Ouch, My Purple Pussy!

Gosh, it's been a while since we had a nice juicy art theft controversy. I burn for a fix... maybe something involving famous people preying on webcomickers. That would rock.

O HAI LOOK AT THIS!

Remember those painfully snotty "Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them!" t-shirts? The creator, Todd Goldman of David And Goliath Tees, sells a lot of ugly pseudo-Happy-Bunny crap at Hot Topic, and even has a few stores of his own.

If you're a 13 year old girl who thinks she's a rebel because she doesn't wear pink or spell her swear words out anymore, you probably have one of his "Duh, I'm just a consumer!" tampon holders in your purse right now.

Okay, I made that last part up. But the rest is true!

Anyway, Cockface opened a gallery show in LA recently to rave reviews. Somehow, drawing Todd Parr-esque stick figures (sans the whimsy and humor) has made this man very popular with the actual high art crowd. Very high, if you ask me, but I digress.

Someone attending the show recognized one of his exhibits as a pretty much unaltered trace of a classic panel of the webcomic Purple Pussy.

The photo of the rip in the gallery shows a little red dot sticker underneath the piece, which I believe means it sold, earning Cockface hundreds or thousands of bucks. Right after that, a slightly different trace of the PP comic turned up on the gallery site, meaning that he's traced the same picture at least twice.

Well, the artist for Purple Pussy has an account on SomethingAwful, and he posted about the situation in the forums. Links were posted to Cockface's shirt store almost immediately so people could go digging around for more rips. Last I saw, Roman Dirge was wading into the action over some questionable goth girl art and there is a lively game of "find the original" being played. I'm having Banrai flashbacks here, almost.

My suggestion is to grab a beer and follow the mischief as it unfolds. Lawyers and reporters have become involved, a sure sign that this is gonna be awesome. I hope he gets his little empire knocked down. Not just because he's obnoxious and a thieving cunt, but because he's a wretched human being and anyone who makes shirts like this fails at life forever.


And just 'cause I felt like sharing it, here's a Goldman clone I spotted aaaall by myself:



The one with the badly placed apostrophe comes from here. The other one is from our friend Mr. Cockface. Separated at birth? STAY TUNED TO FIND OUT.

ETA: Hah! Check it out, somebody found another Cockface version that still has the apostrophe: