But what about all the other dozen of examples? Darkseid and Thanos. Atom and Ant-Man. Green Arrow/Black Canary and Hawkeye/Mockingbird. And the many more from the two above lists. Are we to believe that they are all crazy coincidences?
Don't bring straw men into this. Of course I never said any of this was a coincidence; I acknowledged that it was overt imitation, but in the form of homage and pastiche rather than plagiarism.
And no, none of the examples you cite constitute legally actionable infringement, because they're just
similar, and similarity is not a crime. As I already explained to you, pastiche is not theft. If a creator comes up with a character that's an homage to another well-known character, obviously that creator is not trying to steal credit for someone else's creation, because that other creation is already well-known and nobody could possibly make that mistake. These characters are tributes. These creators are fans of each others' work, and they express that fandom by creating homages.
In the case of Thanos, yes, he was created as a deliberate Kirby homage, but then, so is half the stuff in modern comics. (And Jim Starlin was originally going to base him more on Metron, but Roy Thomas told him to bulk up the character and make him more like Darkseid, since if he was going to copy the New Gods, he might as well imitate "the really good one.") As for Hawkeye and Mockingbird, the decision to put them in a relationship was an homage to Green Arrow and Black Canary, but Mockingbird wasn't created to be Hawkeye's love interest; Bobbi Morse actually debuted in
Ka-Zar as a psychic, continued as a supporting character for a while, then only gradually evolved into the Mockingbird character, at which point someone decided it would be fun to pair her romantically with Hawkeye as an Arrow/Canary pastiche.
And as for the Atom and Ant-Man, they're very far from being the first or only shrinking characters in comics or literature, so that's a pretty silly example.
I'm sorry but I don't see or don't understand your reply on that one. That also looks "negative and accusatory" to me.
Only because that's the paradigm through which you've chosen to perceive this topic -- as proven by the fact that you fixated on that word and ignored my subsequent sentence about "mutual cross-pollination," which should've made it clear that I wasn't perceiving it as an adversarial matter. I just picked that word because I thought it sounded more interesting than "hiring." Maybe it was a little harsher than I intended, but not as much as you seem to be assuming. In business, "poaching" refers to the practice of hiring away competitors' employees. It happens all the time, and it's hardly a crime; at worst, it's considered an ethical gray area, depending on how aggressively it's done. After all, employees aren't slaves. They have every right to move to another company if that company makes them a better offer.
But I didn't know "poaching" is a term used in the publishing business. Is there a similar publishing term for what Marvel has been doing with it's homages and imitations over the years?
