Looking for old Star Trek Parody Manga / comics from 1992

[David cgc]

First of all, stipulating that you're continuing a conversation from 12 years ago and opinions may have changed in the meantime...

What kind of fanzines do you mean? If they're fictional, nonparodical works based on licensed properties, how can they be copyrighted?

Intrinsically, the same as anything else gets copyrighted under U.S. law (I know some jurisdictions require registration). It's why writers are so uptight about having story ideas sent to them, including the house-rules of this very forum. If, to pick a real-world example, I tell the creator of Babylon 5, unprompted, my story-pitch for how to pay off the bluff about G'Kar having an implanted transmitter from the end of the pilot episode, then I could (theoretically) sue him for infringement if that ever happened in an episode. He and Warner Brothers could also easily sue me for infringement if I published that story myself, but I don't have as much money.

(To be clear, I am not actually the person who did that, but wouldn't it make the story so much better if I was?)

And in the case of zines, it's even more clear-cut; CBS (it's still CBS, right?) has no claim on things like essays or episode reviews about Star Trek that don't purport to be Star Trek.

The copyright stand-off between transformative works and their parent properties is fascinating to me (mostly because people like me get frequently boned; while the authors here are typically scrupulous about not using fan-stories floating around the internet, CG artists haven't always gotten the same courtesy. I can name four cases off the top of my head where Star Wars products took models or images off of the internet and used them*, and I'm pretty sure the "funny things in the comics" thread includes some of the cases where Trek comic artists traced fan art of ships, or even original fan designs.

Still, I'm sympathetic to your larger point, I feel very strongly about archiving, and all things being equal, I think if something is unavailable commercially after previously having been for sale or otherwise trivially acquirable by the masses, it's an abdication of copyright. It's hard to be sympathetic to someone complaining about lost sales from a book that's been out-of-print for 50 years. On the other hand, there are also cases where I do think the moral right of the author takes precedence. Just recently I reached out to someone who put something on-line a long time ago (let's call it a partial novelization of an unfilmed episode, as official as a story could get without actually existing) asking if they'd be willing to quietly repost it somewhere safer for posterity, like AO3. They appreciated their efforts to share something with that specific fan community being remembered, but felt it was better to leave the past in the past and nixed the idea. Not the answer I was hoping for, but I asked and I feel bound by their wishes.

I suppose my answer in cases like this would be to, generally, operate from a perspective of asking for forgiveness rather than permission, and to just be willing to remove anything that the creator asks not to be archived.

*Ansel "FractalSponge" Hsiao is a triple-winner, with his Star Destroyer used in the a trailer for the video game "The Force Unleashed," and several of his renders of his models being used in as "illustrations" in a book, where the credited artist clearly downloaded them and used an edge-detect filter to turn them into line art, and his Super Star Destroyer was used in the Family Guy "Empire Strikes Back" parody. One of those happened after he himself had been commissioned to provide art for a Star Wars book. Eric Henry's sequel-era B-Wing design (from before there was a canon one) was used in one of the Star Wars: Visions anime shorts.

 

[Therin of Andor]

Unauthorized parodies are legal under American law, so assuming this publication met the legal criteria for parody protection, this was a criminal act by Paramount.

Paramount had no problem with the Japanese-language fanzines of “Star Trekker”.

But the handsomely-bound commercialized English translations in trade paperback (and Volume 2 announced), with the words “Star Trek”-Ker in large letters, looking like the same format as licensed trade reprints from DC, Marvel and Wildstorm, would be seen as a threat to official licencees, parody/humour content or not. (In fact, the humour was similar to what we now know as “Lower Decks”.)

What kind of fanzines do you mean? If they're fictional, nonparodical works based on licensed properties, how can they be copyrighted?

Copyright was not my initial concern re archiving to digital by a third party. I have been in contact with some of my contributors of stories and artwork they did for my zines to enquire about uploading things to my own website. Several have moved on in their lives and no longer wish their names to be connected to such material. Would-be artists and writers, now made good, don’t always want their old stuff coming back to haunt them. One said, “Okay, but take my name off it.” At least one other contributor told me that his new employer would not approve of his old fannish pursuits. So an emphatic NO.

Without largescale fanzine archival efforts—which cannot track down every author of every work going back decades (many of whom are unreachable, unknown, or dead)—a large amount of fan culture would fade away and eventually be permanently lost and forgotten. I thought you of all people would understand and appreciate this!

And sometimes we need to be satisfied that only a representative portion of anything gets preserved.

I sent copies of all of my zines to the my State Library as each one was published. This is part of publishing law in Australia.

A few years ago, I noticed that not everything ended up being catalogued. A representative sample?

I have also put up selections on “Fanlore”, a web-based archive. Again, they also attempt to do representative samples, not whole-of-content. Sometimes they will quote the zine title and date of a fan’s vintage review quote — but not the original reviewer’s name — for privacy reasons.

 

[publiusr]

Well updates I do have all 3 in paper form and the GN and Issue 1 in digital form i sent a copy of Issue 2 to be digitized but the person never got back to me

You have the Cetus from Cygnus X-1 I take it?

 

[Kaiser]

You have the Cetus from Cygnus X-1 I take it?

I have everything from that Downloaded But no i dont have that book in paper form