An ashcan comic is an American comic book originally created solely to establish trademarks on

potential titles and not intended for sale. The practice was common in the 1930s and 1940s when
the comic book industry was in its infancy, but was phased out after updates to US trademark law. The
term was revived in the 1980s by Bob Burden, who applied it to prototypes of his self-published comic
book. Since the 1990s, the term has been used to describe promotional materials produced in large print
runs and made available for mass consumption. In the film and television industries, the term has been
adopted for low-grade material created to preserve a claim to licensed property rights.

The modern comic book was created in the 1930s, and rapidly grew in popularity.[1] In the
competition to secure trademarks on titles intended to sound thrilling, publishers including All-
American Publications and Fawcett Comics developed the ashcan edition,[2] which was the
same size as regular comics and usually had a black and white cover.[2] Typically, cover art was
recycled from previous publications with a new title pasted to it.[3] Interior artwork ranged from
previously published material in full color[2][3] to unfinished pencils without word
balloons.[4] Some ashcans were only covers with no interior pages.[5] Production quality on
these works range from being hand-stapled with untrimmed pages to machine-stapled and
machine trimmed.[5] Once the practice was established, DC Comics used ashcans more
frequently than any other publisher.[5] Not all the titles secured through ashcan editions were
actually used for regular publications.[6]
The purpose of the ashcan editions was to fool the US Patent & Trademark Office into believing
the book had actually been published.[7] Clerks at the office would accept the hastily produced
material as legitimate, granting the submitting publisher a trademark to the title.[8][9] Since the
ashcans had no other use, publishers printed as few as two copies; one was sent to the
Trademark Office, the other was kept for their files.[10] Occasionally, publishers would send
copies to distributors or wholesalers by registered mail to further establish publication
dates,[3] but nearly all ashcan comic editions were limited to five copies or fewer.[2]
At the time, garbage cans were commonly called "ash cans" because they were used to hold soot
and ash from wood and coal heating systems.[4] The term was applied to these editions of comics
because they had no value and were meant to be thrown away after being accepted by the
Trademark Office.[4][7] Some spare copies were given to editors, employees, and visitors to keep
as souvenirs.[5][7] Changes to the United States trademark law in 1946 allowed publishers to
register a trademark with an intent to use instead of a finished product,[5] and the practice of
creating and submitting ashcans was abandoned when publishers began to consider it an
unnecessary effort lawyers used to justify a fee.[6] Because of their rarity, ashcans from this era
are desired by collectors and often fetch a high price.