Gary Tyrell has been all over the Jess Fink/Hot Topic controversy. (It’s not really a controversy — it’s pretty clear what happened: they stole her soap.) It’s still unclear as to whether Hot Topic is actually dealing with the situation, Tyrell reports.

In the meantime the blog Hurfadurf has started a “I Designed an Original T-Shirt!” of which the above is one of the few which we can reprint on a family blog.

It seems that Hot Topic has stated selling a t-shirt which is a dead ringer for one created by cartoonist Jess Fink. She isn’t taking it lying down.

I’m sorry but I really don’t think this design is coincidentally or simply inspired by clip art. Things right down to the pose of the character and the look of the feet and hands are the same, even the color. I do not know if you know this guys, but most soap is white. Why not make your rip off soap blue or white? I am not trying to give any ideas to any further assholes, I am trying to point out how blatantly similar this crap is.

Fink’s original t-shirt was sold on the Threadless site, and she reports they will pursue action against Hot Topic. A friend of Fink’s created the above banner which many sites are posting in solidarity.

More info here, including mention of another t-shirt designer we can’t talk about here.

Danish authorities have arrested three people who were allegedly planning to assassinate one of the Mohammed cartoonists. A 40-year-old Dane of Moroccan origin and two Tunisians were arrested. The Dane ill be charged with a terrorism offense and the Tunisians deported.

The target of the plot, the intelligence service said, was the cartoonist for the Danish newspaper Morgenavisen Jullands-Posten, which first published the controversial drawings in September 2005. The paper identified the cartoonist as Kurt Westergaard.

“Not wanting to take any undue risks [the intelligence service] has decided to intervene at a very early stage in order to interrupt the planning and the actual assassination,” the statement by Jakob Scharf, the agency’s director general, said. “Thus, this morning’s operation must first and foremost be seen as a preventive measure where the aim has been to stop a crime from being committed.”

Westergaard and his wife have been under police protection for three months. In a statement, the 73-year-old Westergaard wrote:

Of course I fear for my life when the police intelligence service say that some people have concrete plans to kill me. But I have turned fear into anger and resentment.

While this is surely a “what a horrible world,” story, at least a potentially even more horrible story has been averted. For now.

MEANWHILEFox is suing Warners over the labyrinthine rights to the Watchmen movie:

Fox claims that between 1986 and 1990, it acquired all movie rights to the 12-issue DC Comics series and screenplays by Charles McKeown and Sam Hamm. In 1991, Fox assigned some rights via a quitclaim to Largo International with the understanding that the studio held exclusive rights to distribute the first motion picture based on “Watchmen,” according to the lawsuit.

When Largo dismantled, the rights were transferred to producer Lawrence Gordon. Under a “turnaround agreement” between Fox and Gordon, the producer agreed to pay a buy-out price to Fox if he entered into any agreement with another studio or third party to develop or produce “Watchmen,” among other things.

The project apparently bounced around to Universal and Paramount before returning to Warners. Now, Fox claims that neither Gordon nor Warners has paid the buy-out price or advised the studio of any other conditions required under the agreement, including procedures necessary to acquire the rights to “Watchmen” from Fox.

If you canfollow all that you should get a job as an agent for sure. ICv2 has some good analysis”

Typically these sorts of rights disputes between studios are settled before any suits are filed and usually before a film goes into production (remember how rights disputes held up the production of decent Spider-Man movie for years), but perhaps Fox feels that it has Warners over a barrel with the fate of a potentially lucrative superhero film at stake.

Perhaps.

The Writer’s Guild strike is over. Joe Harris reports from the East Coast::

We didn’t get everything we wanted. Didn’t get a lot of what we wanted, actually. And we certainly didn’t get as much as we damn well deserved. 17 days of what’s now called a promotional window to watch programs online without having the pay writers their justly due residuals is odious in my opinion… even if the studios maintain that TiVo and DVR watching has changed the way viewers watch programming for the first/initial time.

Mark Evanier reports from the West.

A feeling of victory seemed to be the prevailing mood. I lost count of the well-deserved standing ovations and when they opened the floor microphones for questions or arguments, they began getting only questions and minor suggestions about deal points. As of the moment I left, no one had suggested that the deal not be ratified…and it would have been very easy for someone to say that if they’d genuinely felt it was improvable.

