The Ink Stained Wretch #191 6/25/25

Coconuts, Copyright Ghouls, Tarantino, and Some Sneak Peeks!

Here we go with another of the malodorous, miserable, and morose piles of malarky that are these newsletters! This week's sketch is very animated, we tell the story of a fight with copyright ghouls, revisit the Tarantino story in a new book, and share some illustration sneak peeks...on with the 'Wretch!

Sketch o'the Week: Terry Gilliam!

Here's the last of our "Monty Python's Flying Circus" series, the lone American of the troupe Terry Gilliam!

Gilliam was born right here in Minneapolis, Minnesota, so we get to claim him as "one of us", although he and his family moved to Los Angeles when he was 12 in 1952. You don't survive twelve winters in Minnesota without it being frozen into your DNA.

There is a huge MAD Magazine connection with Gilliam and his eventual work with Monty Python. Gilliam started out as an animator and strip cartoonist, and was heavily influenced by the early Harvey Kurtzman MAD magazines. Gilliam would eventually work with Kurtzman as one of his assistants at HELP! magazine. HELP! was, of course, the longest running of the publication projects Kurtzman worked on post MAD/EC. Gilliam worked on the magazine and contributed some of the "fumetti" strips the magazine was known for. These were comic stories using photos rather than drawn panels. One of the fumettos he designed was called "Christopher's Punctured Romance", written by David Crossley, and which featured a little known up and coming comedian named John Cleese. This is where Gilliam first met Cleese. When HELP! folded, Gilliam moved to England where he did animation for the children's TV show "Do Not Adjust Your Set", which featured future Pythons Eric Idle, Terry Jone and Michael Palin.

So, we can thank Harvey Kurtzman and MAD for Terry Gilliam's being part of Monty Python!

After Python Gilliam went on to become a well respected film director with movies like Time Bandits (1981), Brazil (1985), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), The Fisher King (1991), 12 Monkeys (1995), and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998).

You lucky Premium Subscribers get to watch me draw this sketch in this week's exclusive video! Scroll down to the bottom of this post to be thoroughly bored!

Copyright Fight!

I've had some people ask me if I will post the photoreferences I use for doing my "sketch o'the week" or other work, because they feel that seeing the pictures I worked from would help them developing their own work.

I don't do that (anymore) for a very specific reason.

Back in 2020 when the pandemic was raging and we were all basically confined to our homes, I did an online drawing exercise I called "The Daily Coronacature". Every day I would post a subject for that day's caricature in the early morning on my blog, complete with six to nine different reference photos of that subject. I would then invite anyone who wanted to participate to draw a caricature of that subject, and post in on Instagram or Twitter with the hashtag #thedailycoronacature. Later in the day I would post my caricature, along with my thoughts on the subject and the caricature I did. I did this for 100 days straight. It was fun and a distraction for some from the stress of the pandemic.

About nine months after I did that, I got multiple emails from an outfit called "PicRights International Inc", claiming to be representatives of copyright holders like the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, and other media companies. The letters cited my use of several pictures from their "clients" for these Coronoacature posts, and demanded payment for the copyright use.

I did a little internet digging and found that PicRights is a copyright troll company that uses internet searches to scour the web looking for copyrighted images that were posted online without the permission of the copyright holder, usually the Associated Press or some other news/media company. PicRights makes a deal with these big copyright holders that they will collect payments for the use of these images on their behalf, keeping a percentage for themselves of course. They then send threatening and harassing letters out to hapless website owners demanding payment or the matter will be turned over to an actual lawfirm for filing a copyright infringement lawsuit. PicRights themselves are not lawyers and have no legal authority. They just try and scare the hell out of people with personal websites who have reposted images they found on the internet to try and get money out of them.

I got inundated with such emails. I did remove all the copyrighted images but I also told PicRights to get lost as I believed I had a fair use right to post those images as they were being used as an educational tool which is an exception to copyright. I welcomed PicRights to follow through on their threats to take my case to the actual legal representatives of the copyright holders and advise them to sue me if they wanted to.

I never heard anything more from them. I'm sure PicRights and other companies like them prefer to move on to trying to scare easy money out of other small website owners than have to actually follow through with lawyers, as do their clients. Whether my "fair use" defense would hold up in court aside, the cost of taking the case to court would not be worth the small amount of money they might be able to get if they did prevail. The AP and other media companies are fine with collecting money frightened out of small time website owners, but have better things to do than chase after them for pennies in court.

Still, why invite that kind of thing? So I don't post the pics I work from online.

Once Upon a Time in the Bookstore

Most of you readers probably know the story behind how I ended up doing two prop magazine covers, one MAD and one TV Guide, for the movie "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood". Well, if you don't you can read all about it in the upcoming book "The Making of Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood", which is coming out this fall. Author Jay Glennie interviewed me last fall about the art, the eventual MAD issue featuring the cover, and the "parody" we did of the fictional "Bounty Law" TV show from the movie. Apparently the tale definitely made the book's final edit, although Jay is not sure if the publishers were able to get permission from MAD to reprint the parody. You can preorder the book here if you are interested.

Here are those two illustrations as they appeared in the movie (and in the book):

If you don't know the story, don't want to wait until the book comes out in November, or don't want to drop $70 (!!) for a copy, here's the tale as I told it on my blog: Part one, part two and part three.

Sneak Peeks!

It's been a busy few months at the drawing board. This week I had not one but two big deadlines for illustrations coming soon. I'll share the full images when I am allowed, but here's a couple of tightly cropped peeks!

Regular Subscriber? That's it for another lame issue of the 'Wretch! Thank you for subscribing! As always, if you liked what you saw please share it with others. Remember I'm always looking for feedback, questions for the mailbag, and suggestions for future Sketch o'the Week subjects. Just reply to this email with any of the above, or leave a comment on Substack! And always remember... it's crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide!