PUBLIC DOMAIN SUPER HEROES IS LIVE!

A WHOLE NEW WAY TO LOOK AT CLASSIC SUPER HEROES

September 29, 2025

Welcome to the new home of classic and forgotten heroes! We’re live today with a promise: you’ll find something new here on a regular basis. Expect monthly novellas paired with free companion stories, so there’s always something fresh to read.

We’ll be rolling out regular updates to our comics and YouTube pages to feed your appetite for timeless heroes and their adventures. And don’t miss the merchandise pages—show your Spy Smasher pride, sip from a Captain Midnight mug, or mark the year with our PUBLIC DOMAIN SUPER HEROES 2026 Calendar. Every dime goes toward our mission: bringing you high-quality, original content starring heroes and villains reclaimed from the public domain.

Check back often. We guarantee you’ll be thrilled—and surprised—by what we have in store.

FROM THE MORGUE:

FILE UNDER 'S' FOR "STUFF I DIDN'T KNOW...

...or "Super Hero".

I was only made aware that Marvel and DC Comics both held a joint Trademark on the term "Super Hero" or "Super Heroes" very, very recently when I read about an effort (apparently not the first) to get the Patent and Trademark people to rescind the trademark as too generic a term. A company wanted to market "Superbabies" (I have NO idea and nor do I care) as a "team of superheroes" and ran into the trademark issue.

Well, now you no longer have to worry about it. They won. We here at Public Domain Super Heroes are grateful!

Apparently the Marvel and DC people failed to respond to the petition and the Trademark has been revoked.

I'm usually on board with most things that comic book companies want to do to protect their interests, but this one seemed pretty low class to me. It's a very generic term, thrown around for all kinds of reasons by all kinds of people. Marketing a character or characters as "super hero" in NO way could ever diminish Marvel and DC's brand. Perhaps they finally saw just how crappy it was to hold onto it and simply decided to do the right thing. We'll likely never know.

If the legalese interests you, there's an article for you here.

FROM THE MORGUE:

DO YOU KNOW THE KING?.

No, not the new guy across the pond.  Not the rock and roll guy either.  I'm talking the King.

Jack "The King" Kirby.  Co-creator of many of the characters that make up the Marvel Cinematic Universe juggernaut that has turned comic books from a hobby I used to get mocked for indulging in to a multi-billion dollar empire that has altered the movie going landscape.  He's at least partly responsible for characters like Captain America, Black Panther, Iron Man, Hulk, Ant-Man and the Fantastic Four and more.

In an article over at CNN.com, I learned that Kirby actually had a similar experience to mine in his youth as a fan of fantasy fiction, hiding his love of the genre from his peers to avoid being bullied over it.  It's nice to know I'm in good company and I'm sure Kirby would be proud to know that his work has since gone so mainstream that it's now cool to be a comic book geek.

 

Here's a link to the article.  It's about a five minute read and while it only skims the surface of Kirby's life and career, it is still a fascinating snapshot of the life of a man that is only well known to hardcore comic book fans and little known by the millions of people who flock to movies based on his creative genius.

So take a few minutes to get to know the King.  The next Marvel movie you take in will have a little more meaning for you if you do.

FROM THE MORGUE:

THE PHANTOM - A PUZZLINGLY UNSUCCESSFUL SUCCESS.

The Phantom.  The Ghost Who Walks.  The Long Lived Character With No Hits.

For the life of me, I cannot wrap my head around "The Phantom".  He's a stupendous concept, been around longer than Superman, is still published in comic books today and yet on film and television he's almost a non-entity.  The character has never gone away but somehow never reached his true potential.

Oh and he's fond of purple, so I'm on board with the costume.  Even the trunks.


He started in comic strips, created by Lee Falk in 1936.  He showed up on film in a 1943 serial and then pretty much disappeared back into the relative obscurity of comic strip print.  In the 80's he showed up as part of "The Defenders of the Earth" along with Mandrake the Magician, Flash Gordon and Lothar and their respective offspring.  For the time it was a decent cartoon but never made much of a splash.

In the 90s, first he appeared in "Phantom 2040" and then in a live action film with Billy Zane.  Both are competently done but neither gets a lot of love.

The Phantom 2040 animated series starred Scott Valentine as the Phantom (that's Mallory's rock-stupid boyfriend from Family Ties if you're wondering) with a supporting cast that included Margot Kidder as the heavy, Ron Pearlman as her flunky and Mark Hamill as the cyborg news guy.  It's two solidly done seasons that has about zero fans these days despite being a pretty solid show.  It gets a lot of love in Australia, where the popularity of The Phantom is still very strong but that's about it.  I had to buy my dvd of season 1 from Oz, in fact and season 2 has yet to be released.

Billy Zane really looked every bit the hero in the 1996 film and took his role so seriously that they shot his out of costume stuff first so he could SHAVE HIS HEAD to make the skull cap fit all the better when they shot the costume stuff.  That's a dedicated actor!

There was a SyFy miniseries attempt to update the character, but it was so poorly done that the series it was a pilot for never materialized.

So, why keep trying?

The Phantom is a unique creation that blends fantasy, superhero and sci-fi elements with a very cool backstory that allows the character to show up at virtually any point in history or even the future without causing a problem with character canon.  The original Phantom was the sole survivor of a pirate caused shipwreck off the African coast in the 1500s,  who vowed to devote his life and the lives of his sons to the elimination of piracy in all its forms in return for the gift of his survival.  The most well known incarnation of the Phantom bases out of Africa in the 20th Century but he can pretty much show up anywhere, anywhen and still be perfectly "in-canon" since the mantle is handed down from father to son in perpetuity.

The Phantom is unique as well in his longstanding commitment to the environment.  From the get go, The Phantom is as hard on those pillaging the natural world as he is on evil doers.  While that's pretty common in the superheroes of today, it was pretty revolutionary at the time the Phantom was created.

Oh and he wears a skull shaped ring, leaving skull shaped imprints in the villains he punches.  How awesome is that?

Add to all of that the real and ever present need of the current incarnation of The Phantom to marry and produce an heir to carry on the legacy, you have a character who just screams cinematic gold, particularly in the current comic book friendly Hollywood.  Great costume, cool gimmicks, animal friends like the dog Devil, romance, history and he's so environmentally friendly he even recycles his identity!  I could write a hit film with one hand.

The two big drawbacks of the character are easily addressed.  First he really falls smack into the "Great White Saviour of Africa" trope, in a lot of ways between Tarzan and "Great White Hunter" territory.  While that's a part of the character's DNA, it would be easy to rework the character to put that behind him.  Either use a modern day incarnation and simply place all that stuff squarely in a less than perfect past or do a period piece and have the character avoid the stereotype.  I could even see it as something that gets hung on a historic version of the character that he privately disavows. 

Second, the whole "father to son" thing is outdated.  In The Defenders of the Earth cartoon, The Phantom has a daughter, so there's already precedence to either cast a woman Phantom or a female heir to the throne (seriously, the Phantom uses a skull motif and has a Skull Throne in his lair) for a sequel down the road.

A great Phantom movie is due.  How we haven't already had one is a complete mystery.

In the meantime, The Phantom will become part of the Public Domain in 2031. He will become part of the Public Domain Super Heroes Universe that same year.

Promise!