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Evan Dorkin talks about DC’s “cartoonist ban”:

First up from the files, the only piece of art I was allowed to draw for the Superman and Batman: World’s Funnest book for DC Comics. Not that it appears anywhere in the book. Long story short, part of which has been covered here before: DC has a clause that prevents folks from writing and drawing material unless said person is on the payroll or incorporated. Fear of lawsuits from freelancers claiming their work-for-hire entitles them to ownership of Batman or whatever the hell under some newly-inaugurated copyright laws or whatever the hell. I guess based on DC’s history they fully expect people to try to do whatever underhanded thing they can to chisel money and ownership of other people’s characters when the opportunity even vaguely arises. Or whatever the hell.

End result, I wasn’t allowed to draw a page of World’s Funnest even though I tried to get around it by various means, all of which went bust. Can I have someone else write the page I would draw? A hassle, apparently. Pretend Sarah wrote it? We’d get in trouble and the world would break in half. Use a pseudonym? It could mean jail time and Siegel and Schuster regaining control of Pete Ross. Sign an agreement that I wouldn’t pursue my questionable rights to the DC empire if I drew a goddamned page of a comic? No, no, a thousand times no. They wouldn’t put me on the payroll for a lousy single page, and I wasn’t going to incorporate for a lousy single page, so, no go (Somehow this hasn’t been an issue at Marvel, expect them to lose the rights to every one of their characters any minute now. I’ve got dibs on Fight-Man and whoever else is left over after the great purge).

An Italian court has named Donald Duck, Daisy Duck, Tweety and Mickey Mouse as witnesses in a counterfeiting trial .

The court summons cites Titti, Paperino, Paperina, Topolino — the Italian names for the characters — as damaged parties in the criminal trial of a Chinese man accused of counterfeiting products of Disney and Warner Bros.

While the story summons jokes of all levels– “I didn’t say she was crazy, your honor, I said she was fuckin’ Goofy!”–alas, it is just a clerical error. Instead of writing down the companies as witnesses, a clerk wrote down the names of the characters. That is fortunate, because it is unlikely Disney would have allowed Mickey and Donald to be extradited for the trial.

An editorial in the local Rome, GA paper points out the overwhelming absurdity of the Gordon Lee case:

AS THIS SPACE has repeatedly pointed out, the zeal with which elected officials are pursuing consistently trivial “family value” issues locally reflects negatively on the community. First of all, the single theme of these “big deals” give the appearance of Romans being throwback Puritans left behind by the sexual revolution — hardly true, as the local unwed pregnancy rate alone attests.

The local chamber of commerce and others work overtime to enhance the image of Rome as a great place to live, work and play — and some local officials seem to work overtime to make certain nobody outside of Rome believes it.

This comic-book case is particularly nutty — and if our observations now makes it impossible for an impartial jury to be seated, then so be it. Any jury anywhere else in the state would probably laugh this one out of court.

The piece goes on to reveal the piece de resistance of all this — near the courtroom where this legal farce is taking place, stands a statue of Romulus and Remus suckling the teats of a she-wolf, with their own naughty bits dangling out. “They don’t show a thing that the Picasso picture didn’t also show,” states the editorial.

Bully even found a photo of it.

As the editorial suggests, Georgia is particularly prone to these kind of senseless prosecutorial vendettas. The state where, until 1998 oral sex between a husband and wife was a crime punishable by 20 years in jail, was also the setting of the the Genarlow Wilson outrage: a 17-year-old boy was sentenced to 10 years in jail as a sex offender for having consensual oral sex (on tape!!!) with a 15-year-old girl. He ended up serving two years of his sentence while prosecutors fought appeal after appeal as the absurd case kept being overturned.

Our advice? Stay out of Georgia.

Who would have thought one of the biggest stories of the year would have broken over the Thanksgiving weekend? For those of you who have been living in a cave–or possibly on vacation for a week–both Marvel and DC have threatened comic book site Z-Cult with legal action regarding their plentiful torrents of comics. The site has agreed to remove ALL Marvel comics trackers, and to delay posting new DC comics trackers for 30 days. Newsarama has several news stories, and a zillion comments at their message boards. It appears that Top Cow, which has its own downloadable comics program in place, has joined Marvel and DC is asking for the trackers to be taken down.

We’re especially sad about all this because we’ve been getting rid of tons of books we had around the house for reference, thinking “Well, if we REALLY need it, we can just go to Z-cult”…and now THIS happens. Sheesh.

This post is just a place marker really as we attempt to catch up on this story, but Glenn Haumann over at ComicMix adds color with his account of a meeting with DC to deal with illegally pirating…2 1/2 years ago.. The post has a bunch of informative comments from ex-DC staffers, as well.

