Results of the lawsuit
Fawcett Comics ended up cancelling all of its superhero comics, selling the reprint rights for Hoppy the Marvel Bunny to Charlton Comics, who re-lettered the artwork to identify the strip as Hoppy the Magic Bunny. The entire creative staff of the comic book division was laid off, including noted comic book creators such as C. C. Beck and Otto Binder, and the comics division was shut down.[4] L. Miller and Son, a small British publisher of black-and-white Captain Marvel reprints, adapted Captain Marvel into a derivative superhero, Marvelman, instead of folding their comic book business. This character enjoyed similar popularity in the 1950s and was revived in the 1980s, and itself became the subject of a copyright and trademark dispute after the publisher of its North American reprints ceased operations.
Captain Marvel remained out of print for the rest of the 1950s and the entirety of the 1960s, a period during which superhero comics regained their popularity. In 1967 Marvel Comics trademarked a character of the same name for use in Marvel Super-Heroes #12, and a follow-up self-titled series, which created some difficulties when DC licensed the rights to all of Fawcett's superheroes in 1972, and revived Captain Marvel in a periodical entitled Shazam!. They also obtained reprint rights to the original Fawcett comic books, and began running older stories in their various reprint titles as well as Shazam! itself. However, the license agreement required a per-use fee for every appearance by a Fawcett character, which limited DC's willingness to use the characters, and as a result most of them appeared very rarely once the Shazam! series ended in 1978.
In 1987, DC Comics relaunched Captain Marvel in a miniseries, Shazam!: The New Beginning, and purchased the full rights to all of the Fawcett superhero characters by 1991.[1] Captain Marvel has not proven to be a modern-day success for DC to the degree it had been for Fawcett, due in part to DC not being able to properly promote the character under the "Captain Marvel" name, which is a Marvel Comics trademark. As a result, when DC Comics rebooted its entire comic line under the New 52 initiative in 2011, Captain Marvel was renamed "Shazam" and was reintroduced to comics the following year under that name.[8]
National v. Fawcett is still an often-referenced case in the areas of copyright law and plagiarism because of its readily-accessible subject matter, and the popularity of its author, Judge Hand, among legal scholars. It was occasionally nicknamed Kent v. Batson, a reference to the two superheroes' respective secret identities: National's Clark Kent and Fawcett's Billy Batson.
