Oooh, this one's controversial! And rare!
This magazine was around for a few issues. It was about bunnies, so the cover art for this issue showed Matt Groening's Binky punching out the Trix rabbit. By some standards, Bunnyhop was a zine and zines of all kinds used re-appropriated images to embellish their pages and make things a bit more interesting. In this case, though, the copyrighted characters were too famous and too contemporary to be re-appropriated for profit.
From the zinester's side, the argument is that Matt Groening should support independent publications and that it's hypocritical to make your living off of subtle pop culture references and parodies and then sue a magazine who parodies one of your characters.
From Groening's side, by law, he has to defend his copyright against all infringements or he loses his copyright. He also says that the image is so true to his style that it looks as if he drew a picture which infringed on the Trix copyright which would make him suspect in any copyright infringement case.
What do you think?
What will I do with it?
I have it for sale here.
No comments:
Post a Comment