Do you remember the Spanish cartoon controversy?. Of course you do. Two cartooners for the satirical Spanish cartoon magazine El Jueves were accused of making fun of the royal family with a cover which showed the crown prince having…relations, let’s say, with his wife. So you could say that they WERE making fun of the royal family, which happens to be a crime in Spain. Yesterday, they were found GUILTY, according to this story in the UK Telegraph and artist Guillermo Torres and writer Manel Fontdevila were fined €3000 each.

Judge José María Vázquez Honrubia ruled that the two men “vilified the Crown in the most gratuitous and unnecessary way”. He said that they could serve 10 months house arrest if they refused to pay.

The public prosecutor, Miguel Angel Carballo, had demanded a fine of €6,000 each.

The duo has said they will appeal, but they seem to be enjoying the notoriety in the photo above.

If you keep reading this Telegraph piece, you get some bonus snark. According to the paper, “Spain has developed the most lurid pornography in Europe, with magazines and television shows dedicated to the sex lives of the rich and famous.” We also learn that

The cartoonists’ skill in poking fun at the ruling classes was perhaps nowhere better expressed than during their golden age in Britain between about 1780 and 1820.

The greatest exponents were James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson, whose main target was Napoleon Bonaparte.

so take that Ted Rall!

Ronald Castree has been found guilty of the 1975 child murder of Lesley Molseed. Castree is a well-known comics retailer in Manchester, England. A different man had been convicted of the crime, but released after DNA evidence proved his innocence.

A 54-year-old man has been jailed for life for the murder of schoolgirl Lesley Molseed more than 30 years ago.

Ronald Castree, of Brandon Crescent, Oldham, Greater Manchester, was told by the judge at Bradford Crown Court that he must serve a minimum of 30 years.

Lesley, 11, vanished from her Rochdale home in October 1975. Her body was later found on moors in West Yorkshire.

She had been stabbed and sexually assaulted. Castree’s DNA matched semen found on Lesley’s clothing.

Accused comics shop owner Michael George is attempting legal maneuverings to go free on bond while he awaits trial for the murder of his wife,the Tribune-Democrat reports. They say he is not a danger to the community. From reading the story one can infer that the new evidence that caused the case to be reopened was a phone call which placed George at the comics shop just before his then-wife was slain, execution style. George claims to have been home with his mother at the time. George’s lawyer brought word of his client’s mood:

Marlinga said George has recovered from the shock of his arrest and is optimistic he will be cleared. “His spirits have greatly improved,” Marlinga said. “He really feels confident.”

LOST co-creator (and sometime comic book writer) Damon Lindeolf had this to say today in the New York Times.

I will probably be dragged through the streets and burned in effigy if fans have to wait another year for “Lost” to come back. And who could blame them? Public sentiment may have swung toward the guild for now, but once the viewing audience has spent a month or so subsisting on “America’s Next Hottest Cop” and “Celebrity Eating Contest,” I have little doubt that the tide will turn against us.

And there’s always interesting strike stuff at Mark Evanier’s blog.

Posted Mark Coale

Many posters here on the Beat and elsewhere have wondered if it is really in the interests of the community of Rome. GA to spend money to prosecute Gordon Lee for two years. Couldn’t that money be used to prosecute drug pushers at the schoolyard or something else that’s more of a direct threat to our nation’s children than a bookseller who made a simple one-time dumb mistake?

It seems gadfly at large George Anderson feels the same way. Anderson, who is another bookseller in Rome, has filed an open records request with the county to find out the cost of prosecuting Lee, as well as a separate case involving the owner of an adult bookstore.

It’s not a first for Anderson, who has become something of a local legend.

What Anderson does is file ethics complaints against government officials. Not one or two complaints, or even a dozen, but 125 last year alone. Since 1997, he’s filed more than 200.

The second-place filer, Cobb Countian Patricia Fuller, wheezes in with a paltry 56. In just one year, the State Ethics Commission’s six-person staff saw the number of complaints it handles triple, from 65 in 1999 to 215 a year later.

Teddy Lee, executive director of the commission, attributes the upward trend almost entirely to Anderson. “He has increased our workload tremendously,” Lee acknowledges.

We know one thing, when Anderson finds out, we’d like to know, too.
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This video is making the rounds with a clever multi-media presentation of the precepts behind the WGA strike. In a nutshell: the writer want their cut of internet profits. Which, studios say, don’t exist.

