Legal Matters

In these end times, we'll likely see more of this kind of thing; a lone vigilante, striking out for justice, armed with a baton, a can of chemical irritant Freeze Plus P, and lead-lined gloves, until suffocating government interference shut him down. It all went down in Petoskey, MI where Mark Wayne Williams, 31, was peacefully minding his own business, climbing a building dressed as The Batman.

Some stories you just don't want to write up. Connecticut-based cartoonist Josue Rivera, who works under the pen name Justiniano, has been arrested and charged with first degree possession of child pornography after a thumb drive he supplied to a funeral home was found to have images of child porn on it.

Canadians seem like a peaceful, tolerant folk, but they have a record of seizing a lot of material at the border, including, this week, several copies of the comics anthology BLACK EYE. Editor Ryan Standfest has a complete account in the link. Basically cartoonist Tom Neely was carrying five copies of the book across the border, when the books were seized. Neely writes:

Just when things looked all lovey dovey on the convention front, Kiel Phegley reports that Canadian convention organizer Hobby Star has filed a lawsuit against Reed Pop and Zuffa LLC, owner of the UFC over the use of the term "Fan Expo," which Hobby Star claims to have trademarked. Reed and the UFC, the hugely popular mixed martial arts organization, have been putting on a series of "UFC Fan Expo" events in conjunction with their fight shows. However, Hobby Star puts on the Fan Expo Canada every year, generally considered the third biggest comic-con-type show in North America. The suit probably only covers the Canadian use of the term Fan Expo, however:

As we predicted last week, the Rob Granito team is attempting to get their second act rolling with a round of tell-all interviews. You may recall (it was all so long ago and little noted) that Granito is a person of dubious artistic skill who has been going around to comics shows for 15 years selling copied art that he's passed off as his own. Now, Comics Cube reports a letter is making the rounds:

Joanne Siegel, widow of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel and the model for Lois Lane, died on February 12th at age 93 after spending most of her adult life helping her husband fight legal battle to get adequately compensated for creating the first and best known superhero of them all. Before she died, she wrote a letter to Time Warner chairman Jeff Bewkes, asking for some civility. Nikki Finke has printed this letter and we're taking the liberty of reprinting it because the topic is so germane to the matters we cover here.

Aaron Colter at Comics Alliance rounds up the latest news of t-shirt makers ripping off artists for ideas without paying them, including the granddaddy of them all, Todd Goldman, whose idea thievery is notorious -- his huge David and Goliath novelty company has a long, well-documented track record for necoming "majorly inspired" by other artists' ideas and then paying a little hush money when caught. We had a whole bunch of posts about Goldman's past sins up here once, but his lawyer made us take them down. Let's hope AOL has a few more resources to keep this story up, because he's a total ______ and a ________ too.

A little catch-up here on a potentially groundbreaking legal story that we don't have time to completely break out, but basically early Betty Boop cartoons are now in the public domain, despite Fleischer Studios still owning the trademark and licensing out contemporary versions of Betty Boop (which you see all over the place on purses, Ts and so on.)

Hiroko Tabuchi of the NY Times has alengthy piece Japan's recent legislation banning sales of adult material to minors. Along the way there's a lot of "Only in Japan!" stuff:

Last week, retailer Travis Corcoran , owner of the Arlington, Mass. online retailer HeavyInk posted some repulsive comments on his personal blog about the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. We didn't cover them because they were so obviously a sickening play for attention: "1 down, 534 to go." After Bleeding Cool made the connection between Corcoran and the blog (which the retailer has since removed), creators tweeted that they didn't want to be sold at HeavyInk, and Corcoran responded with several rambling, defiant blog posts:

Two young men from LA have pled guilty to selling bogus Comic-Con passes. The two advertised their counterfeit passes on Craigslist and sold them to two women for $120 each. The purchasers were dismayed...

As you may have read, a gunman down in Panama City, Florida walked into a school board meeting, sprayed a V for Vendetta symbol on the wall, walked around with a gun, making a lot of statements, started shooting and eventually was shot by a deputy, then killed himself. (Reports differ on this, but the most credible reports are that he used his gun on himself.) This video is pretty unbelievable, especially the part where a woman sneaks behind him and whacks him with her purse. And gets worse from there.