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Message: <blockquote data-quote="billd91" data-source="post: 8650581" data-attributes="member: 3400">It's such an interesting case. Fawcett won the initial lawsuit, but they also suffered a partial defeat when DC appealed. Their win was partly dependent on a claim that DC had failed to copyright their newspaper strips and thus the Superman copyright had been abandoned. The funny part of it all isn't simply that they won, rather, the legality of Captain Marvel as a legit Superman copy was established by the same appeal that ultimately torpedoed their efforts. While the appellate judge ruled that Captain Marvel wasn't a copyright infringement even though is powers were largely the same, the stories relied on in the initial case may actually have violated copyright and that needed to be retried. When the appellate court sent it back for retrial to determine if the stories really had been copied, Fawcett decided it wasn't worth it. Superhero titles were in a bad slump at that point so they got out of that biz by selling off to Charlton Comics (which eventually succumbed to a later slump with most of its heroes ending up with...wait for it... DC). But Fawcett did return to making comics into the 1960s with Dennis the Menace and soldiered on to 1980.</blockquote>