Picking Seeds From the Pulp: Gladiator

Gladiator is a pulp novel first published in 1930 by Philip Wylie. Yeah, that Philip Wylie -- the guy who also wrote When Worlds Collide. Gladiator was Wylie's third novel (a drastic revision of his first, Titan, actually)  and came out nearly eight years before Siegel & Shuster invented Ubermensch Superman for National/DC. In 1940 Wylie threatened to sue DC & Siegel for infringing/plagiarizing Gladiator, and even though Siegel had reviewed Gladiator in 1932 for his own fanzine, he claimed to not have been influenced or inspired by Wylie's character in developing Superman. Siegel even signed an affidavit to that effect. Whatever the truth of the matter, the case never went anywhere and Wylie seems to have dropped the matter. Speculation is that he did so because both Siegel & Schuster were in the midst of other lawsuits and in financial straits. Maybe that is so. The whole mess faded from public view fairly quickly. Most people forgot all about the brouhaha. But others haven't. Many believe Wylie's novel to have been the original impetus for Siegel & Schuster's very popular (and very litigious) character. This entry over at the Superman Story site is a quick example of someone still carrying the banner of the Gladiator's lost cause forwards into the modern day. They also have a very quick description of Gladiator's Hugo Danner that'll make it fairly obvious that Superman had a predecessor in print eight years his senior. Just saying...

So who is Hugo Danner? Good question. Philip Wylie was quite a bit ahead of the curve in 1930 (or 1926 when he later claimed to have first written the manuscript for Gladiator...). He had Hugo's papa, the not so mad scientist Professor Abednego Danner of Colorado invent a serum that he then injects into his pregnant wife. Really. It's another bit of science fictional spousal abuse just like in The Inmost Light all over again.


The serum doesn't kill the unborn child, nor the wife. Which is probably a darn good thing as it would have led to an investigation and some serious questions regarding Professor Abednego Danner's sanity and highly unethical methods, to say the least. Fortunately for little Hugo Danner, he is born with the proportional strength of an ant and the leaping ability of a grasshopper. Oh and he's bulletproof the way that Achilles was invulnerable to blades, etc., and that's without getting dipped in any smelly old river, and without the whole vulnerable heel thing either.


At first he seems like a lucky, lucky bastard...



...but in truth Hugo Danner is one morose, depressed and frustrated guy. He lacks confidence, has no real direction in life and to be quite frank, he's a real waste of superpowers. But then that was Wylie's intention. He wasn't interested in the colorful tights nor the super competent crime-fighters like The Shadow, Doc Savage, etc. He was looking at things from a more humanistic angle--how possessing such powers would remove a person from the commonplace in a way that might make it difficult for them to adapt, or to find their place in the world.

When some costumed schmuck starts prattling on and on about how they'd like to lead a normal life--it's partly Wylie's fault, and more importantly unrealistic bullshit bad writing, but it's what the unwashed masses expect, so the same old slop gets tossed out to them by the bucket-full.

Hugo Danner has a few modest adventures, most of which you see revised and made a bit more colorful and exciting or at least interesting in the early run of Superman.

In the end Hugo goes up on a mountain top and asks God in a weirdly snivelly manner for some advice and gets struck dead by a lightning bolt.

Boom.

Dead.

Wow.

What a harsh bit of feedback indeed.

But Gladiator's Hugo Danner hasn't quite gone quietly into the good night. There is a very good website at the  Hugodanner.com domain, devoted to Gladiator essays and seems to be one of the best possible resources for all things Gladiator out there. You can read Wylie's Original Introduction, read Will Murray's thought provoking essay on Gladiator, check out a very cryptic inscription in Wylie's own hand, or view a gallery of Book Covers for Gladiator's various editions. There's an amusing Q&A page as well, but we're not sure if the site is still offering $5 for Gladiator essays. But if you're really interested in doing something along those lines, please do contact them--might as well get a $5 check than not...

You can acquire a free copy of the full text of Gladiator at Many Books or Archive(dot)Org -- it isn't old enough to show up on Gutenberg just yet.

