Disco, stop insulting ManoftheAtom. Its rude. He is not being insulting back to you.

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Originally posted by ManofTheAtom:
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Originally posted by Pig Iron:
If I'm not mistaken the only reason Fawcett lost was because they were in financial trouble and couldn't afford the lawyer fees...
And did that case actually make it all the way through trial, I wasn't sure it did. I thought Fawcett just ceased publication...???
I think you're right, but my overall point is that DC sued under the simply basis that Captain Marvel's chin looked like Superman's and that both had black hair.
Actually, DC's case was pretty much without merit - they just wanted to shut down their most successful competitor.

This is my view on it. A parody is a perfectly legitimate form of artistic expression. here is the Wikipedia definition:

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Parody is a form of satire that imitates another work of art in order to ridicule it. Parodies exists in all art media, including literature, music and cinema.

Some genre film theorists see parody as a natural development in the life cycle of any genre, especially in film. Westerns, for example, after the classic stage defined the conventions of the genre, underwent a parody stage, in which those same conventions were lampooned. Because audiences had seen these classic Westerns, they had expectations for any new Westerns, and when these expectations were inverted, the audience laughed.

Sometimes the reputation of a parody outlasts the reputation of what is being parodied. A notable case is the novel Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding (1742), which was a parody of the gloomy epistolary novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740) by Samuel Richardson. Many of Lewis Carroll's parodies, such as "You Are Old, Father William", are much better known than the originals.

Although a parody can be considered a derivative work under United States Copyright Law it is has been protected under the fair use of 17 USC ยง 107. In 2001, the federal Court of Appeals, 11th District in Suntrust v. Houghton Mifflin upheld the right of Alice Randall to publish a parody of Gone With the Wind called The Wind Done Gone, which told the same story from the point of view of Scarlett O'Hara's slaves, who were glad to be rid of her. See also the Supreme Court of the United States case Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music regarding the song Pretty Woman.

See literary technique.


Examples

MAD Magazine - parody of all things in American popular culture
The Rutles - parody of The Beatles
The Onion - parody of newspaper and magazine journalism
Chris Morris's The Day Today and Brass Eye - parodies of TV news programmes
Mozart's Musical Joke K.522 (1787) - parody of Joseph Haydn
Blazing Saddles movie by Mel Brooks - parody of American westerns
The Three Amigos movie with Steve Martin - another parody of American westerns
Bored of the Rings a parody of Lord of the Rings
Weird Al Yankovic innumerable song parodies
Parodies of several major hit films in the French & Saunders comedy series (including Titanic, Misery, Braveheart, Thelma and Louise, Lord of the Rings)
It sounds to me as if Supreme has a certain element of parody. The Blaxploitation Supreme, the Kong Kong Supreme, Transformer Surpreme, and the others suggest that Moore is having a little fun at the idea of parallel universes. moore is also specifically having a parodic shot at comics in the 90s when he has a Supreme say (paraphrased), "Oh you 90s heroes are so angst-ridden."

Having Supreme affected by something so silly as "Supremium" is also a parody.

Having said that, parody by its nature is not particulary original, except to the extent that it does lampoon.

I empathise with ManoftheAtom's complaint to a degree: comic books generally are sadly lacking in originality. They dance around the edges of copyright infringement (Liefeld barely - just barely, in my opinion, gets away with it in creating Supreme). The Silver Age re-hashing of Green Lantern, the Flash, the Atom, Hawkman etc. might have been novel for its day, perhaps, but it was not terribly original.

Worst of all, in my opinion, is Astro City. This is totally lacking in originality. Its a vehicle for Busiek to tell the sotries he wants without editorial restraint. The characters are almost devoid of originality. Calling the imprint "Homage Comics" is almost a white flag to criticism.

I can't help but think a lot of the problem is that traditonal superheroics are in a rut. This is one of the reason why the Authority (itself having a fantastic parody of the World's finest couple) had such an impact. But there are only so many permutations of a guy in tights with a cape and superpowers you can come up with.