Flash Friday: Sticker Scandal

Happy Flash Friday everyone!  I’ve been pretty behind on updates lately and I want to apologize for that.  Life has a way of throwing personal and work issues at you sometimes and I’m just trying to keep my head above water.  Today is possibly the strangest topic we’ve ever had for Flash Friday and quite frankly I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. 

To start with we have to go back to a Flash Friday I made back in March of 2011.  As I was reading the current Flash book at the time I had noticed how often coffee was brought up in the story.  Iris’ text boxes were even notated with a tiny coffee cup.  Because I thought it would be funny, I jumped into Gimp (the art program not the sex slave) and modified a Starbucks logo so it read Flash Coffee.  I joked that it was a million dollar idea and that DC should run with it.

Yesterday morning I pull up speedforce.org because it is an amazing Flash site.  In Kelson’s Instagram feed I see the Flash Coffee logo.  I wonder to myself why he linked to that after all this time and click on the link.  The picture’s caption read, “Flash coffee sticker #WonderCon #theflash #coffee”. I quickly jumped back to my site to make sure I hadn’t gone insane.  I had been ripped off.

Except I don’t own the Flash logo.  And it wasn’t done by some huge company; it was a guy at a convention that sold vinyl stickers.  It’s also possible that someone else had the exact same idea that I did.  The use of the all black Flash symbol makes me think my image was used for the sticker but I’d never be able to prove it.  I’m oddly conflicted about the whole thing.  I did something cool enough that someone wanted to steal it, but someone did steal my work.  It’s not like anyone is going to make a lot of money off Flash Coffee stickers either.  The vendor is probably lucky to break even on them.  I do wish they would have sent me a handful of them though, I was pretty happy with the design.