SUITS

Dick Tracy is alive in the courts as well as (for now) on the funnies page. Actor Warren Beatty has sued a unit of the Tribune Company, which owns the comic strip detective, to prevent the Tribune from taking back the TV and movie rights to the character. Beatty starred as Tracy in the 1990 movie that earned more than $160 million, and he says he’s now at work on a TV Dick Tracy special. According to the agreement he secured in 1985, he retains the rights to the character for “a certain period of time” after which the TV and movie rights revert to the Tribune. The Tribune maintains that it gave Beatty a “period of time,” two years, on November 17, 2006; Beatty says he started work on the TV special November 8, 2008, within the specified framework. But the Tribune says it has the right to terminate Beatty’s rights. We don’t know, yet, what’s left.

And New Orleans’ Time-Picayune editorial cartoonist Steve Kelley is also bringing suit — against his former employer, the San Diego Union-Tribune, which, his brief alleges, has coerced his successor editoonist, Steve Breen, into abandoning a plan to collaborate with Kelley on a comic strip to be called Dustin. According to the voiceofsandiego.org, Universal Press Syndicate agreed in 2006 to a development contract that might lead to syndication, but when Breen withdrew, the deal fell through. Breen already does a syndicated comic strip, Grand Avenue, in addition to his editorial cartoons (for which he won a Pulitzer in 1998). Kelley, who also works as a stand-up comic, has had a somewhat acrimonious relationship with the Union-Tribune: he was sacked by the paper in 2001 when his editors mistakenly thought he’d “sneaked” into print a cartoon that had not been approved. (Details in at RCHarvey.com, Rants & Raves, Opus 62.)