Right.

There’s a lesson for EVERY creator here — don’t give up your rights. You may have created Vitameatavegemin. Please, watch.

Todd Alcott has more, including a link to a suspiciously articulate article by Alec Baldwin.

Big Producer calls, or, more likely, Big Producer has Enthusiastic Minion call. Enthusiastic Minion tells me a little bit about Massive Pop Behemoth and how it’s going to be a big big hit and make everyone a ton of money with toys and video games and spinoffs and all I have to do is come up with a compelling story that will appeal to absolutely everyone, offend absolutely no one, and make the movie a smash four-quadrant $500 million hit, a beachhead for MPB’s life-long juggernaut upon popular culture.

So I spend a week or so watching other $500 million four-quadrant hits and figure out a broad-strokes story that I think stands a good chance of becoming a movie. This week or so is spent preparing for the “pitch” instead of actually writing something that could ever be actually something other than a soul-destroying “product.”

Because I am not paid to prepare for the pitch, I must have, literally, ten or fifteen of these projects going on in the hopes that one of them turns into an actual paying gig.

ICv2 interviews CBLDF head Charles Brownstein with more on what happened this week down in Rome:

What are the next steps in this case–does the trial go through all the same steps, including pre-trial motions, that it did the first time around?

The next steps are still being weighed by counsel, although we expect to file a motion to dismiss based on this misconduct. That, and any other motion, will need to be considered prior to a new trial. From there, we’ll proceed to trial directly. We do not need to go all the way back to square one. That said, these next steps will be an added, unforeseen expense, but are a necessary response to this week’s events.

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Despite the farcical goings on in Rome, GA in the Gordon Lee case, the DA vows to fight on:

“We hope to get this on the next available misdemeanor trial calendar,” said District Attorney Leigh Patterson. “I don’t know exactly when that is, but I gather it’ll be after the first of the year.”

After the prosecutor appears to have deliberately brought on a mistrial with an obvious flub, maybe it’s time for the court system to say enough.
At the above link in the Rome Tribune-News, there are several comments. Of course, these could be from partisans of either side, but were we a tax paying citizen of Rome, our feelings would be mirrored by those of “Get Real”:

Can our city goverment not just except the fact that they lost. How much of our tax dollars are they going to keep wasting fighting this?

The trial of the year non-ended in a mistrial due to statements by the prosecutor. *sigh* Following air conditioning mishaps, illnesses, amended charged and everything else, it seems this trial is CURSED. According to a statement from the CBLDF:

The case against Gordon Lee took another in an ongoing series of bizarre turns this afternoon when statements made by State prosecutor John Tully during opening arguments led to a mistrial.

Lee and his legal team, paid for by the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, appeared in court this morning for jury selection and returned in the afternoon to begin the actual trial. Before the jury was brought in to begin the trial, lead counsel Alan Begner argued an oral motion in limine asking the judge to instruct prosecutors that they could not admit statements from their witnesses alluding to Lee’s character and previous legal actions Lee has been party to. Prosecutors assured the court that they had instructed their witnesses not to address Lee’s previous conviction for selling adult comics to an adult. Then during opening statements in front of the jury, prosecutor Tully said witnesses will testify that Gordon was defensive and that Gordon had told police, “I’ve been through this before,” a clear reversal of his earlier statement to the judge that prosecutors would not be entering such statements into the record.

When Tully made his statement, defense counsel stared at each other in disbelief before Begner leapt up to demand a mistrial. Judge Larry Salmon put his head in his hands and called a 15 minute recess.

(more…)

After many, many fits and starts, the trial of retailer Gordon Lee begins today in Rome, Georgia. Lee is charged with the misdemeanor charge of distributing harmful materials to a minor, stemming from giving a 2004 incident in which he gave a comic book with a nude Pablo Picasso to two 6- and 9-year-old brothers. The pre-trial story in the local paper is here.

The local paper ran a story earlier last week, in which Lee had a rather different role as a take-no-prisoners tough guy who stops at nothing to bring evil doers to justice:

Lee gave chase to two women accused of stealing two puzzles from Legends at 317 Broad St. at about 3 p.m.

Lee jumped on the hood of the car driven by one of the suspects as she pulled out from a parking space in front of his store. She drove around the block, and Lee fell off. He was not hurt.

Police later arrested Linda Hughes, 22, of 7 Texas Ave., and Stefanie Childers, 26, of 455 Clearwater St., Rockmart, and charged them with shoplifting, according to Floyd County Jail records.

