Welcome to the 880th installment of Comic Book Legends Revealed, a column where we examine comic book myths, rumors and legends and confirm or debunk them. This time, learn whether Marvel never reprinted a Spider-Man story because a character in the comic was too visibly similar to Godzilla.
One of the interesting things about intellectual property rights is that so much of what we understand about parody rights is still fairly new. As I’ve talked about in past Comic Book Legends Revealed, in 1962, Irving Berlin, on behalf of a group of composers including Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers (of Rodgers and Hart and Rodgers and Hammerstein fame), sued Mad Magazine over the song parodies that Mad would often include. Think about that, parody law was so unclear that there was a legit case to be made that written (not recorded, just written) parodies of songs were infringing on their copyrights! That sounds absurd to us today, but the idea of an exception for parody being part of the “fair use” exception is still a relatively new one.
I bring that up, of course, as it ties into today’s legend, where Toho tried to get Marvel to agree to never reprint an issue of Amazing Spider-Man that was filled with parodies of toys because one of the toys was too close in appearance to Toho’s iconic character, Godzilla.
HOW DID SPIDER-MAN RUN AFOUL OF A GODZILLA TOY PARODY?
As you may or may not know, at the end of 1995, Marvel decided to “end” the Clone Saga that had been going on in the series for over a year at that point (and since there were four Spider-Man titles at the time, plus a quarterly Spider-Man Unlimited, plus a number of miniseries, a year’s worth of a single story was a LOT of comic books) by having it confirmed that Ben Reilly, who was believed to have been the clone of Peter Parker made decades earlier in the original Clone Saga (where the evil Jackal cloned Gwen Stacy and then cloned Peter Parker, complete with the same memories as the original Peter Parker), was actually the REAL Peter Parker and the Peter that we had followed for the last 20 years was ther actual clone This allowed Marvel to let Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson-Parker retire from the comic and go off and have a baby and live happily ever after, and then Spider-Man could become a single superhero again (Marvel had been trying to get rid of Spider-Man’s marriage pretty much as soon as it happened).
After initially going by the name, the Scarlet Spider, Ben eventually took over as Spider-Man, with a brand-new costume. In 1996’s Amazing Spider-Man #413 (by Tom DeFalco, Mark Bagley and Larry Mahlstedt), the comic was a bit of a riff on Toy Story, which was a new movie at the time.
On the cover, we see Spider-Man facing off against parodies of a number of notable toys of the era, namely Stretch Armstrong, Gumby, Woody from Toy Story, Luke Skywalker, a Xenomorph, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, some other characters I can’t quite place (probably someone supposed to be Batman) and, of course, Godzilla.
In the comic, Spider-Man wakes up to find himself seemingly shrunken down in a kid’s room…
After Spidey escapes from the jar, he begins to formulate a plan to get himself back to his normal size. He then runs into a little trouble from a big green monster…
And there is a toy that is basically Godzilla…
It really is close-looking to Godzilla, right?
TOHO TRIED TO GET MARVEL TO NEVER REPRINT THIS SPIDER-MAN ISSUE
At the amazing webaite, The Life of Reilly, all about the Clone Saga, Spider-Man assistant editor Glenn Greenberg recalled how the Godzilla parody was a bit TOO on the nose:
The Godzilla-like monster also appeared on the cover of the issue, and apparently it looked TOO MUCH like Godzilla, because Marvel was very nearly sued by Toho, the Japanese film company that makes all the Godzilla movies and owns all the rights to the character. They are very protective of the character, and they go after anyone they feel has exploited the property without their permission. That’s very understandable and any other character-driven company, including Marvel, would and should do the same exact thing. As I recall, Toho sent a “cease and desist” order to Marvel, and although the issue was already in print and could not be recalled, we had to go back and change the artwork so that if the story was ever reprinted, the monster would look nothing like Godzilla.
At the time, Panini had a reprint series called Astonishing Spider-Man that reprinted three Spider-Man comics per issue, and in issue #48, the altered version of the page appeared (and notably, the cover of the reprint used one of the covers of the other two stories reprinted in the issue and thus avoided using the cover with the Godzilla toy on it)….
However, while that was what Marvel did AT THE TIME, the issue was later reprinted decades later, as part of the trade paperback series that collected all of Ben Reilly’s issues as Spider-Man…
and in that trade collection, the original version of the page was used…
So whatever concern Marvel had back in 1996, they got over it (or Toho just doesn’t care anymore, I guess).
Thanks to Chris McFeely, who suggested I write about this on Twitter. Check out Chris’ YouTube station.
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