>>93235375Yes and no. It's complicated with Namor, but right now the situation is this:
The court could not find any evidence that Motion Pictures Funnies Weekly #1 which contained the first half of the first Namor story was ever actually published. The only extant copies are the publisher copies that were kept by former Funnies Inc sales manager Frank Torpey. There have been rumors of the issue actually being handed out in theatres (which was the plan) but there's no proof, and no "customer owner" copy has ever manifested. As such, the first comic that was actually published with Namor in it was Marvel Comics #1, which was a comic done as work for hire for Martin Goodman's not-quite-Marvel comic.
Now here's where it gets really skeevy. Funnies Inc retained rights to their characters at the start, according to Goodman's first editor in chief Joe Simon. But Goodman quickly figured out that he was making a lot of money off Marvel (Mystery) Comics and he could make even more if he actually owned all of it and could freely produce more comics with the Torch and Namor without the input of Funnies Inc. So he ordered Simon to start putting pressure on the workshop in 1940, demanding they produce stories faster, do more pages, and CONSTANTLY sending pages back for revision, slowly eroding the financial gain per page for Funnies Inc. The tactic eventually worked, and Funnies Inc signed over ALL rights to their works, past and present to Martin Goodman, who proceeded to exploit Namor and the Torch especially, since they were the two big sellers. So in pure legal terms, Martin Goodman owned all of the Marvel Mystery character gallery, and he later signed it over to Marvel as a corporation. Meaning people like Bill Everett and Carl Burgos' heirs are totally out in the cold for any hope of getting money from those creations. And it gets extra funny when you consider that nowadays Joe Simon's own heirs have tried to get rights back to Captain America who Simon himself created
