I liked the idea of Lara. None of the stories built around her were able to live up to the potential she had as a child of a main series character. As such, Archie is better off not touching her or the rest of Pender's posse.
Variety: Judge Rules Stan Lee's Comicbook Characters Belong to Marvel, Disney Not Penders, but here's a little nugget that just came up. I don't think anyone in this thread even mentioned it, but apparently Stan Lee Media, of which Stan Lee is himself no longer related to, tried to sue Marvel and Disney for $5.5 billion due to their claim on copyrights Stan Lee apparently placed with them over several Marvel characters that he'd created. Basically what I'm getting at is that apparently Penders isn't the only one who goes to work for a company, makes a bunch of top sellers for that company, and then years later demands more money.
Copyrights should not be eliminated entirely, authors of creative works have a reasonable expectation to be the ones to benefit from their own work. However, there need to be some major reforms, especially to restore public domain.
Believe it or not, authors benefiting from their own works is actually a secondary function of copyright, not the actual purpose, and is simply a means to an end - said end, and the actual purpose of copyright, is to benefit the public, the US constitution explicitly defines the purpose of copyright as "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". Copyright, as it is now, does little to actually fulfill this purpose, instead mostly filling the coffers of corporations. In fact, it can be argued that copyright violates nearly every tenant of laissez faire capitalism, as it is essentially a government-granted intellectual monopoly, and the term "intellectual property" could also be argued to be misleading, as "IP" is not actually a type of property, but rather an "intellectual privilege" with some property-like, well, properties. In the digital age, the notion of intellectual monopolies is becoming an increasingly outdated concept, especially since the common consumer can basically download their entertainment for free on a whim. When piracy is a thing that simply cannot be stopped, it's best to fall back on the basics of the free market - make better products than the competition, at a fair price, and treat your customers with respect, and you will be rewarded for it more often than not. In an unrestricted, free market, Penders still wouldn't make a cent, because his works are too shitty for anyone to care about. Case in point.
This may sound completely fucking crazy, but when The Lara-Su Chronicles actually does come out, I'm strangely interested in checking it out, if only to see just how horrible the comic is. I lurked on Penders' forum for a bit, and he did seem to accept that a lot of people found the promotional artwork shitty (and oh, believe me, that artwork makes Lara-Su look like some kind of abomination, and I wouldn't even wish that on Archie characters), even if he insisted the people he showed it to in SDCC liked it, but I could somewhat tell that he wasn't completely batshit insane, or maybe that's just me giving him the benefit of the doubt. Who knows, maybe the next bit of artwork he shows off of the story, it may not be as shitty as this. But it could just be me being a rare optimist at the one thing I shouldn't be optimistic about.
When you have people whose livelihood depends on your career and suddenly you're not around anymore to support them, the idea behind it makes absolute sense. Unfortunately like pretty much everything else copyright related, the implementation and actual contextual contemporary usage makes absolutely no sense and is nothing more than a gross perversion of original intent.
That's what fixed term limits are for. If someone has dependents they can reasonably be expected to be that for no more than 20 years or so. Make it a fixed time length, regardless of whether you're dead or not. Life + ludicrouslyLongNumber is ridiculous. Agreed.
Considering blue collar jobs get no such luxury, I have to say that is complete nonsense. Being an artist is not a life insurance policy.
In regard to the artwork, look at this atrocity. I mean, for God's sake, she looks like the fucking pig from the Muppets! Now, there's a minute possibility that the book might be good, but every piece of promotional material I've seen suggests otherwise. That's just my opinion, though.
And with that meme, it's tempting me to try drawing that pose with Lara-su, just to see how I fare; she's almost pleading to be drawn and colored properly, and maybe with a background drawn from scratch. For some reason stock photos (If I'm seeing this thing right?) being used in these kinds of things bother me now. Yeah, and it amazes me at this point that there are still things to criticize it for. Imagine the captionable material the actual comics would have.
