Kindergoth is the story of a group of kids known as the Dead Bonsai Society. It has been running around in my head since high school when I was asked to do some comics for the school newspaper. Around 1996 my friend Dennis came up and suggested we do a comic for the San Diego Comic Con. It was a month before the Comic Con and for some reason I said yes. We scraped up the money for a booth, wrote and illustrated our first comic in two weeks, and sent it off the the printers. Somehow, Dark Tarot, arrived just in time for the Con and BloodFire Studios was born. We trucked on for a few years when Den started bugging me about the cartoon project in my notebooks. I really wanted to do Kindergoth but at the time I was in school and even though I had designed the characters, I really couldn’t draw the cartoon style I preferred for the project. Enter Jeff Zugale.
I met Jeff at the San Diego Comic Con while he was working on his own indy comic, Mystic for Hire a year later he worked on ElfQuest with Wendy Pini. We talked about Kindergoth and he thought it was funny as hell and said he would love to draw it. So sometime around 2001-2002 We launched Kindergoth as an ashcan. Ashcan is a fancy word for “they made it on a xerox machine.” Using one of my original character sketches for the cover and a t-shirt, we proudly marched into the San Diego Comic Con with Kindergoth in hand, fanboy pride on the table for all to see. We pretty much sold out of Kindergoth at that show. It gave us enough money to get books printed at a real printer!
In 2003, we launched Kindergoth: Tiny Green Men #1 and #2 at the San Diego Comic Con (do you see a trend here?). We showed up with 1000 copies of each book and by Sunday we only had 5 copies of issue 2 left. The lines were long and almost nonstop that whole weekend. Diamond Comics Distribution was in the booth across from us and sent a rep over to see what the line was for. After a quick meeting at the show, Kindergoth was picked up for solicitation by Diamond. From January to April of 2004 Kindergoth: Tiny Green Men 1-4 were released through Diamond. Kindergoth appeared in the top 250 books distributed, and was a top 50 book on the indy list. On a book signing tour that April, we sold 364 copies of Kindergoth #1 at Golden Apple Comics in Hollywood making us their best selling comic since the death of Superman. Things were going great, Kindergoth had a circulation of around 40,000 books and we started hatching plans to launch Kindergoth as a monthly comic. Then, one day at a comic convention, someone came up and asked me to sign their Kindergoth doll. Only problem was I never made a Kindergoth doll.
Legally I am not allowed to talk about the details but the basic gist of what shut us down for so long is this: Somewhere out there was a company making Kindergoth toys. They tried to trademark it while I was in the process of trademarking it, so a legal battle ensued. Little ol’ me vs company lawyers and legal threats. Then I got laid off from my day job. Did I ever tell you how stubborn I can be? I firmly believe that if I am in the right, I will not give up. Several years of going back and forth legally and wracking up huge legal bills, I finally won in a settlement. Thanks to my amazing lawyer, Kevin Smith at Sughrue Mion, and Mark Hamill.
WTH does Luke Skywalker have to do with all this? In 2002 Mark filmed his mockumentary, Comic Book – The Movie at the SDCC. In one short scene for just a few frames, Mark walks up to me and asks, “So what do you guys do?”, to which I replied “He writes the comics I draw them (referring to Dennis and Dark Tarot)”. The camera pans up, left, then down again to focus on a female fan’s butt. In this very brief exchange, you could clearly see everyone’s comic con badges with the date, my Kindergoth t-shirt, and the piles of Kindergoth Ashcans to the left and right of our lady friends shapely bottom. This clearly showed that Kindergoth had been a commercial product before the toy company was even incorporated. However because neither company owned the Trademark at the time of the infringement, I had no way to recoup my legal expenses without risking another long battle so I took a settlement and walked away with the trademark in hand. Battered and bruised, but I won. The Force was with me (other than the part where I was still out of job).
It’s taken a few years but now we are working on relaunching Kindergoth. In 2009 Len Wein (who Jeff and I met at an in store signing in LA a few years before) lent his amazing talents to write Kindergoth: Special #1 with me. Jeff was not able to draw the book this time around so I brought on my friends David Wong and Joel Adams to do the art this time This is a great book and the only way to get it is through BloodFire Studios at a convention or through the Kindergoth online store. (Act now! Supplies are limited.)
The moral of this story is this: If you have have a really good idea, contact Sughrue Mion PLLC to handle everything for you. It would have saved me a lot of money in the long run and made this history three paragraphs shorter.
Those responsible:
Lee Kohse – Creator, Artist, Writer | Len Wein – Writer
Jeff Zugale – Artist | Joel Adams – Artist | David Wong – Artist