A Few Gladiator Links

• Hugo Danner has an entry at the nearly always helpful International Catalogue of Superheroes site.
• Duane Spurlock wrote another essay over at Pulprack--Gladiator: Superman with Feet of Clay that is worth reading, if you're at all interested in Gladiator.
• R. J. Carter likewise has written about Gladiator/Hugo Danner as part of his Primer: The Men Before Superman essay.
• Gregory Freeley also wrote an interesting, academically-oriented essay on Gladiator--When World-views Collide: Philip Wylie in the Twenty-first Century. It's partly a review and partly an overview, but at least it's something.
• For a little lighter take on the whole Superman/Gladiator thing, check out Six Famous Characters You Didn't Know Were Shameless Rip-Offs at Cracked.
• There is a rather exhaustive bibliography for Philip Wylie at the Grove Antiquarian Books site.
• You could pay a lot for the University of Nebraska reprint of the Knopf edition of Gladiator, but since they fail to include anything remarkable in terms of some much needed scholarship regarding the origins and influence and impact of Gladiator on the Pulps, comics, and so forth, why not just get the cheaper version sans academic pretensions?

Perhaps more ignominious than just being ignored, plagiarized paid uncredited homage to, would be having the text converted into a B-grade comedy. This actually happened to Gladiator. They made a comedy out of the Gladiator novel starring Joe E. Brown in 1938. IMDb can give you some more details, if you're interested. You just can't make this stuff up.

In 1976 Roy Thomas adapted Gladiator for Marvel Comics in Marvel Preview #9 as 'Man God.' Then Thomas developed "Iron Munro" for DC as a Retcon-doppleganger for the editorially-erased Golden Age Superman. Iron Munro was one part the classic Street & Smith character and another part Wylie's Gladiator, but went on to become fairly well ignored as his own character. It turns out that Hugo Danner (Wylies' Gladiator) was Iron Munro's estranged father. Which was a very nice little precedent to be setting...

It was also very cool of Roy Thomas to have Iron Munro encounter Georgia Challenger in the course of his efforts to locate and learn what happened to his father, the ill-fated, whiny and supposedly lightning-blasted Gladiator, Hugo Danner. That's right. Arn, Iron Munro, meets a living, breathing, beautiful and butt-kicking grand-daughter of Professor Edward Challenger while investigating a secret government project (like one of those other projects all those scientists might have been working on in the secret underground complex featured in The Time Tunnel perhaps?)

Roy Thomas is so much fun.

Howard Chaykin and Russ Heath teamed-up to revise/adapt Wylie's Gladiator in the Wildstorm comics 4-part miniseries which might still be available at eBay for around $10. There isn't much available on this series, even with Chaykin & Heath having been attached to it. The mini-series just seemed to drain away into obscurity, which is very strange given the major talent involved in its creation.

Hugo Danner, the Gladiator, is a flawed, bungled and botched mess of a guy who just happens to have gained superpowers because his daddy was an unethical prick who injected his mother with an untested, experimental serum while he was still in the womb. The guy is a walking victim and a real sob sack, despite being invulnerable. He joined the French Foreign Legion and didn't really gain much in the way of honors or recognition, despite serving in WWI. You'd think that a guy who is bullet-proof, super strong and able to outrun a train just might have found himself making an impact on the battlefields of Europe in 1917. At least you'd think he might. But not this guy. Nope. He's conflicted, emotionally constipated and totally at a loss for what to do with himself.

It's a good thing that he gets blasted with a lightning bolt at the end of the novel.

But then maybe he survives the thunderbolt and goes off to reinvent himself. He was part of the whole Lost Generation, which really, really begs the question, at least for me, why the hell didn't a guy like Wylie who was one of the founders of The New Yorker write a more Upton Sinclair or F. Scott Fitzgerald sort of novel out of this stuff? Hugo Danner could have been a cross between Odd John and The Great Gatsby--and that would have been infinitely cooler than what we were given...

Maybe someone needs to really go back over this stuff and write a sort of pseudo-Regencypunk revision of Gladiator that merges it with Stapledon and Fitzgerald. That would be very, very cool...with or without flying monkeys...or vampires...

