Spectreman was a popular superhero TV show in Japan. Created by a man named Souji Ushio, it debuted on Fuji TV in January of 1971 and ran for 63 episodes. The shows were eventually dubbed into English and syndicated on American television commencing in the fall of 1978.
Omac was a comic book created by Jack Kirby and published by DC Comics beginning in 1974. It didn't last long and I have been known to make the case that it, like a lot of comics DC launched between around 1968 and 1976, was a good publication that should have and could have lasted longer if its publisher (a) was better at marketing its wares and (b) hadn't been so quick to cancel anything that wasn't an immediate hit. Omac has since been revived and reprinted many times indicating that some people liked it but its success has nothing to do with this piece.
What do these two properties have in common? There are a few similarities between the characters and their storylines, just as there are some similarities between almost any super-hero comic and almost any other super-hero comic. I'm no expert on Spectreman but the parallels seem to me to be few in number. Still, the other day on Facebook, someone asked if Omac could have in some way been inspired by Spectreman.
I sure don't think so. For one thing, Spectreman was not on American TV — or as far as I can tell, exhibited anywhere in this country — at the time Jack did the first issue of Omac. If it was somewhere, it wasn't in English and Jack did not speak or understand Japanese.
For another thing, Jack told the core idea of Omac to me and my then-partner Steve Sherman in either late 1969 or early 1970. It was an idea he developed while at Marvel a few years earlier…an idea for a Captain America series set in a bizarre future.
It began with the premise that Steve Rogers, the gent who then wore the costume of that star-spangled hero could not live forever. There would come a point — and I thought they'd already passed it — when a guy who was doing superhuman feats in World War II could not be doing superhuman feats a few decades later; not even if he'd been frozen in a block of ice for some of those years.
Ah, but the concept of Captain America could. The series Jack had in mind involved a new guy — or maybe even a gal — going by that name, wearing a futuristic patriotic costume in a very different era. Jack might have done it at Marvel had not the company refused to ever let him have a financial share in, or even a creator credit on any new book he launched or helped launch.
I do not remember every detail of the idea Jack told us then but I remember enough to know some of it formed the basis of Omac a few years later. But this piece is also really not about that.
What it is about is that people who rarely if ever create things for a living often don't get that because a book, movie, TV show or any form of entertainment has one or two things in common with something else, it doesn't mean that one was inspired by or copied from the other.
In Batman #156, which came out in April of 1963, Robin the Boy Wonder encountered a character named Ant-Man. A few years ago on the Internet, a fellow who couldn't seem to read dates kept insisting that Marvel copied its Ant-Man from that Ant-Man — this despite the fact that Marvel's came out close to a year earlier. When he finally grasped the concept of time moving in a forward direction, he became equally certain DC's was plagiarized from Marvel's.
Me, I think it was a coincidence and I have two reasons. One is that while folks in comics do sometimes copy what others have done, they usually wait until something is a smash success — which Ant-Man wasn't back then — to rip it off and they usually don't give their imitation the same name. Makes the crime kinda obvious.
Secondly, in an industry where someone thought of naming characters Batman or Hawkman or Catwoman or Spider-Man, it seems quite possible that two different people could independently think of pairing the word "ant" with the word "man." And the idea of having a teensy human in a normal-sized world had been around in fantasy and science-fiction way before DC launched the tiny version of The Atom (in 1961) or Quality Comics had Doll Man (in 1939).
I am not saying one person's idea might not inspire someone else's…and often you can lay the final work next to what inspired it and not see any similarity whatsoever. I'm just saying that just because one thing reminds you of another, that's not prima facie proof that the creator made the same connection you did.
Jack Kirby was not shy in admitting that the original Captain Marvel (the one who said "Shazam!" a lot) was a major inspiration for the Marvel version of Thor. And now that I mention it, some of you are probably saying, "Oh, yeah! I see the connection!" But that didn't occur to me until I heard Jack say it…and even if he hadn't said it and I noticed a tenuous connection, that wouldn't be proof that the latter was inspired by the former.