Bill Willingham had some great news for Fables fans at the DC Nation panel at the Emerald City ComiCon this weekend — he’s been given the ok, presumably from DC’s legal department, to use Peter Pan in Fables. Expect to see the character show up sometime after issue #75.
Willingham had originally planned on using Peter Pan as The Adversary, but as he told The A.V. Club last year, Peter Pan was still under copyright protection in England:
I wanted the Adversary to be Peter Pan. Even when I was a kid, I couldn’t understand why he was considered the good guy in these stories. Basically, he would come to our world and steal our kids. That just seemed pretty sinister. I thought, “Okay, we’ll do a little turnaround on that, and make Peter Pan the evil Adversary, and that means that Captain Hook and his pirates were really were a crew that were going to Neverland and rescuing these kids, and they were painted as pirates only because Peter was doing the press releases.” That was, I thought, a pretty good idea that we didn’t get to do, because even though I carefully worked out that Pan was in public domain in America, he’s still under copyright in England, because the Parliament did a special extension of copyright because all the income from Peter Pan books went to the Ormond Street Hospital for kids. So to keep the hospital having their income, they extended the copyright, and since we were going to sell Fables in England, we couldn’t do it. That’s why we had to come up with a new villain, who, in hindsight, I think was much better. That worked out pretty well.
Peter Pan entered the public domain earlier this year. More on Peter Pan’s copyright history can be found here.
May 12th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
Peter Pan was actually always more of an anti-hero than anything else. He’s more notable for being a cocky little jerk who’s afraid of growing up than anything good or heroic. However, he does lend himself to a fun little fantasy story. The thing is though, that almost all the other little kids he plays with will eventually leave because they’re not afraid to grow up. So, he’ll always be alone in the long run (except for his shadow), though he probably won’t remember it.