Jenny Everywhere: An Open Source Character

The character of Jenny Everywhere is available for use by anyone, with only one condition.
This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Everywhere,
in order that others may use this property as they wish. All rights reversed

Jenny Everywhere is an Open-Source Character--possibly the very first Open Source Character intentionally developed and created specifically for use by anyone. The only rule about using her is that your work must have this notation:

While most of Jenny's adventures, as well as her various artistic interpretations, are under copyright to their respective creators (including her first appearance) the character and the idea of this character are free for anyone and everyone to use. The image we've included up above has been declared public domain to give creators a starting point in their efforts at interpreting, incorporating or exploring this character in their own creative projects.

Jenny Everywhere was originally developed via the Barbelith online community. She was created by Steven Wintle & the Barbelith.com community in a collaborative effort that is still mostly available for all to see here.  Her first image was composed by 'Moriarty' and declared Public Domain. You can find copies of this image here, here, and here.

The discussion regarding Open Source Comic Book Characters at Barbelith is a very intriguing relic of imagination at work. It has a lot of ideas that might be of use or interest to anyone else who decides to explore this territory.  One such experiment is by no means enough. Not by a long shot. That's why there are other Open Source Characters such as Victory Girl, Selina the Moon Maiden, Captain Atomic, or Captain Prodigy--who you have got to check out for yourself as no one would ever believe it if I told you the origin of this particular Open Source Character.  Wow. Evelyn Ramirez/Captain Prodigy might be a lot of fun to turn over to Inmate93... "By the Power of Nyarlathotep!" Fun stuff.

There is a Jenny Everywhere Clearing House and Update Point at Barbelith which should be handy to anyone seeking to bring Jenny Everywhere into their games, campaigns, settings, comics, fiction or whatever.

The Shifter Archive is your guide to all things Jenny Everywhere, and of course August 13th is Jenny Everywhere Day, so mark your calendars. Netherwerks plans on doing something special for Jenny Everywhere this coming Aug. 13th.  The Jenny Everywhere Day blog also features a very nicely done Who Is Jenny Everywhere page that is worth taking a look at if you're at all interested in this character or the amazing viral-tulpa-like process that produced it, ahem, I mean Her.

You can find more Jenny Everywhere information at this Wiki, and follow her continuing adventures in the Jenny Everywhere Chronicles webcomic produced by Benji Christensen & Scott D. M. Simmons.

Oh and yes, there is already an Anti-Jenny: Jenny Nowhere, who is also an Open Source Character with the same requirements for use as Jenny above. Where Jenny Everywhere remains fairly recognizable from universe to universe, Jenny Nowhere remains only consistent in her name. She makes a great contrasting opponent/antagonist and a very intriguing foil for Jenny Everywhere as they run into one another again and again across all the wide Omniverse...

By this time next year, we here at Netherwerks plan to launch our own Open Source Character into the murksome seas of the Public Domain. It sounds like a fun challenge.

This concept of Open Source Characters may also have some bearing on the nascent revival of shared-world campaigning, and open world gaming that has been getting mentioned over at The Hill Cantons such as here and here...and here.

"The character of Jenny Everywhere is available for use by anyone, with only one condition. This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Everywhere, in order that others may use this property as they wish. All rights reversed."

Thank You Mr. Hite: The Black Terror Goes Eldritch

Okay. I'm late to the party, again, but this time I've spent a few weeks side-lined with a nasty shoulder injury and the combination of muscle relaxants and pain-killers were almost worse than the persistent, never-subsiding pain itself. Almost. But I'm reasonably better now. Now it's time to get caught-up on a bunch of long-overdue stuff. Like this one.  Please excuse the sub-par illo above--I only had ten minutes to cobble something vaguely relevant togther.  Better stuff is in the works now that I'm back at least part-time.

Ken Hite's Adventures Into Darkness

For M&M Superlink

Written by Kenneth Hite

Published by Ronin Arts

48-page PDF (16.6 MB)

Stock Number HITE003, $9.95

Available all over the Internet or from your local supplier of RPG-madness.

What If H. P. Lovecraft Wrote Comic Books?  Sure it's as unlikely as R. E. Howard writing soap opera scripts, but then if you keep in mind that Hank Williams derived a great deal of song-writing inspiration from Romance Comic Books...well...maybe it's not quite so far fetched as it might sound at first blush.  Besides, HPL really needed the money...and much respected and revered Sci-Fi Great Alfred Bester (amongst quite a few others) did a bit of time writing for the Comics (as in Green Lantern--Bester invented GL's Oath, for example), so why not HPL writing for Nedor comics?

