Miscellany: an introduction

 
Miscellany
Murder Ballads
Secret London

You won't find anything in this section that could comfortably fit into Murder Ballads or Secret London, but aside from that all bets are off.
What you will find includes:

Show Me the Bunny: Easter Fires in Texas. This piece describes my visit to a bizarre Texan festival which aims - in the words of it's own literature - to "blend the local fable of the Easter Bunny with the deeply religious facets of Easter". I wrote it back in 2001 as a sample chapter for a travel book that ended up never being published. Fortean Times bought a much, much shorter version of the same story later that year, but this is the first time it's appeared anywhere in its full form.

We had no room to include Pace in that project, so I'm using the material about him here instead

Black Swan Blues: America's first Motown. Harry Pace did everything Motown's Berry Gordy did, but did it 40 years earlier in an even more racist environment. His Black Swan Records was America's first major black-owned label, and the first to record ground-breaking blues artists like Alberta Hunter, Ethel Waters and Fletcher Henderson. I stumbled across Pace's story while researching a blues programme for BBC Radio 4, but we had no room to include him in that particular project so I'm using the material here instead.

Added in July 2010: Superman fights in court

When two teenagers named Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman back in 1938, they sold all the character's rights to DC Comics for just $130. They and their families have been battling the publisher for a better deal ever since.
    In 2008, Siegel's family won a historic victory when the US courts awarded them a 50% share in the copyright of Superman's first appearance. Shuster's family has its own action underway, and looks set to win the remaining 50% of those rights soon.
    Meanwhile, relatives of Jack Kirby, the man who did more than any other individual to create all Marvel's key characters, have also launched a legal challenge.
    The circumstances are very different, but if the Kirby family succeeds, Marvel will no longer fully own the characters behind multi-million dollar movie franchises like Spider-Man, Iron Man and the X-Men.
    With money like that at stake, the resulting courtroom battles are a match for anything in the comic books themselves. For a ringside seat, just click here.