight, immaculate evening dress.
'Zenith's crimson-irised eyes were reflective. He stood there long of leg and broad of shoulder, immaculately dressed, groomed to perfection, cold as an icicle; and dangerous; transcendently dangerous.'
Monsieur Zenith is an albino. Craving excitement because it brings forgetfulness; thrust into crime by his abnormality, by his illimitable egotism, by the caprice of his recalcitrant nature, he finds himself involved in the quest for a mysterious something on the finding of which life--and more than life--depends.
Indifferent to gratitude or reward, asserting--and, perhaps, believing--that he seeks only the final diversion of the damned, to dice with death; threatened on the one hand by the police, and, on the other, by political chicanery, this strange creature crashes through.
Monsieur Zenith is the strangest, most bizarre, character ever devised in thriller fiction.