Did you know that a David from Sesame Street fought a legal battle against Marvel that went all the way to the Supreme Court?

Northern Calloway, the actor who played David, had created a character called The Skyrider that he wanted to create an animated movie around. When Marvel began working on it, Calloway sued for copyright infringement. Except that Calloway had sold the rights to a company called LMN Productions who, in turn, transferred them to Marvel. Calloway's lawyers said the documents were forgeries with no evidence to that claim, and Calloway's lawyer ultimately took the brunt of the court ruling, being personally fined $50,000 basically for wasting everybody's time.

Here's how it was written up in the April 1990 issue of Entertainment Law Reporter...

United States Supreme Court upholds sanctions against individual lawyer, but not law firm, for filing meritless claims against Marvel Entertainment

The United States Supreme Court has ruled that the sanctions available under Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure may be imposed against individual lawyers only, not their firms.

The issue arose, as reported at ELR 10:10:19, in a proceeding brought in 1982 by actor Northern Calloway. Calloway, best known for his role as "David" in the television program "Sesame Street," claimed that Marvel Entertainment Group infringed his copyrighted script for a proposed animated science fiction movie entitled "The Skyrider." Marvel presented contracts indicating that Calloway had sold his rights in "The Skyrider" to LMN Productions, and that LMN had transferred those rights to the Marvel parties.

A Federal District Court dismissed Calloway's complaint (with leave to refile) on the ground that the complaint did not specify the registration number of his copyright and the dates upon which the alleged acts of infringement occurred.

An amended complaint, signed by Calloway's lawyer, Ray L. LeFlore, was filed. The amended complaint remedied the defects cited by the court and also asserted that Calloway's signatures on the option documents were forged.

In 1984, LeFlore joined with Radovan Pavelic to form the law partnership of Pavelic & LeFlore; court papers in the case subsequently were signed "Pavelic & LeFLore By /s/ Ray L. LeFlore (A Member of the Firm) Attorneys for Plaintiff."

The District Court directed a verdict in favor of Marvel on the allegation of forgery. After a six week trial, a jury, notwithstanding Calloway's arguments challenging the validity of the contracts, returned a verdict in favor of Marvel.

The court, stating that the forgery claim had no basis in fact, and was not investigated sufficiently by the lawyers, imposed Rule 11 sanctions in the amount of $50,000 on the law firm of Pavelic & LeFlore, and $50,000 on Ray L. LeFlore.

A Federal Court of Appeals upheld the imposition of sanctions against the law firm and against LeFlore, but, on the court's own motion, reinstated Calloway's appeal of a separate judgment imposing sanctions of $100,000 against the actor.

The United States Supreme Court has reversed the Court of Appeals' decision with respect to the $50,000 in sanctions imposed against the law firm of Pavelic & LeFlore on the ground that Rule 11 provides that when a paper is signed in violation of the Rule, a court may "impose upon the person who signed it ... an appropriate sanction." Justice Antonin Scalia noted that the Rule "strikingly" departs from normal common-law assumptions such as that of delegability - the signing attorney represents that the filed paper is factually and legally responsible, and that "he personally has applied his own judgment. Where the text establishes a duty that cannot be delegated, one may reasonably expect it to authorize punishment only of the party upon whom the duty is placed."

The Court of Appeals judgment therefore was reversed insofar as it allowed Rule 11 sanctions to be imposed against Pavelic & LeFlore, and the case was remanded for further proceedings.

Justice Marshall, in dissent, viewed the court's interpretation of Rule 11 as overly restrictive in reading into the Rule "an absolute immunity for law firms from any sanction for their misconduct." The court's decision would result in an "unnecessary erosion of the discretion of federal judges," stated Justice Marshall, for the Rule could be read as allowing a court to impose sanctions on any juridical person, including the law firm of the individual signer. Justice Marshall concluded by emphasizing that the decision "unwisely ties the hands of trial judges who must deal frequently and immediately with Rule 11 violations and ill serves the goal of administering that Rule justly and efficiently."

I can't find any details about The Skyrider project itself, much less any concept designs or drawings of what the project might have entailed. It doesn't appear that Marvel ultimately did anything with it. I suspect this was due to the fact that it was tied up in litigation for the better part of a decade and, ultimately, everyone at Marvel who might've been interested in back in 1982 when Calloway first filed suit had either gone on to other projects and/or left the company entirely by 1990 when this was finally wrapped up. (Calloway himself passed away in January of that year.) As near as I can tell, though, Marvel still owns the rights to The Skyrider if they wanted to pursue it again in any capacity.

