Tintin, the seminal hero of the pulp genre of boy adventurers, enters the United States public domain in 2025, though in a way that probably wouldn’t please his creator Hergé very much. Not necessarily because the cartoonist would be angry at other folks being able to legally make Tintin stories — but because the Tintin story entering the public domain is among his least favorite ones.
On Jan. 1, 2025, works first published in 1929 (and sound recordings from 1924) will enter into the public domain in the United States, and that includes a good portion of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, a work of explicit and broad anti-Soviet/Marxist propaganda that Hergé was so embarrassed by that he refused to allow it to be reprinted for 40 years.
But Tintin and his little dog Snowy aren’t the only comic strip characters whose earliest adventures will no longer be covered under copyright. Popeye (you know, the sailor man?) also appeared in E.C. Segar’s Thimble Theater for the first time in 1929. Though, at that point, Thimble Theater had already been running in the New York Journal for a decade — Popeye was merely a one-arc guest character in the adventures of Ham Gravy (boyfriend to Olive Oyl) and Castor Oyl (brother to… yeah, you get it). The nautical hombre hadn’t even developed his trademark spinach-powered super strength, and Olive Oyl wouldn’t break up with Ham Gravy to date him until 1930.
Other 2025 entries to the wild world of public domain art include many films from the bleeding edge of the Silent Era and the Talkie revolution, including Alfred Hitchcock’s first sound film, Blackmail, and the first feature-length Marx Brothers movie, The Cocoanuts. Numerous Disney animated shorts also enter the field, like “The Skeleton Dance,” whose dancing skeletons (what else?) have gained new life in celebratory Halloween gifs.
Mickey and Minnie Mouse themselves made a big splash last year when their earliest shorts hit public domain, enabling gleefully emotionally transgressive and carefully not-legally transgressive horror art, and more than a dozen more 1929 Mickey Mouse shorts will follow in 2025, including “The Karnival Kid,” in which the famous mouse has a speaking role for the first time.
What would this writer like to see in the public domain in 2025? Maybe our universal agreement that, in the pursuit of something to do with newly public domain art, low-budget horror is low-hanging fruit. (Of course we are getting Popeye the Slayer Man in 2025.)
For more notable works entering the public domain in the United States in 2025, you can check out the Center for the Study of the Public Domain’s yearly bulletin.
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