List of 186 Public Domain Characters Shared by Marvel and DC Comics

5/26/2017

Twitter is a strange place. The more I invest myself in keeping up @ReligiousGames, the more I discover that research on religion and video games doesn't make much sense unless it can segue coherently into several worlds of popular culture simultaneously. The loyalties and rivalries of fans, cross marketing opportunism, copyright disputes, the perversity of even well-meant adaptations, all of these issues comprise the shifting background upon which the possibility of religious game creation continues to develop.
  Comics have become a particular focus, partially because adaptation controversies are so visible there, but mostly because I love them. I am a late fan, only getting curious, really, when my daughter came home from kindergarten asking "What is the Hulk?" But I accidentally fell into the Marvel Wiki while trying to find an answer, and have read a hundreds of comics and graphic novels since then, trying to get my bearings.
   This morning I found myself curious about a very specific, rather objective question: Where comics draw upon mythology, folklore, and religion, how do rival comic giants Marvel and DC differently depict the same traditions?
The good people at Public Domain Super Heroes maintain lists of un-copyrightable characters in both Marvel and DC comics, so I decided to collate them. Here, then, are 186 characters that cross between two different comic multiverses as well as the worlds of readerly belief smoothly, without need for dramatic crossover events. It is odd company, with historical, mythological, and literary characters side-by-side with cryptids, euphemisms, rhymes and various unruly hybrids. In many cases the adaptations go in radically different directions; Marvel Jesus presents a pious retelling of the Bible, while DC Jesus is the center of a heretical Church cover-up.
   If you know of any overlapping stories not on this list, or discover interesting patterns between the various adaptations, please send word.

A Abraham Van Helsing