Leopold and Loeb Puns

I've read about this case a lot and encountered quite a few responses from contemporary Jewish sources in newspapers and the like, touching on their opinion of the case/making the killers an example to other Jewish young people/apprehension about an infamous crime being associated with the Jewish community in Chicago/etc. (Both young men were ethnically Jewish; neither family was practicing Judaism, and that gets remarked on too by more traditional commentators.) But I've never encountered anything that dealt with contemporary gay perspectives on the case (from Jewish people or otherwise) rather than retrospective dealings in the context of plays and films inspired by the case, i.e., Hitchcock's Rope. There weren't necessarily similar print venues for LGBT people, Jewish or not, to document their thoughts and feelings on the court case in a public way in 1924. But do we have any way of knowing how the case was reacted to, even by individual gay people, either at the time or in near (pre-1960s) retrospect? Either within the US or abroad -- even a mention in a contemporary diary/letter/whatever would satisfy me.

My Gen Z students are very curious about the 90s especially mid-late, pre-millennium 90s. One of my students had drawn a woman inspired by this era and I said, “Yeah, the hair, the glasses, the neckline. Totally reminds me of Lisa Loeb. Nice work.”

“Who,” they all demanded, “is Lisa Loeb???”

“You know, Stay.”

“No, we don’t know.”

“‘Cause I missed you’?” I hint pointlessly. I only receive blank stares.

Oh. God. These reminders. They just sneak up on me. Students are young. I am aging. Agh. Time is relentless. How to bridge this—

Cue music from someone’s phone. A student had found the video.

Upon hearing the opening cords, I am helplessly transported. My head is swaying, I start drifting from the 21st Century back...back... And I thought what I felt was simple...And I thought that I don't belong...And now that I am leaving...Now I know that I did something wrong 'cause I missed you...Yeah, I missed you...

They are watching me carefully. I am visibly time-warped by this song. I am a specimen from a simpler time. They are nodding encouragingly. Wondering, will our teacher sing?

I snap myself out of it. Literally shake my head to get the song out.

No, she will not. Not this time, little ones. But she came extremely close.

Edit: formatting

Seriously, this is ripe for the MCU treatment. In the first few issues we meet Sam Alexander whose father was a Nova, though Sam thinks all of his stories of deep space battles are just drunken ramblings. His father disappears and who shows up but Rocket and Gamora to tell Sam that his lineage is key to stopping an incoming Chitauri invasion, and that they’ve been tasked with training him to be the last Nova.

Really good stuff and it’s got MCU written all over it.

Is LOEB Public Domain?

I am familiar with all the public domain dating, but on the LOEB FAQ's site there is a public domain sticker at the very bottom so I am not sure exactly what to go with here?

OK, my first post here—if there’s a better subreddit for it, please let me know.

I recently started reading some classic comic books for the first time; I hadn’t read any since I was a kid (and, then, the ones I read were mostly Tintin, anyway). I read and enjoyed some of Alan Moore’s work: Watchmen, The Killing Joke, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, “For the Man who Has Everything,” The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And several of the Legends of the Dark Knight tales, though unfortunately I didn’t much like Batman: Gothic, which had a fantastic concept but poor execution.

But my favorites of the comic book stories I read were the collaborations between Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale, both for DC and for Marvel. Even when I thought they missed the mark (A Superman for All Seasons, Catwoman: When in Rome, Captain America: White), what they were trying to do was interesting, and when they hit the mark, it was excellent.

Needless to say, then, but I really enjoyed The Long Halloween, Dark Victory, and Haunted Knight.

Something niggled at me while I read them, though: Jeph Loeb, the writer, is clearly inspired by Ellery Queen.

In case you don’t know who “Ellery Queen” is, here’s the Wikipedia link, but the basic rundown is that “he” was the pen name of two cousins who wrote mystery novels together from 1929 to 1971. “Ellery Queen” is also the name of the detective character in those books.

As I’m an EQ fan, I liked that inspiration very much, but I haven’t been able to find any discussion of it anywhere on the web. It seems like a major source for TLH in particular has fallen through the cracks, unfortunately.

TLH’s first solution is largely borrowed in its entirety from Ellery Queen’s The Tragedy of X (written under yet another pseudonym—yes, it’s confusing, as befits mystery-writers). The settings (New York, Gotham) are close. The second solution is a trick EQ used in Cat of Many Tails (which also had to have inspired TLH—serial killer on the loose, city on edge) and Inspector Queen’s Own Case.

Loeb’s organizing stories around patterns, whether they be holidays in TLH and DV, colors in the Marvel series, or seasons in ASfAS, is also Queenian. Queen’s Calamity Town, for example, is also centered on killings that take place on holidays, and many of his/their books have similar patterns. (Examples: the 12 Days of Christmas in The Finishing Stroke, the 10