Which Lee will prevail this week? We’ll bring you any developments as they happen.

They’re trying ONE MORE TIME to get the Gordon Lee case to trial. You may recall this was supposed to go to trial last summer, but was delayed due to a broken air conditioner, then postponed because of a sick judge. Will the Curse of the Trial strike again????

On November 5, after three years of criminal charges, legal proceedings, and seemingly countless delays, Comic Book Legal Defense Fund defendant Gordon Lee will finally have his day in court.

Lee’s trial comes after three years of legal action arising from the Halloween 2004 distribution of Alternative Comics #2, a Free Comic Book Day sampler which featured an excerpt from the critically acclaimed graphic novel The Salon that depicted Pablo Picasso in the nude, and was allegedly handed to a minor. The CBLDF has spent over $80,000 on Lee’s defense since taking the case in early 2005, and expects costs to reach six figures by the end of the trial.

Mr. Lee will stand trial for two misdemeanor counts of distributing harmful to minors material, and faces penalties of up to a year and prison and $1,000 in fines for each count if convicted.

“Everyone at the Fund is glad to finally take this case to trial,” says CBLDF Executive Director Charles Brownstein. “For three years Gordon has had to live with the tormenting reality of this case hanging over his head, and to suffer criminal accusations, a complete change of facts by the prosecution midstream, and numerous delays when it looked like the end was near. All for something that shouldn’t have been prosecuted in the first place. We look forward to taking this case to trial, and because of the donations of the CBLDF’s supporters, are confident that we have the best team possible to prove Gordon’s innocence.”

(more…)

Retailer/con organizer Michael George pled not guilty to the murder of his wife 17 years ago, local papers are reporting. George’s lawyer intends to pursue an “aggressive defense.”

Marlinga said he believes prosecutors have a weak circumstantial case and because of that on Monday filed a motion to release George on a “reasonable bond” with a tether confining him to his mother’s house in Hazel Park. He is currently being held without bond.

“This is a cold case not solved for 17 years, and we don’t believe it is solved today,” Marlinga told Judge Biernat.

But assistant Macomb prosecutor Steven Kaplan, head of the cold case unit, countered outside the courtroom Monday that more evidence will be presented at trial.

What the heck is going on in Connecticut? It was bad enough when teacher Nate Fisher was fired over a mistake that should have drawn merely a suspension. Now a New Haven teacher has been fired for showing THE SIMPSONS MOVIE to some children:

New Haven school officials have fired a substitute teacher for showing an alleged bootleg copy of “The Simpsons Movie” to third-, fourth- and fifth-graders.

School officials said they had warned 30-year-old Aquil Abdul-Salaam that the PG-13 rated film isn’t appropriate for children.

According to the story, inappropriate elements in the film are that “two male police officers share a kiss and the Bart character skateboards naked.”

It’s about time this kind of thing was stopped! When The Beat was a third-grader she was left alone to watched — UNSUPERVISED! — various Looney Tunes in which a male cartoon rabbit repeatedly kissed a human male on the LIPS, sometimes while dressed as a human woman. This filth aired during afterschool hours. If you can believe it.

Seriously now, we can see giving the guy a rap for showing an ILLEGAL BOOTLEG of a film. That sort of pirate shit is bad for America. But the Simpsons? The rule should be, if the kid is big enough to wear pajamas with the character on it, they are old enough to view the character.

[Thanks to E Fitz Smith for the link.]

Confirmation today that Nate Fisher, the teacher in the Guildford High/Eightball #22 case, will not face any charges in what now was clearly just an error in judgement and not a crime. You’ll recall that Fisher was forced to resign his job after parents complained to school board officials over his giving a 13 year old student a copy of Eightball #22 to read as a summer reading make up assignment. The police were brought in and Fisher was investigated, but no charges will be filed.

Finally free to talk, Fisher goes on record in the New Haven Register:

“It’s something that had been hanging over my head, and my entire family had been affected by this,” Fisher, 29, said. “It was a very, very hard thing to sit around for a month and wait to find out whether or not I’m going to be arrested, and I was relieved when I found out that I wasn’t going to be; it was kind of a signal to me that now I could move on with my life.”

There may be some difficulties with that, but hopefully, everyone can just move on:

“This whole thing has done damage to my reputation,” he said. “I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to teach again, but I’m hopeful that there are school systems out there that will see this for what it is, and I’m hopeful that this isn’t something that’s going to define me for the rest of my career as a teacher.”