Why did DC change his name?

It's pretty solid and memorable name.

Because DC fucked over Fawcett and Marvel stole it.

My only question is what is the marvel family called now, both as a group and each as individuals

As of right now, yet to be determined. Johns has only just now returned to the book

All the "mans" and "captains" are boring. Shazam is a swell name.

DC took Marvel to court over it in 1973 when DC leased the old Fawcett Comics characters from Fawcett. Fawcett hadn't bothered to update their trademarks since DC (which was then known as National Comics) sued them over Fawcett's Captain Marvel's alleged similarities to National's Superman at which time Fawcett ceased publishing comics of any kind after settling with National and agreeing never to publish Captain Marvel again, so when DC sued they instantly found that they had no trademark to defend - Marvel had by that time had their own Captain Marvel for five years, Marvel had been called Marvel Comics for fifteen years, and Fawcett Comics had been out of print for twenty years.

Because DC had sued Marvel in 1973, they were forced to settle with Marvel quickly. As part of this - fairly magnanimously, given that the idiocy DC displayed at the time could easily have been used to bankrupt them - DC agreed to never use the name Captain Marvel for any marketing purposes. This meant that DC's planned Captain Marvel live-action tv series became known as Shazam! and all subsequent adaptations have used the Shazam name in the title.

It was the 40s. People did that. I don't even know why.

Fawcett. Charlton was where DC got the Watchmen characters from, then decided they were going to use them after all so the Watchmen are in fact expies of Charlton characters for the most part. Then DC didn't use the Charlton characters.

You're wrong about everything else too - Marvel's character was introduced in 1967/8, but DC didn't even try to license the original from Fawcett until 1973. The trademark on the name (not copyright, that's something else) probably expired in 1963 at the latest.

The British version was named Marvelman because at that time the original's name was still trademarked in the UK, so L Miller & Sons (the publishers) needed a new name for their obvious ripoff character. They got ten years out of it before sales dropped and they stopped publishing the character. At that time, the rights in Marvelman reverted to the creator - Mick Anglo - but he didn't know this, so they were eventually sold on to various others. Moore didn't work on the character until about 20 years later, for Dez Skinn on Warrior, who also didn't hold the trademark (because L Miller & Sons had gone out of business 20 years before, it was a similar situation to Fawcett's loss of the Captain Marvel trademark but retention of other rights).

Skinn refused to pay Moore and Warrior went bust. Skinn sold the Marvelman/Miracleman rights (which he didn't own) to Pacific Comics (who went bust) then to Eclipse Comics.

Eclipse actually paid Moore and made the decision to change the name to Miracleman to avoid litigation (they were primarily a US publisher and this was a very real concern - it's not a big deal or wrong of Marvel to defend what was by then their 25-year trademark). Eventually Neil Gaiman took over the series, but then Eclipse also went bust and Todd MacFarlane (personally) "bought" the Miracleman/Marvelman rights from Eclipse.

MacFarlane, a champion of creator rights, tried to argue that work Gaiman had done for his Spawn series was work-for-hire and he (MacFarlane) therefore owned all rights in it. Gaiman disagreed. In the course of researching his own case, Gaiman discovered that the rights to Marvelman (and thus all derivatives created under the impression that they were legitimate) reverted to Mick Anglo in 1963. He then enlisted Marvel Comics as a potential publisher of Miracleman and personally arranged all the necessary rights transfers (even Alan Moore) to Marvel Comics. This ensured that Mick Anglo (and his wife, who outlived him by several years) got some money from the character probably for the first time in 50 years. Everybody came together to help out an old couple.

When Marvel started using the name they'd been Marvel Comics for ten years without anybody objecting, and Captain Marvel had been out of print for fifteen years, with no suggestion that he would ever be used again by anybody - so far as anyone knew, nobody could use him again because of National/DC's settlement terms with Fawcett.

The trademark wasn't worth keeping, so it was lost to Fawcett. I imagine they thought that was hilarious when DC approached them about licensing the character.

The Shazamily.

Or to put all this another way: if you're so upset about the name being held by Marvel because they had continuity trademarks from 1968, lawfully obtained, why aren't you also upset that the estate of George Bernard Shaw isn't getting mad cash from DC and the Siegel/Shuster heirs for their obvious pre-ownership of the term Superman - which Shaw coined (or at least trademarked) in 1908, some thirty years before Action Comics #1 was printed?

You know why

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Because DC are a bunch of cowards.

>why aren't you also upset that the estate of George Bernard Shaw isn't getting mad cash from DC and the Siegel/Shuster heirs for their obvious pre-ownership of the term Superman

Because is a term that Friedrich Nietzsche created and made popular decades before Bernard and who Bernard was clearly referening Nie term yet the faggot dared to copyright the term because he made a little fanfiction about Nietzsche works.

So why aren't you mad that the estate of Neitzsche isn't getting money from DC? They're ripping him off!

Probably, I would guess, because you hurriedly ran to Wikipedia to find some way of proving me wrong by calling on another authority than your own reasoning skills.

