Disney-comics digest #528.

Don Rosa 72260.2635 at compuserve.com
Wed Dec 21 02:49:15 CET 1994


JAMES W.:
	No, what Disney does and what they compel Gladstone to do is
plain illegal. They refuse to return artwork even though the artists (or
at least ME) tell them they are buying the rights to the story and
reproductions, but not the original, physical artwork. Ownership of
private property cannot be transfered when the owner does not agree that
he's selling it. Disney will continue to have its way in this regard
since it affects, as I said, so FEW freelancers, and when only one of
which objects to it. What beat Disney in Virginia was mass public ill
will -- there's not a handful of people on Earth who care how Disney
mistreats a few freelancers, and those freelancers can't begin to afford
to sue, so Disney can get away with crime as long as it wishes. Their
attitude is "if you don't like it, QUIT!"... which seems rather unfair
when I don't even work for them, but for a totally separate corporate
entity which is only treating me like this at Disney's demand.
	That new Barks painting isn't based on any old Barks story. But
with a mine being dug in the Money Bin where a vein of gold coins is
struck... that's my "Money Pit" story, isn't it? Hm. Maybe the guy's
having his revenge. I make a few hundred bucks off his ideas, he makes a
few hundred THOUSAND bucks off my ideas? C'est la guerre?
	That shoddy bit of exploitation where you get a 1982 Whitman
reprint comic, framed, with a Barks autograph on a separate bit of
paper, for about $400... that was Barks' new "business manager"'s first
idea. All the years that Bruce Hamilton made Barks look classy, then
this business manager starts making him look shoddy with stuff like that
and getting himself involved in this lawsuit now... what a charmer. It's
a greedy world.
	
	I'll be back just before next year.




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