Each Sunday I toss my neighbor’s paper down the steep steps from her driveway to her door. During one toss, I saw that Peanuts was still appearing as a Sunday cartoon. Since Charles Schulz is no longer with us, I wondered if someone else was drawing Peanuts. I did learn that Boom Studios has published new Peanuts stories, such as the graphic novel Snoopy: A Beagle of Mars.  But the cartoons in the Sunday paper are reprints.

The continuation of characters and settings beyond the death of the original creator is not new.  Nor is the transfer of creative control of characters and settings anything new. Characters such as Superman and Batman have lived on to be monetized after their creators have died. Star Trek continued after the death of Gene Rodenberry with the Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise and beyond. Frank Herbert’s Dune universe has spawned numerous books, including prequels. The same is true of Asimov’s Foundation series.

In general, the legality of the continuation of characters and settings can be easily settled (with obvious exceptions). Intellectual properties are just that, properties. So, they can be inherited, bought and sold like any other property. If a company owns the legal rights to Peanuts, then they can do with it as they wish within whatever agreements might be in effect. Naturally, there can be nasty legal battles and disputes when it comes to specific properties, but this is not anything legally special about even beloved intellectual properties like Peanuts or Star Trek. As a philosopher, I do have thoughts about this.

There is a moral question of whether creations should be continued after the death of the creator. This can, of course, be tied to legal concerns in many ways. If, for example, the creator agreed to this continuation in a contract or other agreement, then the continuation would be morally acceptable, if the agreement was not coerced. If the creator made it clear that they did not want the work continued, then even if someone (say a relative who inherited the property) had the legal right to continue the work, then doing so would be morally dubious. This would also apply to cases in which characters and settings had entered the public domain. While people would have the legal right to use the characters and settings, there is still the moral question of whether they should do so—especially if they degrade the characters and settings. For example, the John Carter movie is based on Burroughs’ works which are now public domain. However, the treatment of these excellent works was so awful that one could argued that Disney did something morally wrong. I am also concerned with the matter of aesthetic identity.

Philosophers love to debate identity, especially personal identity. Fortunately,  a discussion of aesthetic identity can bypass many of the usual metaphysical problems of identity since the fictional characters and settings do not have the ontological status of actual people and settings/ Unless, of course, one believes that fictional worlds are also actual worlds. However, there are still concerns about identity in aesthetics.

In the case of characters, the concern is like that of personal identity: when a character is continued by someone other than the original creator, is the character still the same character? For example, if someone else draws and writes Charlie Brown, is that character still Charlie Brown in terms of aesthetic identity? Or is it a character that looks similar and says similar things but is a mere imitator, a doppelgänger? In some cases, the continuity of aesthetic identity does seem possible. After all, it seems that many comic book characters retain sufficient identity to still be the same characters even though they are drawn and scripted by different people (and played by different actors in movies). For example, most would agree that Spider Man is still Spider Man across most of the movies.  

 Interestingly, it can be argued that in some cases even the creator fails to preserve the aesthetic identity of a character. What is needed, of course, is a full account of the aesthetic identity of characters—a project that goes beyond this short essay.

In the case of settings, aesthetic identity is also of concern. For example, there is the question of whether the universe in the newer prequels to Dune is similar enough to Herbert’s Dune universe in terms of its aesthetic qualities to be the same universe. As another example, the latest versions of Star Trek and Star Wars raise questions about whether they are still Star Trek and Star Wars in terms of aesthetic identity. I know there are dumb culture war fights over Trek and Star Wars. Star Trek has always been woke—just watch the original series, so saying modern Trek is not Trek because it has something to say about racism is an error. But one can raise good faith concerns about whether the Trek retain the aesthetic identity of Star Trek. There is also the question of whether the modern Trek shows are good; after all the original series had some bad episodes (“Spock’s Brain”) but were still Trek.

 While the identity of a setting would include obvious factors such as getting the locations, inhabitants, history and such right, there is also the matter of capturing the “look and feel” of the setting. Beyond that, there are also the deeper qualities that define a setting, such as the Star Trek universe.  So, while a book might get all the facts about the Foundation universe right, it might fail to capture the aesthetic qualities that made the Foundation universe the Foundation universe. As with the aesthetic identity of characters, the specific conditions of the aesthetic identity of settings would also need to be developed. As I am all too familiar with the endless manufactured culture war fights, I always strive to be clear that I am not engaged in that sort of thing. My concern here is not with the manufactured culture war fight over identity politics, but with the philosophic subject of aesthetic identity of characters and settings. That is, what makes, for example, Spider Man the same character across the spider verse?