Good, old-fashioned blackmail.

The Fed Express driver who scouted Lin? I think is ironic that he delivers my Becketts. (Sport card price guide.) Don't you? Just the slightest bit ironic? A tiny, tiny bit ironic?

Probably just to me.

Meanwhile, Bulletin, just because you ain't famous doesn't make you "obscure." Sheesh.

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Because it was so inexplicable to me that almost all the Tarzan (except the first two), all the Pellucider, all the Venus, and almost all the Mars books (except the first three) were out of print despite them being in the public domain, I have been telling people it's because the Burroughs estate was very aggressive in protecting their trademark.

"What's that got to do with copyright they ask?"

A good question, which I don't know the answer to. But I know this:

"Hey, hiring lawyers to defend yourself probably makes it just not worth doing."

I must have heard something about their "trademark" aggressiveness somewhere, because it turns out I was right. Summarizing a Wall Street Journal blog, the Comics Reporter says this:

"The famously aggressive family holding company Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. has apparently sued the comics-maker Dynamite for the Tarzan- and John Carter-related efforts in its pulp-driven famous character line rollout. Those characters are trademarked even though the stories in the series have slipped into the public domain. It looks from the filing itself they're also staking out a claim in case the comics are distributed in any country where the family-owned business still has a copyright claim..."

I was able to get some books from Nebraska Press, which weren't fancy but contained the stories -- so either this publisher was too obscure to sue , or because they were a University press got away with it, or something. There are dozens of books, and crossovers, and I read most of them as a kid.

So what good does it do for the Burroughs estate to sue everyone, and what good is public domain if it can be trumped by trademark?

Seems to be good, old-fashioned shakedown, to me. The estate isn't getting any money otherwise, and this way someone might pay them just to go away.

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Meanwhile, as I keep saying, the John Carter movie looks and feels wrong to me. I can't put my finger on it.

Apparently, the industry is also starting to hum about what a disaster it might be. Hugely expensive, and yet with little buzz.

I think it's a really bad sign that they changed the title so radically -- from Princess of Mars (great title), to John Carter of Mars (well, O.K.) to John Carter.

I always think, when it comes to S.F. and Fantasy and comics, the closer the movie version tries to be to the spirit of the original source material, the better it is. The farther they go away from the original sources material the worse.