But no, I take your point. Instead of “on-going,” though, can I suggest “original?” That would include mini-series, stand-alone graphic novels, and one-shot comics meant to expand upon (or, sometimes, conclude) film and television series.
That being said, there’s a few spoiler comics that can grandfather in a huge amount of public domain characters. Fables, *Kill Shakespeare*, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, for example, collectively give us virtually every character from European folk lore, the works of William Shakespeare, and a healthy chunk of notable English literature of the last five hundred years.
A decent point, perhaps. I think there’s a grey area that could be subject to interpretation. Take, for example, Death. Death has been portrayed in movies in LOTS of different ways, and also in comics in lots of different ways; so to just say “So and so played Death in this movie” might not work, but if someone made a cinematic version of Sandman including Death as a character, and eventually Marvel made an Infinity Gauntlet movie that has Marvel’s version of Death, I would say that a particular interpretation of Death might count, but not Death in a general, all-encompassing sense.
So where does that leave characters like Dracula, the Invisible Man, Mr. Hyde, etc.? That’s admittedly harder to pin down. With something like Star Wars, you have an adaptation that includes established characters that don’t deviate much from the cinematic characters. With Dracula, are we talking about ANY Dracula, from Van Helsing Dracula to Coppola’s Dracula to Blade’s “Drake”? Definitely some hard to define boundaries there.
…with Tommy Lee Jones as Agent K, after Two-Face in Batman Forever (with Jim Carrey as the Riddler after The Mask before Colonel Stars And Stripes in Kick Ass 2.
Ron Ely played Tarzan for 57 episodes before playing Doc Savage (who was, AFAICT, the first fictional character ever referred to as ‘a superhero’) and, y’know, Superman.
I think it’s a mistake to list Smith’s role in MiB. If Jay’s a superhero, you’re basically saying that any action movie hero is a superhero, and that stretches the definition to the point of uselessness. Any actor who’s headlined two different action movie properties would qualify.
That’s a good point. I think the distinction here lies between characters, and character concepts. “Death is a person,” is a character concept, much like “rogueish starship captain.” But Terry Pratchett’s Death isn’t the same character as Neil Gaiman’s Death, anymore than Han Solo is the same character as Malcolm Reynolds.
So, I’d say that all those Draculas count as the same character, because they’re all explicitly meant to be that guy in the book. Claude Raines counts for The Invisible Man, because the character of Griffen shows up in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which details events that happened to Griffen after the end of the original story. Kevin Bacon would not, because his updated version of the story, Hollow Man, features an entirely different character - Sebastian Caine.
If we can include voice work, David Warner played Jor-El in “Lois and Clark” and the voice of Ra’s al Ghul in both the animated Batman and Superman series as well as in Batman Beyond.
Cuckoorex didn’t limit the subject to superheroes only. He said that any character who had their own comic book origin would qualify. Since Men In Black originated as a comic book, Will Smith as Jay would make the cut.
