Monday, March 20, 2006

IN CASE U MISSED IT: Super-silly

Apparantley the case between Marvel/DC and Super-Hero Happy Hour (a late great indy book of a couple years back) has closed or something because the suits suddenly all over the news.

Like HERE

It's a weird case, and one that hits kind of close to home...

4 comments:

Brant W. Fowler said...

Sounds to me like the guy is a couple of decades late with his revolt. didn't they trademark the term in the 70's?

Jason Martin said...

Yeah, if I remember correctly, when the story broke a year or two ago, they mentioned how Marvel and DC jointly filed a trademark or something, ages ago...

I'm still confused as to why this is in the news again, now.

Nothing I've heard says the case went to trial and was won or anything, just that Superhero Happy Hour was forced to cease and desist, which happened like a year and a half ago?

Jason Martin said...

BTW, it was a good book, but I seem to recall it stopped around the same time... but the writer/co-creator said it had more to do with the artist or whomever moving on (at least that was the public response/reason), but that they may continue down the line as Hero Happy Hour, or something like that...

but I've not seen it since

Brant W. Fowler said...

Actually it was changed to Hero Happy Hour and had a featured short in an issue of Digital Webbing Presents last year.

Dan Taylor, the writer, is a founder of ScrypticStudios.com where you can find a link to his site. As I understand it he had some personal issues that slowed progress in all his projects, but he's working on stuff now. You should check it out.

But yeah, as long as you don't use the term Super-Hero (or Superhero, Super Hero) in the title of your comic you're okay. You can use Super or Hero independently, and as far as I'm aware you can use superhero in the text of the comic as trademarks only apply to titles and logos. So it's not really that big a deal in my opinion.