terry2012

I forgot to mention this before, but Blue Dynamo's creator, Corey Grant, is a wrestler. According to his Facebook page, he is:

• Manager, color commentator. at War Wrestling
• Manager at New Ohio Wrestling.
• Manager at Future Great Wrestling.
• Former Manager at Pro Wrestler

• Worked at Ohio Championship Wrestling.

His wrestling name is Ripper Blackhart. :)

I think it's more just a case of "summer blaze" was known to both creators as a phrase, and it's wordplay that makes a good name. According to the OSC group I'm in on Facebook, they are at least aware of each other.

I don't think plagiarism is really a concern here- it's more likely a similar train of thought leads to similar characters, which is why we have to have copyrights and trademarks to begin with. It's just that some of these guys didn't check into whether there was any crossover with their names. ...I should probably check into that when I post these things.

Yeah, I like it, but I always like a good wordplay name. :)

(Sorry- this got a little long)

One of the interesting things about Open Sourced Characters (OSC) is that some of these creators are just out there cranking out their characters with no regard to what other creators are releasing to the Public Domain as an OSC. It creates some interesting commonalities and duplications that wouldn't be allowed in copyrighted and trademarked characters, but because these are all public domain, it can fly.

This Summer Blaze, by Christian Dimaapi, shares the same name as Miss August, by Corey Grant- her real name is also Summer Blaze.

Another character by Dimaapi, Miss January, shares a name with another Grant character, Miss January of The Calendar Girls.

They're clearly meant to be individual characters, but I'm going to see if I can mash them up since they share the same names. The other nice thing about OSC's being public domain is that I don't have to use the bits I don't want to, so if I have to shave parts to make them fit together, I can.

***

The flipside of the name duplication is that these creators don't always check to see if the names they're using are already copyrighted. So, you have to be careful of that. Corey Grant created a character called Mr. Midnight, and I thought it was really cool, but Mr. Midnight has been used a few times in comics already.

However, he had another character called Count Midnight that was a vampire, and made for a good combo with his Mr. Midnight. So, that's what I did. It gets me around the previous copyrights, does away with the name duplication, allows me to use Mr. Midnight's look as an alternate look for Count Midnight, and makes my version of the OSC unique to any other version (which means it's copyrighted to me- yay).

I love playing with these OSC's. In a way they're more fun than those Golden Age characters that fell into the Public Domain, because there's little to no backstory to go with them, and outside of the creators, no one is going to care if I ignore bits to make them work for me. It's like your neighbor that used to create characters with you giving them to you, because they've decided that they're bored with it. You suddenly have all these new characters you can do anything with. It's great! :)

Thank

@terry2012: Thank you very much! I wasn’t expecting to like it this much either.

Hopefully if they make a sequel, it's at least a little better.

@terry2012: Oh yeah that's a long standing bug lol. You usually have to open it on a separate window or whatnot.

Pictures are a bit funny on mobile, not sure how that happens but knowing CV it's probably apart of some terrible legacy code that never got fixed like eight years ago.

Lol pretty much that, yeah.

I mean I don't really have any time management, I just tend to focus really hard on one thing at a time. Helps a lot when looking for feats.

@terry2012: Thanks! Did you expect higher or lower?

@terry2012: Thank you!