20 Comic Characters That Are Total Rip-Offs‏

7. Fighting American

Fighting American couldn't be more obvious a rip-off without actually breaking some intellectual property laws. In fact he was created to challenge those particular laws, but we'll get into that in a moment.

The gist of the character is that during the early days of the Cold War, scrawny underachiever Nelson Flagg volunteers for an experimental government program that gives him super strength, speed and agility, allowing him to avenge the death of his war hero older brother. Also he had a special shield. And was super into America.

Totally a rip-off of: C'mon now

Joe Simon and Jack Kirby cooked up Fighting America in 1954 as a protest against Marvel (then Timely) Comics, who had kept the copyright to their original creation, Captain America. Obviously he was nowhere near as popular as Cap, but his story does get a lot weirder from there. During the mid-nineties Heroes Reborn event Marvel hired Jeph Loeb and Rob Liefeld to work on an updated Captain America mini-series. Also during that event Marvel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, resulting in Liefeld getting kicked off the book after refusing to take a pay cut.

Never one to keep a good - or usually awful - story down, The Rob took the story to Joe Simon, altering the artwork just barely so it could be a new Fighting America series rather than Cap. Doubly weird is that initially Simon asked for too much for the licensing rights, so Liefeld tried to make his own knock-off of Fighting American called Agent America. A knock-off of a knock-off. Amazing.