Is Bill Willingham’s Fables Now Public Domain?
It depends on who you ask. Willingham made headline news last Friday when he made the sudden announcement that Fables, the comic book series he created and has been writing for the last twenty years, was henceforth released to the public domain. Why would he do this? In his words via Substack, it’s a last-ditch, Hail Mary, self-inflicted gunshot after every other attempt to fight DC for control of his creation and lost payments has failed. “When I first signed my creator-owned publishing contract with DC Comics, the company was run by honest men and women of integrity…Since then, over the span of twenty years or so, those people have left or been fired, to be replaced by a revolving door of strangers, of no measurable integrity, who now choose to interpret every facet of our contract in ways that only benefit DC Comics and its owner companies.” Willingham says he would sue if he could, but doesn’t have the strength or pile of cash to drag it out, and