Which is why you're wrong anyway: Nietzsche wrote the term "Übermensch", which has a literal translation of "beyond-man" or "over-man"; it wasn't until a 1909 translation drew on Shaw's coining of the term "Superman" (sometimes rendered "Super-Man") that the English equivalent to Übermensch became "Superman", and in fact it was never popular as part of the English-language translations of Nietzsche, which prefer to simply bring Übermensch in as a loanword.

Congrats on being a huge faggot.

Because we are talking about Marvel not DC, you can be upset about both.

Because shaq took Kazaam already

>Congrats on being a huge faggot.

Said the faggot trying to push a Tu quoque, Superman copyright name is irrelevant to this discussion, we can point to Marvel and DC doing different shaddy things all day or you can make a thread about Superman name instead of being a complete autist that you are.

You've mistaken tu quoque for being asked why two things which are exactly equivalent aren't given the same priority. You know the answer is that, as makes implicit, this is a company wars thread started by an absolute faggot, in which everybody else got their facts wrong because it was the only way to hate on Marvel - the company who actually helped out the Marvelman creator by ensuring he finally got paid some of the money he'd been owed down the years.

This is a thread in which you idiots couldn't even get the name of the publisher of the original Captain Marvel right and had to be corrected. This is a thread in which you couldn't work out for yourselves that Alan Moore - who hates Marvel - signed over his Miracleman rights to them so that Mick Anglo could get paid money that neither creator-rights champion and Image Comics founder Todd MacFarlane nor any of the three prior publishers of Marvelman/Miracleman after L Miller went bust in 1963 ever even tried to pay to Anglo.

And you're sitting here arguing copyright for some reason, apparently not having understood despite there being several reminders in this same thread that copyright and trademark are not the same thing, you fucking moron.

I think we all know that Charlton were the only comics company that deserved to survive. But socialists and corporate magnates couldn't allow it, and so the Fountainhead was broken while Atlas shrugged in dismay.

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How the fuck Marvel owns the name Captain Marvel if the characters and some of his comics are public domain?
Even the comic called "Captain Marvel Adventures" is publiic domain. Neither Marvel nor DC can't stop you from putting the name on the cover or using the character.

Names are extremely tricky to copyright. Now TRADEMARK, on the other hand. Trademarks are a different bag as they don't expire and transcend public domain, however just ask Hasbro how tricky they can be. Unlike Copyrights, which last a limited time (though thanks to Disney among others it's well past normal human lifespan) if you don't defend them you can lose them. They can also be invalidated a number of different ways.

How can you trademark something that's public domain? Can I trademark the Odyssey Homer?

Marvel didn't steal anything. There's a million reasons to hate Marvel but the Shazam thing is squarely on DC.

>There's a million reasons to hate Marvel
such as?

It wasn't because of Carol that's for sure.

So is the wizard that gave him his powers still names Shazam too, or did his name change so there wouldn't be two characters with the same name at the same time? Or did his origin change at some point and his powers don't come from a wizard anymore?
Because I know originally he said "SHAZAM!" because a wizard named Shazam gave him powers, and he essentially transforms by yelling at the wizard, which is why Captain Marvel Jr. transformed by saying "Captain Marvel" since he got his powers from Captain Marvel instead of the wizard.

You can trademark anything. Whether it will hold up in court depends. It'd be better than copyright, though. You can't copyright names, titles, slogans, shit like that. You could write a novel today called Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and it would be legal under copyright law as long as the plot and characters are unique, however Rowling has trademarked her character so the brand confusion elements would probably stop you from publishing your book. Same reason why Apple Computers and the Beatles' Apple Corps went to war and Apple Computers agreed to stay away from the music biz. This caused a new phase of trouble when they started their iTunes music store.

>which is why Alan Moore doesn't work for them
No, it isn't. Back in the 80s, Moore didn't work for Marvel US because he felt he owed some loyalty to DC Comics. When he felt screwed over by DC, he simply didn't work for any of the big two again (at least willingly, he ended up doing some stuff for DC again after Jim Lee sold Wildstorm). The issues with the Miracleman rights had nothing to do with it.

Not really.
>Moore had been in dispute with Marvel Comics in the 1980s after they had reprinted some of his Marvel UK work without his permission. Since then, he had blocked any further reprints. This led to a falling out with his collaborator on Captain Britain, artist Alan Davis, as he was denied reprint fees and exposure for his work. In 2002, Marvel Comics’ editor-in-chief, Joe Quesada, attempted to persuade Moore to contribute new work (Moore had already contributed to Marvel’s 9/11 tribute comic, Heroes), and convinced him the company had changed. Moore agreed to the publication of a reprint collection of his Captain Britain stories, on the understanding that he would receive full credit for his characters. Unfortunately, Moore’s credit was omitted due to a printing error, and despite Quesada’s apologies and the error being corrected in subsequent printings, Moore declared he would no longer consider working for Marvel.
statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Alan-Moore

>Moore’s credit was omitted due to a printing error
lol, right.

Yeah he didn't believed it as well.

I like the name Shazam a lot, it's fairly unique and alludes to wizard powers.

For Golden Age Cap it actually works since he's got a military bib and fancy cape. It does better at evoking the "Captain" name than any other Captain.