I first started reading webcomics about twenty years ago. I had been enjoying Phil and Kaja Foglio’s Girl Genius in its printed form (I was actually a fan of Phil’s going back to his days working on “What’s New?” in the back of Dragon Magazine) and they dropped the printed version in late 2004 when they realized it was only breaking even and all the money they were earning from the series came the online version. So if I wanted to continue reading the story, I had to switch to the online iteration.

At the time, I felt I was a long-standing holdout to webcomics. By that point, comics like PvP and Penny Arcade were already big hits. Even though I still loved my print comics, I could see that comics as a whole were heading towards the web. My biggest issue at the time was that my favorite characters from Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, etc. weren’t available in digital form yet. But since I had broken the ice with Girl Genius, I figured I might as well start checking the whole webcomics scene out.

Any of the webcomics that were basically just gag strips were easy to pick up. Just like how you can grab a newspaper and follow along with everything, even if there are a bunch of strips you’ve never seen before. There’s no real continuity or on-going story; that day’s strip has all you need to understand and appreciate it.

But webcomics that were more serial in nature, the ones that were telling long-form stories over the course of months and years… those were scary. I didn’t like the prospect of trying to dig through years of updates to sort out what was going on. But I soon struck on an interesting realization: I had already done exactly that.

When I first really got into comics, I started with John Byrne’s run on the Fantastic Four. I was gifted issue #254 and found myself hooked within half a dozen pages. I promptly went out to buy #255, and #256, and so on. But it wasn’t long before it dawned on me that there were over 250 issues that already came before that I had no clue about! I had jumped into the middle of huge story and just figured it out as I went along.

Why not do that with webcomics?

The big reason one could argue is that Byrne was a long-standing professional by the time he was working on the FF, so he knew how to tell a story well, but a webcomicker might not be so talented and figuring out the story from the reader’s perspective might be more difficult without going all the way back to the beginning.

Which is a fair arguement to make. But the flip side to that is that if you, as a reader jumping into the middle of a webcomic, can’t parse what’s going on after a month or two of updates, maybe the creator — and thus, the comic — isn’t very good. There are literally thousands of webcomics out there, and you can use the creator’s long-form storytelling abilities as a gauge to keep your reading list from getting too overwhelming. (Which is easy to do — trust me! I stopped counting when my dedicated webcomics feed reader went north of 300 titles!)

Now there may be any number of other reasons why you might want to keep following a webcomic where you can’t completely follow the broader story, but if you’re trying to determine whether it’s worth starting to follow it, go ahead and dive in! If it turns out you can’t follow along, then you can drop it without having invested anything more than a little of your time. You’ve probably already spent more testing out different pamphlet comics; why not give some webcomics a chance as well?

Jeff Smith first began drawing figures that would eventually become Bone characters when he was five years old. By the time he was nine, he was drawing the characters into his own hand-made comics. When he got to college, he developed them further in his Thorn comic strip which was published in the school newspaper. He finally published the first pamphlet issue of Bone in 1991. He collected those first issues in his first two trade paperbacks in 1995, shortly after portions began to be serialized in Disney Adventures magazine. Smith then essentially had a collected edition of Bone stories come out every year through 2004, at which time Scholastic published a one-volume edition of the entire Bone saga. They then published a color edition of all the original paperbacks every six months through 2009. In 2011, in conjunction with the first issue’s 20th anniversary, Scholastic released a new one-volume edition in full color.

If you look at Smith’s work with Bone, you can see a progression, not only of his art and storytelling ability, but also his audience. Those earliest drawings were probably seen by no more than a handful of people. The Thorn comic strips were collected, but had a print run of only 1,000. I seem to recall his initial print run of Bone #1 was only a couple thousand, but that steadily increased as word got out about the book. Obviously, by the time he was seeing his work published by Disney and Scholastic, his readership was in the hundreds of thousands.

What I’m leading up to with all that is that Smith just didn’t suddenly “appear” on the comics scene. He built up his audience slowly, and odds are many people came to know his work gradually. Maybe they caught reference to it in another comics’ letters page. Maybe they saw a review in Hero Illustrated or Wizard. Maybe they saw it plugged in Diamond Previews. Over time, people’s recognition morphed from “Bone? Yeah, that sounds kinda familiar,” to universities asking him to give commencement addresses.