The One and Only Kenneth Hite reveals the long-lost account of H.P. Lovecraft's long suppressed and entirely too obscure comics writing with all the versimilitude of a hoax, just the way the old gent said that such a thing ought to be done.  It's one of those dream-projects where it really ought to have happened, but at least now, thanks to Mr. H, we get to see what it might have been like, kind of...

Adventures Into Darkness includes:

• A complete historical overview of H.P. Lovecraft's comics career, including a wonderful section on just How It Came To Be...
• Full Mutants & Masterminds (Second Edition) statistics for 17 of Nedor Comics superheroes and 'super-ified' HPL-derived protagonists, from the Fighting Yank and The Black Terror to Nodens,  "Doc" Strange and on to Randolph Carter, Dream Master...super trippy, yet with a ring of esoteric authenticity few other authors could have pulled off...
• Eleven supernaturally sinister villains, including that dreamy-witch herself Asenath the Body-Snatcher, the fiendish Nazi sorcerer Baron von Junzt, the eldritch Yellow Lama, and the demi-god Dagon, amongst other favorites...
• Monster stats for grotesque ghouls, fiendishly ferocious Frog-Men, outrageously ostentatious Outer Ones, tainted tribal Tcho-Tchos, naughty nightgaunts, and the ultra-creeptacular Dark Haunter, all lovingly detailed and ready to rumble right off the bat...
• An up-to-date Price Guide that details just how much your rare Lovecraft comics will bring today, should you consider parting with such terrifying treasures...
• A complete section detailing how-to mix together the Golden Age of Comics with the madness of H.P. Lovecraft, and either dragging things kicking and screaming into full-out supernatural terror, or just wild and wooly flights of madness-tinged imagination and oneiric phantasy...
• Super Sanity rules .. and what HPL-inspired supplement can be complete without talking about SaNiTy in some capacity?  Insane superheroes grappling with soul-shattering Elder Horrors from beyond...it's not just for contemporary comics any more, even the Golden Age can be subverted and retroactively polluted by the toxic genius from Providence...and thank Cthulhu the Stars are Right for this to happen now!

Ken Hite delivers -- really delivers -- a timeless, eldritch mutation of unholy dread and delight as he combines the horrific cosmic-nihilism of H.P. Lovecraft and the daring, dashing and determined Nedor superheroes in Adventures Into Darkness, one of the maddest, most deranged and wonderful mash-ups ever imagined.

The Black Terror is a superhero from the old Nedor Publishing comics line that is in the Public Domain, and he's one of a group of vintage characters that have been revived and re-imagined by Alan Moore (Mr. Moore at Wikipedia) via ABC/America's Best Comics (Terra Obscura), Dynamite Entertainment's Project Super Powers (Highly Recommended), AC/Americomics FemForce, and others.  Ken Hite has expertly and deftly re-imagined the Black Terror, Fighting Yank and other Nedor heroes as if they had been written by H. P. Lovecraft himself and made it all available as a supplement for Mutants & Masterminds.  This is truly Fun stuff!  What Mr. Hite doesn't know about HPL isn't worth knowing, generally, and he displays here a fairly lucid and well-researched grasp of the old Nedor superheroes that does an obscure comics geek's heart proud.  With some effort this stuff could be ported or adapted to quite a few other superhero RPGs, and with some inventive sneakery, one could likewise draw a great deal of inspiration from this supplement for bringing the Golden Age of Comics into HPL-vania via whichever set of rules you prefer for demented Noir-ish romps into spectral weirdness and occult horror.  (I'm still waiting for the official retro-style Hammer Horror RPG...)

Not every tome, folio or book discovered in an investigation need be some moldy old grimoire...and just as was mentioned towards the bottom of the previous post regarding madness-inducing/insanity-inspired works of comics-genius and some obscure, long defunct but possibly reviving comic book publisher specializing in putting out grimoirically-derived four-color fantasies for the kiddies...the mixture of HPL and Comics is a heady cocktail that is just dripping with bizarre gobs of inspiration and untapped, here-to-fore mostly unexplored potential.

