I know you have been waiting for this. Guess who found her magical wand and brought it with her to the debate? If you guessed Pinky, you should give yourself a gold star on your calendar today. POOF!

Poof!

And isn’t it sweet of Bob to defend Pinky? You can almost hear him say, “Nobody cares about your darned birth certificate, Pinky.” Hard to say whether Mei is going to be mad at Pinky for bringing her wand to the debate or not.

and now, for a small rant…

The other day, as I was romping around on Facebook, I came across an ad for t-shirts and coffee mugs that had a familiar (and one of my favorite) comics characters on them. But as I looked more closely at the website, it didn’t look quite right to me. For one thing, there was a slight, but significant discrepancy in way the name of the comic was spelled, and it was not from the website that I know and love.

I decided to contact the real website and say, hey…I saw this and it didn’t look right. Apologies, if this really is one of your sales portals, but I thought you should know about it and here’s the link. Today I got an email back from the website and they thanked me for contacting them and that I was correct, these were NOT authorized products. They are going after these guys and I hope they nail their asses to the wall.

It is hard enough to make a living in any of the arts without someone siphoning dollars of the fruits of my creative labors. The more famous you get, the more likely you are to have copyright infringement. And at least currently, you don’t have to register copyright to own it. All you need to do is create it. There are legal and financial benefits to registering your copyright, but for your rank and file artist who is just scrapping by, the cost of registering each piece is prohibitive. Yes, you can register collections, but that does not have the same clout as registering individual pieces. Copyright must be transferred in writing. If you buy a painting from me, I still own the copyright, unless I specifically transfer it to you. So I can still make reproductions of something that I have sold and you can’t. (At least you shouldn’t)

So if you see stuff for sale from The Panda Chronicles and it didn’t come from here or here or here, the money is not going into my pocket. and you do want me to be able to keep doing these ‘toons, don’t you? Remember, I post all my ‘toons on line for the low, low price of absolutely nothing, because I know what it’s like to have a limited budget. But I appreciate book and swag purchases a lot! (Not to mention sales of original art and original cartoons.) I appreciate everyone who reads my stuff and shares it with their friends.  Huzzah! Keep on…

Being the Bears!
Bob T. Panda