To catch us closer than the rest of the examples, we often think that only the video game they suffer that constant harassment and demolition about what they do right, what they do wrong, and how with their stories and ideas they corrupt the minds of our children.
But there is always something worse when it comes to talking about withered grandparents imposing retrograde morals and youngsters who go along with it, and to show this story about how Marvel managed to register the word as his zombie during more than 20 years.
The origin of the word zombie
The funny thing about this whole thing is that, actually, Marvel not even close to being one of the thinking heads behind the idea of zombis
The origin of the word goes back to Haitian voodoo and, by rebound, to certain words of African origin such as dustbody without a soul in the area of Angola, or the godthe spirit of a dead person in the Congo, but it was not until stories like The Magic Island, from 1929, that the term zombie began to become popular in popular culture.
From there it jumps, of course, to all those first horror comics by big names like Tales from the Crypt until, incredible as it may seem, both the word zombie and the way to represent them are banned in the United States after the government’s criticism of youth violence and delinquency.
Along with many other words and representations of monsters, he as a werewolf, and even going so far as to prohibit the use of the word terror, thereby causing the death of those Tales from the Crypteverything that in some way could have some controversy is completely prohibited in the world of comics.
From this point three paths join. Marvel using and registering the word zombie despite the veto. Other works and comics using the word zombie despite not having the license. And what happened to those rights so that now the term continues to be used without problems and we don’t know anything about that supposed trademark.
Marvel’s rights to the word zombie
The first path is easy. We come from a time when Romero’s Night of the Living Dead caused a sensation and created a school, so in 1973 Marvel create the hero The Zombie and, to avoid the veto, he launches the story as a magazine, not a comic, dodging the bullet.
The same year he issues a record of the term that ends up winning in 1975, thus becoming rights owner for publications, “particularly magazines composed of comic stories, pictorial and non-pictorial compositions”. Movies can use the term with no problem, and if someone like DC He wants to use it, so go ahead with it after paying a small clause and everyone is happy.
The problem is that the registration of common words is a complex issue and, as soon as someone wants to dig a little into the viability of this type of rights, the house of cards ends up falling apart.
In 1996, Marvel loses the rights to the word zombie for being too generic and not having continued to exploit the brand The Zombie like cartoon. The rest, from the revival of the monster with The Walking Dead to Marvel Zombies or the absurd mania of calling them infected, is another story for another day.
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