Thursday 26 January 2012

Wolveroach

Cerebus #54-56 (September-November 1983)
Art by Dave Sim
(Click image to enlarge)

DAVE SIM:
(from an interview in The Comics Journal #184, 1996)
When it came time to do a Roach character that had the ambiance of religious fervor surrounding him, it had to be Wolverine. The fact that Marvel got so upset about me putting Wolverine on the successive covers. "It's not a parody; you are now stealing the central icon of our church," was to me revelatory. "Well, there you go. Yes, I picked the right one." I didn't realize I was going to be putting my foot in it this badly. I thought parody's parody, but you can take that chalice called Captain America and do a parody of that, you can take this subaltern and do Moon Knight, but by God don't you touch our Wolverine. That's the center of our church.

DAVE SIM:
(from the essay 'Dave Sim On Parody & Copyright' in Following Cerebus #3, February 2005)
...when Marvel did Peter Porker, The Amazing Spider-Ham - I suspect largely as a warning shot across my bow over my doing Wolverroach. Essentially they did Cerebus in a Spider-Man costume. It was an attempt to play some hardball with me. You want to play cute, we can play cute too. Of course my theory, which dates from that time period, is that you protect your trademark and copyright by being good at what you do. Twenty years later on, Wolveroach is far more memorable than Spider-Ham, even though there was, in my view, a far greater level of appropriation going on in the later case.

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