Superheroes are the contemporary embodiment and pop culture expression of mythological figures.  Co-mingling them with a manufactured/synthetic mythology such as Lovecraft's opens the door to a host of other methods of re-imaging these trope-heavy characters as long forgotten or often suppressed/censored aspects of the Cthulhu Mythos or even more interestingly, it gets the imaginal ball rolling a bit and gets one to wonder how such characters might fit into other milieus and time periods.  Roll back the faux-contemporary veneer, scrape off the 30s-40s Noir fashions or the Roaring Twenties bombast and take things back a few more decades, past the War to End All wars, past the Civil War, past the Whisky Rebellion and the American Revolution, down the dusty corridors of history, and these characters can easily be made to fit, more or less just about as they are, especially the Black Terror, who makes a great Dread Pirate archetype despite being a nominal good guy.  Of course once you step past the founding of the United States, someone like Fighting Yank needs to be revised, possibly as a loyal-royal British patriot, or French, German or Algonquin.  That's when things like this get truly fascinating.  What would a patriotic superhero who served Imperial Rome have been like?  Or Carthage?  Was Vercingetorix a superhero?  If not, what would he have been like as one? A lot of this territory has been superficially explored in various What-If stories, Elseworlds, alternate time-line tales, and all that, and of course quite a few historical figures have been incorporated into various superheroes' back-stories, lineages, or even family trees (as with the Wold Newton stuff).

The notion of mythic superheroes goes back, way back to Beowulf and Gilgamesh--very likely even before them.  Back when Mr. Gygax was penning the first of the Little Brown Books, he plugged-in the title Superhero for any Fighting Man who reached a total of 120,000 experience points (Men and Magic, p.16).  Implicit in the suggestions outlined by the great and mighty Big G himself in that particular root/core tome of RPG-goodness is the notion that one was not to just take inspiration from John Carter Warlord of Mars, Conan the Barbarian or the other mentioned heroes, superheroes really, but one's characters were to aspire to become like unto those models and templates, those archetypes and mythic forebears. Your Fighting Man (Magic User, Cleric, etc. ) was supposed to evolve into something wonderful, special, unique and intriguing in their own way, through the steady accumulation of merit, minions, material, and magic as codified by the experience point system.

So, aside from Robin Hood, The Three Musketeers, Arthur, Bran Mak Morn, Achilles, and the rest, sometimes it is fun, and occasionally illuminating to de-volve popular characters to what they might have been way back when, to figure out what it would be like to have a Travis Morgan-type character develop in the midst of your Pseudo-Medieval setting, or to develop your own take on the time-wornhonored trope of a Robin Hood-style figure, like R. A. Salvatore's Highwayman, for instance.  It's not exactly rocket science, unless you're re-inventing Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon, but even then, it can be quite fun and rewarding to mix-and-match various obvious superheroes with the expectations of other genres and to develop analogous versions of Zorro, Sinbad, Sherlock Holmes, etc. that are more than just a knock-off or cheap imitation.  Reed Richards may be the smartest man in the Marvel universe, but who is the smartest guy in your setting?  Hercules is the strongest hero, according to some, but who epitomizes power in your setting?  Are there different kinds of strength that are exemplified besides raw, brute force?  Even Tolkien played this game--look at Aragorn, really look at the guy; he's one of the last descendents of a prehistoric culture destroyed in a great Atlantis-style cataclysm, raised with responsibility and honor ground into his head at every turn, burdened from birth with a sense of destiny, I mean Destiny, and the heir of a forgotten lineage of mythic beings who were orders of magnitude beyond piddly, normal humanity.  He's over seventy years old when the War for the Ring begins.  He's closer to Superman or Doc Savage than he is to any piss-ant faux-medieval groundskeeper. 

In summary, what I'm suggesting is that instead of ripping off and plunking down established characters in your setting ala the old Giants In The Earth feature from the way back days of Dragon magazine, take a look at those characters that you find interesting and spend some time developing your own version of how someone like that might have developed in your world.  Instead of borrowing Tarzan, you might invent your own Zembla, or perhaps you'd prefer to try your hand at a fresh take on Lee Falk's Phantom.  (Here's a hint: the first Ghost Who Walks didn't have matching .45's, so yours wouldn't necessarily require them either...perhaps matching cutlasses, crossbows, or a matched set of tribal throwing irons would be a better fit...that's up to you, after all...)  Who says that Jungle Lords all need to live in Africa, let alone be only 'Jungle' Lords; why not vengeful Tundra Lords (reindeer-riding Schwarz-Peter-style badasses) or Ladies of the Fertile River Valleys (Think Babylon)?  Don't even get me started on why most of them seem to always be magic mighty white guys...but then the world is probably not ready for a female kobold superhero...though yours might be...