Smith’s notoriety grew in that way in part because there were very few outlets to discuss comics. If you wanted news about what was going on in the industry, you only had three or four options beyond anything that came directly from the publishers themselves. So nearly all of comics fandom shared the same information, and everybody’s awareness of Smith and Bone came about, not quite simultaneously, but certainly in tandem.

With the internet, however, we no longer have a small number of outlets for comics information. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of news sites, blogs, fan pages, etc. all talking about different aspects of comics. Which means that, while a webcomics’ reach is potentially much farther than traditional print comics, it’s also more challenging to gain widespread name recognition throughout the industry. Fans are able to filter their information circles so that they essentially travel in echo chambers, where everyone always talks about the same things. Which means that as one creator’s circle of fans is slowly growing, another circle might not hear anything about it.

Consequently, with these echo chambers in place, it’s possible for a webcomic creator to develop a significant and devoted following and still fly under the radar of more “mainstream” comics news outlets. And if one of those fans happens to be an editor or a publisher, it’s entirely possible that the first thing you might hear about a creator is when they’ve got a new book being published with a sizeable marketing campaign behind it.

While there have always been comic creators who seemed to spring from nowhere, it’s increasingly common for webcomic creators to take this “surprise” popularity route. Just as we no longer have only three television stations which allow nearly everyone to collectively share the same shows, we no longer have a small handful of outlets trying to act as comics tastemakers. There are so many looking at so many different webcomics, it’s not difficult to find webcomickers who’ve got years of strips behind them already, with a devoted audience, and see them picked up and suddenly given center stage and a spotlight.

For the past month or so, my wife and I have been trying to speed run several of the larger/pricier projects had loosely planned on for 2025. My old computer has been borderline unusable for a year now between several non-functioning keys and taking literally a full five minutes to switch between apps that are already open, so I have a new one that should be arriving later today. We have a new oven scheduled to be delivered on Thursday; our old one still works but it's the last major appliance that we haven't had to replace yet since moving into our home a decade ago, and we figure it's bound to fail soon. We had some landscapers out here a week ago to put down a layer of mulch in our backyard that we'd normally wait until spring to deal with. We've got an electrician coming in this week to replace the circuit breaker; there's a couple rooms where we can't run all the devices we need to without tripping a breaker and the panel we have in place is so old that they haven't made parts for it for at least twenty years. Our passports aren't due to expire until early in 2026, but we're getting them renewed now instead of waiting until late 2025. My wife is in the process of getting an updated social security card because her original one started literally falling apart.

None of this seems especially pressing, you're probably thinking, so why go to the effort -- and the expense! -- of trying to cram all that into a fairly short time-frame? And what does any of that have to do with comics anyway?

As you may know, the US held an election in early November and we will now have Donald Trump in the White House come January 20. And he's announced very clearly that he plans to fuck things up for everybody who isn't part of the 1%. He's announced that he'll be placing huge tariffs on everything imported from China, Mexico, and Canada. He's announced massive deportation efforts. He's announced cabinet picks who have in turn announced the various ways they plan to dismantle their respective agencies.

A lot of people have focused on the tariffs -- and I'll get to those in a bit -- but to address some of those other concerns first, I'll start by saying that however much you hate government bureaucracy, simply removing it without having any systems in place to handle the same tasks will result in, at best, government tasks becoming less effecient or, at worst, utter chaos. So my wife and I are trying to update any paperwork that requires federal processing (e.g. passports and social security cards) before any of these cabinet members start shutting down agencies wholesale. Secondly, whatever your thoughts on immigration policies, Trump has indicated his plans are of the "guilty until proven innocent" variety and the intent is to simply "get rid of" anybody who isn't a cis hetero white person and/or speaks with a 'foreign' accent. While the landscapers and electricians we use are American citizens, they do have Mexican accents and they could well get rounded up before anyone thinks to ask them for proof of citizenship. By getting them to get work in now, I'm hoping that affords them a little extra cash for whatever they might have to deal with and, more selfishly, we'll be able to get that work done without having whatever contractors aren't immorally harassed that are left trying to squeeze us into their now-more-loaded schedules. Am I speaking in hyperbole? If I am, then go tell my friends from Chile, Zimbabwe, Jamaica, and South Korea that they shouldn't be worrying either because they're all terrified.

