Malcy Duff | June 19, 2025
In 2025 some famous comic characters became public domain after their 95-year-old copyrights expired. This brought up some interesting questions to me about the relationship between the cartoonist and the character. I think about the moment these mortal and immortal entities were intertwined like a tennis match, and the conversation these two tennis players had over the net at the end.
Maybe that conversation went something like this:
The character’s last words to the cartoonist were “I will miss you, like a room misses a smell when the window is opened.” The cartoonist’s last words to the character were never heard – apparently lost in a cross hatched thunderstorm in a panel at the bottom of the page.
Then they shook hands, and the game was over.
— Malcy Duff
English (US) · 