Everything New is Old Again

Public Domain.  In a nutshell those things that are in the Public Domain are ours to use freely as part of the inheritance of all the world, free from royalties.  In practice it means that the Copyright has lapsed and the Trademark might still be in force, or legally contestable.  Things pass into the Public Domain most often through sheer neglect.  But once anyone smells the possibility of making money off of something, they tend to get interested real quick.  One good case in point is the use of the long forgotten 1940's characters from the Nedor Comics characters in Tom Strong by Alan Moore and the subsequent invention by Moore of Terra Obscura which placed Public Domain characters into the peculiar position of being re-copyrighted and trademarked by ABC, which was part of Wildstorm and then DC.  An explanation of the intricacies involved in this situation can be had from the Newsarama archives on the Nedor Heroes being the property of DC/ABC/Everyone.  This was truly a most fascinating chain of events.

Usually, Public Domain is a fairly safe thing to mine for free stuff.  But in terms of Comics and Pulp Heroes and Villains...it gets a bit trickier than just reviving an obscure character.  Trickier, but eminently do-able, if you do the research involved in due dilligence.  If these sorts of characters/opportunities appeal to you, then you might consider reading through Ivan Hoffman's various articles including the one on The Protection of Fictional Characters.  And there are a LOT of these old, neglected characters out there for anyone wanting to go and seek them out.

Some defunct Comics Publishers such as Fox Feature Syndicate, Crestwood Publications, Quality Comics, Spark Publications, and others have left behind an massive collection of characters that have barely been tapped-into by a few intrepid explorers of the Public Domain such as Alan Moore, though tehre are a few new publishers really making a concerted effort to mine this treasure such as AC Comics who provide a very interesting series of Golden Age Reprints and an "Official" Golden Age Heros & Heroines Directory, and Moonstone Books which are in the process of reviving Karl Kolchak (Darren McGavin Rocks!), Buckaroo Banzai, The Green Hornet and a host of other Characters and franchises including such Public Domain characters you know and love or might never have heard of before such as Sherlock Holmes, Mandrake the Magician and many, many others (even The Spider!).  Moonstone is bringing back a lot of Original Characters from the brink of the abyss, and they are bring out comics based on The Saint, Captain Action, Mister Moto, The Avenger, and other classics as well as reviving the old White Wolf fiction, which is ...odd... but as a publisher mining the old and obscure, Moonstone are definitely worth checking out.

You can find a bit more information, including thumbnail pictures in most cases, about Standard/Better/Nedor Comics' Characters, Fox Features Syndicate Characters, Quality Comics Characters, and Spark Publications Characters (and piles more!) over at the International Catalogue of Superheroes (an essential resource for researching all sorts of old, forgotten, lost or abandoned Pulp and Comics characters irregardless of their being in the Public Domain or not: a truly wonderful resource is the page dedicated to Various Golden Age Characters where you can look-up some really obscure publishers like Centaur and others).

Jeff Rovin has also published a pretty comprehensive Encyclopedia of Superheroes, as well as an Encyclopedia of Monsters, both of which might be of interest or use in researching the old, out-of-date and Trademark-expired Heroes and Villains of Yesterday.  You can find a lot of old names, publishers and stuff to start your own search.  Another online resource to consider is the Golden Age Comic Book Stories blog where you could easily loose hours digging through some amazing and fun stuff.  The Digital Comics Museum and you can view a nice gallery of Golden Age comics covers at the excellent Ben Samuels Design webite as well (That's where we found the nifty Black Terror cover used above).

If your tastes run a bit more to the European end of the Comics spectrum, you can check out Lambiek and their Comiclopedia, Cool French Comics, or Black Coat Press and their comic imprint: Hexagon Comics.  There are dozens upon dozens (hundreds?) of European (not just French!) Heroes and Villains languishing in obscurity, some of whom are in the Public Domain, others who are just waiting to be revived by an interested writer/artist and translator. 