On to tariffs. You may have heard that a number of people and companies are making larger purchases now to beat whatever tariffs are imposed come January. Tariffs -- as apparently not known by many people -- are essentially taxes placed on imported goods. Taxes which are then passed along to consumers. That's all tariffs are: taxes. Taxes on imported goods. The effects of tariffs on other countries largely does nothing but raise prices on the country imposing the tariffs in the first place. (While theoretically, tariffs could be used in very specific circumstances to do very specific things, they are effectively never functionally used like that. Which means that tariffs never work as stated.) The new computer and new oven are specifically to beat tariff price increases. All of which gets us to the comics industry.

Now, because of all of the above, I will admit that I hadn't given any consideration to how any of this might affect the comics industry, but I have really only seen one outlet mention it at all so far. Bleeding Cool has this piece from last week that rightly points out that most comics published in America are actually printed in Canada, using Canadian paper. If a blanket 25% tariff on all Canadian goods goes into effect -- as has been proposed -- that will mean basically a dollar increase for each and every comic book you buy, whether you're reading about Batman or Spider-Man or Luke Skywalker or Archie Andrews. The $20 you spend on comics every week will now be $25, even if you don't change your reading habits at all. Extend that to monthly: $100 a month on comics is now $125.

And that will basically come as an overnight change. I expect some publishers -- perhaps even all of them -- will look for US-based alternatives to avoid the imposed tariffs, but the US paper and printing industries are not at a size that they could absorb that overnight, if at all. Meaning many, if not most, publishers will continue using the Canadian companies they use now. And because of the nature of these tariffs -- all but guaranteed to be in place for at least four years -- I don't think any publisher could hold to a lower price for that long in the hopes that the tariffs would be lifted later. For the major publishers, I believe their profit margins on a given comic are in the 20%-30% ballpark (this would obviously change from title to title, and even issue to issue) -- which would be basically negated entirely by a 25% tariff. In order to keep the same prices, they would essentially be committing to making zero profit for four years minimum. Even with the backing of corporations like Warner Bros. and Disney, I don't think any publishers would be able to tolerate that. They're going to calculate that really quickly as soon as any new tariffs are announced and adjusted their prices accordingly. Fans will likely see the change the next time they pre-order books, and it'll hit their wallet two or three months later when those books actually land in stores.

Can readers, in general, absorb those additional costs? My guess is: not likely. Corporations used COVID-induced supply chain disruptions to gouge consumers with higher prices -- prices that have expressly not come down even after the supply chain disruptions faded away. You are no doubt painfully aware of the hit your bank account takes when you buy groceries now, comared to a few years ago. People can endure that to some degree when it comes to things like groceries that they need. They sacrifice in other areas that aren't so necessary and go out to the movies or sports events less often. Or they shift to cheaper options.

As pointed out in that Bleeding Cool article, that might mean shifting to digital comics. Or waiting for the trade paperbacks to show up at the local library. (Although TPB costs will likely increase thanks to the proposed tariffs on China, where many books are printed. "Wait, why would that matter if I get them from the library?" Well, they might not cost you anything but the library has to pay for them, and if they're paying more per book, that means they'll be able to buy fewer of them. And that's assuming their budgets don't get cut to begin with!) Or potentially just leaving the hobby entirely; I've known people to do that before when it becomes cost-prohibitive for them. Some of those will be more/less problematic for publishers, but none of which are things that comic shop owners want to hear.

I don't have a good solution for this. Publishers might be able to hedge things a bit by buying paper stock now, or switching to domestic printers now. I expect some of them are investigating those options already. But what can comic shops do? What can regular fans do? I suppose fans could switch to subscriptions where you lock in a per year price now before any tariffs are instituted, but that's only available for a small percentage of titles, and certainly wouldn't account for any new ones that come out later. Comic shops can't really do that, though, because they're buying for a changing number of people month to month, whereas the individual consumer is just buying for themself. The only thing I can think to help them would be shifting their business model, but given how many products are made in one of those three countries, I don't know how much that could help.

