The way Thomas Denton at SAY IT BACKWARDS sees it, is that it was his fault for not realizing how strict Warners can be about unauthorized DC Comics properties that come under their radar (follow above link for details).

The Candlelighter's auction covered here recently, (to which I contributed a Supergirl original sketch), was progressing nicely until someone at Warner's noticed several DC properties in the original art auction and lodged a complaint with Ebay, who promptly removed them. The affair snowballed into Denton canceling the entire auction and now considering to shut down his Superman family blog, for not wanting much to promote Warners properties anymore.

Thomas simply wanted to help out Candlelighter's, a charity helping his family cope with the exorbitant costs of his cousin's cancer treatments. He began talking about it at his blog and found his friends and readers enthusiastic about helping out. Thomas solicited art donations from close fan and professional circles and opened up an auction at Ebay.

Thomas Denton understands the problem. We all do. Warners is legally justified in doing what it did... but like almost everyone else in our morally questionable and economically driven capitalist business world, Warner Bros appears to have stumbled upon its own protective quagmire of corporate greed, run amok with excessive application of its power, driven by a false sense of judicial self-righteousness.

It's not enough that hundreds of professional artists sell original art commissions depicting DC characters, all over the internet, and there appears to be little that can be done to halt the trend. It is a sort of poetic justice because many of the artists selling such commissions openly have been disenfranchised from the companies they gave the best creative years of their careers to. Most comics artists selling commissions today do so because it is a primary source of income for the basic survial of the artists and their families. Warner's can't go after all of them, really. They're too many and it just wouldn't look good for them pursue such a witch hunt... so they simply look the other way.

In this case, someone at Warner's legal department apparently saw the Ebay auction and thought they were being the corporate hero by removing the pieces. No brains and no heart really needed to be a corporate hero these days. Just heartless and mindless robotic idiots, doing the bidding of the big money that charges their batteries.

Big heroes, indeed. Shutting down a $2,000 achievement of a cancer charity auction, intended to help people suffering from the financial burden of medical treatments needed for their survival, in this heartless economic jungle that our world has become.

If they'd had any real brains and the slightest bit of heart, they should have kept looking the other way. As it stands, they've lost a good fan and big supporter of the Superman family... and have self-inflicted a rather undesired public relations situation, which could also itself snowball into very bad publicity for corporate Warners who would look like the brainless and heartless morally corrupt judicial bullies that they've become.

I realize this is not a very diplomatic tone to take if we'd hope to see a change in such corporate behavior. But I have become rather tired of being a diplomat when it's proven to be useless with such people, time and time again. I would simply rather speak my mind right now and allow the more diplomatic amongst us to do their job.

Let's also hope this doesn't discourage Thomas Denton from continuing to do good things such as he did with this auction. The idiot fools who shut it down shouldn't really be given such an easy victory, after all.