: Re: Owning comic book characters I am currently writing an ongoing comic series, along with a co-author. Some of the characters in the book were created by me, some by the co-author, and some

@Cugini967

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Note that there are two cases ou have to distinguish:

characters that were made by some creator for you as part of a paid contract or hire.
characters that you were allowed to use by the original creator based on some contract.

Type 1 characters are Works Made for Hire and as you hired them, you hold the copyright. You can make whatever derivatives you want with your copyrights.

Type 2 characters are usually licensed characters and you will have to refer to your original license about their use. You might need to obtain additional licenses for reuse and derivates. As far as I know, such characters often just make a short cameo and then never appear back and also don't make it to the adaptions to other media: While the gang of The BigBang Theory does appear in Supergirl Volume 5 Issue 1, we will never see them in any adaptation, as the holders of the Supergirl IP don't hold the TBBT license for more than this cameo (which might only have been possible as a fair-use?).

The most common practice in the comics industry is - shocking - Work for Hire. Anything made for the company that holds the copyright is company property.

However, the "I make, you print" approach is the core of the indie. We find it in many indie titles... and if we look at one of the large Publishers, their imprints: Vertigo had once been used to publish the Comic-Code non-conform stuff, but nowadays, DC uses it mainly to publish stuff that is not owned by DC but rather licensed. They don't do merch outside of the contract, and once their contract is up, they don't reference it with other works. AFAIK, they pay the main author in bulk, who then might have to distribute the earnings to pay for his license fees.

Licensing fees from the publishers come in basically 3 shapes: Bulk license (Pay X, be allowed to do Y for time Z) and royalties (Pay X for each sold issue of Y), or both combined.

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