I said this a lot back when Trump was in the White House before: the best way to think of him and his cronies is to recall the most two-dimensional, superficial, evil-for-the-sake-of-evil villain from the worst Saturday morning cartoon you ever saw, and that's pretty much what we're dealing with. He's not Lex Luthor. He's not Dr. Claw. He's not even Boris Badenov. Trump makes Snidely Whiplash look like a genius philanthropist. There is no amount of negative things you could say about Trump that would be hyperbolic. Be prepared for prices to jump. Be prepared for businesses -- notably local retailers and smaller publishers -- to go under. Maybe we'll get lucky and someone will bribe Trump enough to not go through with some of his stated plans. But don't count on it.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: Shubeik Lubeik Review
https://ift.tt/U1kV4pq

Kleefeld on Comics: The Prohibition Era Review
https://ift.tt/BdgknUJ

Kleefeld on Comics: Behind the Scenes of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving
https://ift.tt/6qJ7SnO

Kleefeld on Comics: Thankful For... (2024 Edition)
https://ift.tt/TRYDyrn

Despite my displeasure with how Thanksgiving got started I am thankful for everything I have. I've particularly been cognizant of it the few years in the wake of dealing with the pandemic. But I'm sitting here at the tail end of 2024 under my own roof. With my wonderful wife in the next room. Who's been extremely supportive of my crazy notions like building a personal comic library and running a marathon. Which I've been able to comfortably afford because I've got a secure and well-paying job. Which allows me the luxury of being able to work from home.

I'm sitting here in my library right now, and I repeatedly finding myself just staring around the room, still giddy at having been able to realize a dream I had for many years now. And even in lieu of the holy-crap-is-this-the-most-fantastic-collection-ever sense of awe I had at the Billy Ireland Library and Museum, that I'm able to do something even remotely capable of being called a comics library makes me inordinately happy.

And within the sphere of comics writing, I usually just sit off in my own little corner, banging away on my keyboard. I don't have a lot of interaction with other folks about my ideas, so I'm left to assume that I'm shouting at the wind. But I wrote a textbook on Webcomics that was nominated for a frickin' Eisner Award! And I served as an actual Eisner judge last year! Even the couple years since Webcomics was published, I've already seen it pop up in the bibliographies of other books!

I wonder sometimes what my teenaged self would think of current me. I suspect there'd be some level of disappointment at not being professionally employed in an expressly creative field and having instead "sold out" to "the man." But being an award-nominated writer, having run several marathons, being an extra in an Avengers movie (that there even IS an Avengers movie!), appearing as a character in dozens of comics, having a smart home more advanced that the one Bill Gates ostensibly had in the 1980s when I first heard of the idea, surviving a lightning strike, literally saving the life of a drowning cousin, being able to 3D print almost anything I want out of my utility closet... Fifteen-year-old me would probably not even come close to recognizing current me; what I've been able to do in my life, both in terms of the technology at my disposal as well as my personal skills and talents, is well beyond whatever I might've dreamed of doing. I've never had a formal "Bucket List" but if I had, I would've had to re-write it several times over with the number of Bucket-List-level items I would've checked off.

I am absolutely bat-shit terrified of what might happen next year. I'm scared hundreds of thousands of people will needlessly die because of idiotic racist policies, and millions more will be irreparably harmed, both physically and emotionally. I think the damage Trump will do to the country writ large will literally destroy it; I don't see the United States surviving as a country beyond 2030. My wife and I are currently trying to speed run as many of our major 2025 plans as possible to build up as much as a buffer as we can against what I think will become a failing economy and a useless, chaotic federal government. We're in a much better position than probably a majority of Americans; we have a number of options to pivot fairly quickly if we need to. I see/hear the struggles some my own friends and family are dealing with, and I help when/where I can but there's only so much I can do. The fact that I was born when I was or graduated when I did or bumped into the right person when I did or whatever random collection of happenstances separated my situation from theirs years ago has led us to very different outcomes with different active and present concerns. From raising trans children to paying for the roof over their heads to even finding a job to begin with, they have challenges I do not. I do have challenges of my own, certainly, but I've also got flexibility in a lot of other areas they don't have to be able to deal with them.

But my wife is in the kitchen working on what I have no doubt will be a delicious meal. Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry relish, pumpkin pie... a lot of the foods you might expect for a Thanksgiving feast. There is seemingly no end of awful things going on in the world right now and there are no doubt many more to come. But I am thankful for where I am personally in my life. The friends I have, the things I've been able to achieve (or were priveleged/lucky enough to stumble into!), the safety net I've been able to craft for when things do go sideways... I remain thankful for everything I have.

These are from a decade ago, but Francesco Marciuliano put together some deleted scenes from “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving”...