Not A Hoax, Not A Dream, Not An Imaginary Story: The Return Of Moore, Bissette And Veitch’s ‘1963’ (Sort Of)

News of ambitious plans for creators to work with Steve Bissette’s 1963 characters, the retro-superhero series from Image Comics from the early ’90s created by Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, and Rick Veitch.

Now, this is a weird one, seen via the Really Very Serious Alan Moore Scholar’s Group on Facebook, but it seems as though there are plans afoot to do something with 1963, with a plan to bring back about half of the characters of the Image Comics series by Alan Moore, Rick Veitch, and Steve Bissette, and even talk of finishing off the series.

Is it likely that it’s going to happen? Well, I’m not betting the farm on it or anything like that, but it’s out there, it’s news, so we’re reporting it.

But basically… don’t hold your breath.

You can find the whole story about bringing back Bissette’s characters from 1963 at the Patterson Irrigator, in a story headlined ‘Local Comic Publisher forms grant, secures licensing to reboot classic.’

The local comic publisher they’re talking about is William Hoffknecht of 100% Comics, and this is a huge step up from the few projects he’s published thus far.

According to that article, Hoffknecht and “his group of collaborators” originally planned on completing 1963 as something of an unofficial thing, bootleg, tribute, homage… call it what you will.

And then Bissette got in touch with them, offering to license the 1963 characters and trademarks that he owns.

“We in the group got together and said, ‘let’s finish this project, let’s do our version of what this would look like just for fun’ because we all love it and it was meant to be just kind of an underground bootleg kind of project but Steve Bissette got wind of it and he reached out and was like, ‘Hey, I’m open to licensing my part of the universe.’ So we got in discussions with him and [reached a deal]…We essentially got licensing for just under half of the characters and trademarks to the 1963 universe so we are going to be creating our own stories of that and fair use parody of everything else.” – William Hoffknecht of 100% Comics

According to the piece, the project will now entail fifteen to twenty creators, all donating their time for free so that the proceeds can go towards the Make More Comics Art Grant, another of Hoffknecht’s projects, something akin to the Xeric Grant of old.

Oh, and just because that really isn’t enough, Hoffknecht will also be working on and publishing a fan tribute pastiche of Marvel’s Weapon X, as Weapon Echh!

Okay, to break some of that down… the history and fallout from 1963 is something I’ll cover below, but there’s definitely no problem with Steve Bissette licensing his characters from 1963, as Moore, Bissette, and Veitch divided up the properties back in 1998. So that includes Bissette’s characters The Fury, N-Man, the Hypernaut, plus all of their supporting casts of characters and concepts, including Sky Solo, and two titles, No One Escapes…The Fury and Tales of the Uncanny.

But it’s with the whole “fair use parody of everything else” bit that Hoffknecht mentions that there might be some problems with the whole project.

Of course, it wouldn’t be the first example of something like this, with many, many works over the years taking someone’s characters and using them under the auspices of parody as fair use. I’m thinking  Bartkira, Ryan Humphrey‘s mash-up of Akira with Simpsons characters, Ed Pinsent‘s Illegal Batman, the anarchist Tintin parody Breaking Free, to name but three.

It all depends on how the work is seen, whether it actually falls under fair use of a copyrighted work as a humorous form of social commentary and literary criticism. However, whether or not something falls under fair use is one of those wonderful grey areas of copyright law. One person’s fair use under parody is the other person’s copyright infringement.

But all of that lies in the future. There may be lawyers involved. There may not.

Right now, it’s all just one man saying something in town newspaper from California, a project in the planning stages at the moment.

Will it happen? Who knows? Personally, I just can’t see it right now, but I’m more than willing to be proven wrong – it wouldn’t be the first time!

Okay, now for that promised bit of background on the whole 1963 thing…

1963 was an Image project from Alan Moore, with art by Steve Bissette and Rick Veitch, and inks from Dave Gibbons, Don Simpson, John Totleben, and Chester Brown. The whole thing was this rather fun retro-superhero thing, a homage to the Silver Age with all-new characters.

Initially published as a six-issue limited series in 1993, it was intended that the whole thing would be concluded in an 80-page finale annual, with the 1963 heroes thrown forwards 30 years to the world of 1993 and the Image characters of the time, all meant to be coordinated by Jim Lee with the 1963 creators drawing their characters and the Image creators (Rob Liefeld, Todd McFarlane, Lee, etc.) drawing theirs.

And then Jim Lee decided that he was taking a year off. By the time he came back, Image had changed, meaning that some characters could no longer be used, and everything just stalled and the whole thing just never happened.

Now, although it’s not one of the great, unfinished projects in the Alan Moore bibliography, such as Big Numbers or Miracleman (yes, I know it’s lying unfinished by Neil Gaiman, Mark Buckingham, and Marvel, but you know what I mean!) it’s still something of a major piece of news to hear that it’s perhaps being, at least partially, brought back.

There’s very little on the record about why it all went wrong, this CBR interview with Bissette is perhaps the best and most detailed from just one of those involved, but there was certainly some falling out for some reason along the way between Moore and Bissette, probably relating to an interview Bissette gave to the Comics Journal (#185, March 1996) – see this AV Club interview for more, but here’s the pertinent bit…

• SB: The interview hadn’t seen print yet. I sent copies to anyone I mentioned by name, of the transcript of the interview with a cover letter, saying “If anything upsets you, I will take it out. If there’s anything I got wrong, I will change it. Please read this, go over it, and let me know.” Alan, I never heard from. But when Neil [Gaiman] saw him, Alan…
• AVC: Gave him an earful?
• SB: Yeah. Actually, Neil called me before he left England, and I called Alan that night, and it was the last sentence he ever said to me. He said “Right, Steve? I’ll keep this short. Don’t call me, don’t write me, as far as I’m concerned, it’s over, mate.” Click. That was it. All done.

By 1998, there was no hope of the project ever seeing completion and Bissette, Veitch, and Moore agreed to a legal division of the 1963 property.

Bissette ended up with all the characters he’d co-created – The Fury, N-Man, the Hypernaut, plus all of their supporting casts of characters and concepts, including Sky Solo, and the rights to two titles, No One Escapes…The Fury and Tales of the Uncanny. All of the other characters, titles, and the 1963 title, apart from the character Johnny Beyond (which Moore co-owns with Jim Valentino), are co-owned by Moore and Veitch.

Part of the split also includes a proviso that Bissette cannot reprint any of the previously published 1963 stories created jointly with Moore.

Over the years, Bissette and Veitch have tried to get something moving with some collection, perhaps even some version of an ending that doesn’t involve any of those Image characters as originally planned, but none of those plans, including Bissette’s 2010 plan for the release of Tales of the Uncanny – N-Man & Friends: A Naut Comics History Vol. 1 from About Comics, ever came to fruition.

Obviously, there’s plenty of room for Bissette to do what he wants with the characters moving forward – and some of that could well be what we’re going to see in the future.

As we’ve said… time will tell!