Comic Strips and Peanut Butter: Two Great Tastes That Generate Legal Action

Trademark watch: the daughter of classic comic strip artist Percy Crosby fails to get the Supreme Court to bite on her challenge to the peanut butter company who have been–illegally and fraudulently, she claims–using the name of dad's Skippy character for its peanutty sandwich spread.

By the account contained in her court filings, the various peanut butter corporations using the name have blatantly lied along the way. However, I can't see any claim in justice–as opposed to trademark law, a very different thing–to someone being prohibited from calling a peanut butter "Skippy" just because someone was already using that name for a comic strip character, any more than sellers of peanuts should have been able to enjoin Charles Schulz's syndicate from naming his brilliant strip "Peanuts" (a name Schulz always despised, by the way).