It’s totally legal for Batman to punch the Great Gatsby and yet I’m still waiting
Good people of the superhero comics community, I’ve kept quiet for 23-and-a-half months and I can remain silent no longer. It’s been almost two years since The Great Gatsby entered the public domain and yet — despite being absurdly overqualified for the job — Jay Gatsby is still not a Batman villain.
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic of the American canon, entered the public domain on Jan. 1, 2021. Which means that it has been totally legal to write him into one of the major superhero universes for 710 days of human history. Despite that, no one has done it.
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Public domain characters show up in comic books all the time. We’re most familiar with mythological superheroes and their allies, like Thor or Zeus. And while they’re less prominent, you’ll also find a few idiomatic cultural figures, like Santa Claus or Uncle Sam, bouncing around superhero settings.
But it bears repeating that there are also many examples of comic book superhero characters who hail from the modern era of copyright and can be credited to a singular source and author. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is a historical figure in Marvel Comics. DC’s Frankenstein, aka Mary Shelley’s modern Prometheus, is gonna be in his own cartoon produced by James Gunn. Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula menaces both universes.
Why not Jay Gatsby?
How many times have you read or watched a story in which Batman finds himself at odds with a shady rich guy, either as the Caped Crusader or as Bruce Wayne, Gotham’s favorite idiot philanthropist? This is a subplot of Batman: Returns, and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and innumerable episodes of Batman: The Animated series. Not to mention classic comics like Batman: Hush, and villains like Lex Luthor,
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