I thought maybe this meant the inker called Abel in to ink this detailed page, but the GCD credits Abel with the whole story (except for Clark Kent faces inked by Murphy Anderson)

Then I thought the editor was being petty and not crediting Sekowsky for some reason, but the editor was.... Mike Sekowsky.

Then I thought DC didn;t credit Sekowsky 'cause he was leaving the company, but he did the next issue as well...

So.... I'm out of ideas.

I find trademarks to be an interesting subject. I've long understood that a comics company can lose a trademark if they don't use it, hence different DAREDEVIL and CAPTAIN MARVEL comics from different publishers jumping on abandoned trademarks. But if you look at the registry of trademarks, it's not just the phrase but the logo design itself covered by trademark protection. In comics, there are several instances where a defunct trademark title was appropriated, but it's almost unheard of, so far as I've seen, for a publisher to pick up another publisher's trademark and logo design, except when a license changes hands or a title is sold off to a different company.

So I was surprised to see that Dynamite Entertainment would not just scoop up Marvel's unused "Savage Tales" as a title, but also swipe its original logo design:



Yes, there are some slight modifications, but the Dynamite logo uses an almost identical pattern of raggedness on the edges of the letters. That's taking things to a remarkably detailed level of swiping!

I kind of wonder what he was really like beneath all the bravado he displayed for fans

It is sometimes important to remember that the success or failure of comic companies doesn't always have to do with the sales of their comics or their popularity.

Cartoonist Kayfabe is such a great channel in general, I love seeing a new video of theirs pop up in my subscriptions

When Piskor uses that, I don't think he targets the guys who worked in an era where you had no choice, I think he is indicating folks who have the chance to pursue their own vision and creative freedom, to take a risk to self-publish or work outside the assembly line system but choose to take the assembly line pay rate and such. Yes, they may work hard for a living, but they are taking less than what they could make (higher floor, lower ceiling on earning potential) and the safe same old same old of playing in someone else's sandbox churning out the same status quo books instead of doing something of their own or something that says or does something new.

You can agree or disagree with him as you like, but he shows a deep respect for some of the innovators who worked in that system when there was no other choice (the Kirby's Ditko's Adams' and the like of the work-for-hire only era).

Piskor's done both, but even when he's taken work-for-hire stuff, he's pushed the boundaries of the medium with it and not just churned out house style assembly line pages for a safe sub-standard page rate. But he's gotten the opportunities he has had because he's taken chances and shook things up and not just taken the Big 2 dole to churn out house style pages.

-M

By the same token, 90s indie Majestic flamed out quickly because their parent company was pirating their own NFL trading cards, to sell without paying royalties and got busted and lost their license.  They crashed and took the company down before they could expand on an intriguing premise, in Legacy.

Simon & Kirby's Mainline went under because their distributor wouldn't put out their comics, because of the 50s hysteria.

First Comics went under because the owners spent so much cash trying to get Classics Illustrated off the ground and into book stores that they couldn't sustain regular operations, despite the revenues generated by their regular titles.

Eclipse Comics was pretty much crippled by the flood of their warehouse and offices, since they depended on the sales of back issues to finance new publications.  They limped along, borrowing from the future to finance the present.  Had they not suffered the flood, they might have lasted through the 90s, with a better financial situation.

Malibu disappeared because Marvel just wanted to keep them out of DC's hands (per Tom Mason and Chris Ulm), thereby significantly increasing their market share.  They soon shut things down and gained little beyond some computer coloring systems.

Fantagraphics nearly went under with the bankruptcy of their retail book distributor, Seven Hills, and had to appeal to the market place to get people to place orders directly with the company, to get enough cash to float them through the crisis.

The Borders bankruptcy took down Tokyo Pop, in the US, because Borders had gone deep into manga and owed Tokyo Pop a ton of money.