Another Misappropriation of Crowd-Funding

How often does this happen?

Nick Lopez (the "project director) is trying to solicit $4500 to do a graphic novel "what if" where Mace Windu survives and teaches Luke, instead of Obi Wan, I gather.

That strike anyone else as...I dunno...problematic?

$4500 seems like more than the simple cost of materials for a graphic novel, unless it is much larger than your average GN.

In addition to that, some of the rewards are 11x17 posters from his Etsy store. Like this one:

Sure seems like a screen grab from Empire that is just run through a filter, no?

I believe he's well aware of the violation his work effects, as I found the following on the FB page for this project:




When confronted with the appearance of this project, Nick Lopez responded with the following:

Actually, as the project video states, creating a comic book is very costly. Some could cost $100 to $300 per page. Our story is a 4 part series. Each of the 4 chapters is at least 15 pages in length. At the very least each page will cost up to $80 to make. So if you do the math... $80 x (15 pages x 4 chapters)... it comes out to about $4800. So that's the minimum cost of producing this project.

As I said in response, I don't think boards and tools add up to $80/page, so that still leaves someone profiting off this project. It doesn't matter if it is just that he's paying someone else to draw it and then soliciting people to advance purchase the work (as the minimum "donation" gets the first two chapters of the project (which makes you wonder what happens with the third and fourth)), as it still is a violation of the Lucas rights.

Somehow, I doubt this is the only fan project that winds up trying to bend or ignore the law when it comes to crowd-funding. Anyone else have examples?