There are also a couple of online Comic Database projects like Comicbookdb, (They have a Blog as well) and the Grand Comics Database (Wiki), both of which seem to be doing more or less the same task, cataloging every last scrap of information that they can gather on any and every comic ever produced.  There's a lot of information at those two sites/projects, and you can volunteer to help out as well.  If you have any spare time on your hands.  If you're so inclined.

Public Domain Super Heroes (Wikia) is an incredible resource.  As is Project Rooftop and especially their Retro-Fix column where an artist will re-imagine/re-design the look of an older, public domain character.  Very inspirng, especially the recent redesign of Zardi: The Eternal Man, which really looks cool.  It's similar to the Comic Twart Blog, only for Public Domain characters.

Whew.  That's a lot of stuff.  But it's far from exhaustive.  You can get a pretty good start on digging around for old timey Pulp and Golden Age goodness from here though.

But why?

Huh.  I would have thought that would be obvious.  There's a ton of stories, characters and loads of art out there that we can learn from, if only to use as a source of inspiration and self-education.  Tarzan is cool, but once you look over some of the alternatives, parallels, and blatant rip-offs, you start to see some fairly archetypal themes and a host of fresh insights start to bubble up from the depths of the primordial collective unconscious.  Wandering barbarians are a dime-a-dozen, but when you familiarize yourself with a dozen or more such characters, you really get a feel for the plots and stories that have been done to death, the tried-and-true, the boring cliches and a peculiar, divine dissatisfaction comes over you --or you cave-in to ennui and waddle off on another tangent-- and you begin to see ways that things could have been or should have been or might have been different.  And then you start to write, draw or create and you either breathe life back into some forgotten character, or you create and contribute your own brand new hero or villain to the overall mix.

Why endlessly repeat and regurgitate the stuff of the past when we can use it as a hyper-fertile matrix for growing fresh new stuff?  Reviving old heroes was old when the Greeks were doing it.  It was stale when Sinbad did it.  And yet those stories are as timeless as they are shameless, and we keep on re-tooling them, re-editing them, and re-presenting them, only now this time in a blue cape or with a domino mask and a pair of hand guns...

The Public Domain is all our tool-set and playing field combined.  Those characters relegated to it are ours to use as we see fit, so long as we do our research and are clear on what all someone else has already done or is currently doing, and we take steps to make it uniquely our own interpretation.  Like how Kevin Smith is reviving The Green Hornet for Dynamite as opposed to the stuff coming out via Moonstone.  They're also doing their own version of Zorro and a few others.  I guess it comes down to "Let the best writer/artist team win."  Kind of like capitalist publishing gladitorial combat.

It's nice to have choices.  Not every superhero belongs in the modern age, or even in a retro-steampunk/dieselpunk setting.  Some heroes translate exceptionally well to the prevailing conventions of Fantasy, dark or otherwise.  Zorro is amazingly easy to re-adapt to a faux-medieval setting, just as Robin Hood morphed into DC's Green Arrow fairly easily.  The Shadow could just as easily wield twin hand-crossbows as .45s, and The Spider would make for an intimidating character in just about any setting you cared to bring him into.  Doc Savage would be a worthy replacement for Merlin in King Arthur's court, just as he could easily take Gandalf's place...and probably change the flow of things so drastically that you'd have an entirely new story that'd be both exciting and very, very different than a band of pedestrians taking forever to deal with the world-threatening crisis.

Exceptional characters are fun, when handled appropriately.  Sure, they can easily dominate or wreck a typical world that is not ready for them, but given some thought and consideration, you can adapt Pulp hereoes and Golden age superheroes--and villains--into your setting, making suitable modifications so that Fu Manchu becomes Ambassador DeCluny, or some C-list gunslinger is transformed into a masked bandit stirring up trouble in the Eastern Forests, or that freakish meteorite that recently streaked across the midnight sky has birthed a whole generation of peculiar mutant offspring similar to Philip Jose Farmer's Wold Newton Family.  And that's without introducing aliens, ghosts or time travllers...

The sky was never the limit.