bluto and or brutus?

leave it to lawyers to mess everything up about bluto or brutus.

It honestly seems more like stupid lawyers in this case.
Ordinarily, the lawyer is just doing his job, but this time it appears to be incompetence. A lawyer who can’t do the research to find out who owns what name seems pretty bad today.

Maybe it was their employers’ fault–if they didn’t keep archives of any of Bluto’s appearances in print. But that seems unlikely since we have them today.

That sounds logical at first, but, while I can’t speak specifically to Thimble Theatre, there are certainly cases of classic newspaper comics where the only extant copy of such-and-such a strip was found in the morgue of the East Armpit, Idaho, Daily Gazette and Hog Price Report. In general, comics were not perceived as more than ephemera, although there were some exceptions, like the 1930 posthumous boxed set of Clare Briggs (itself now going for $600).

As long as we’re discussing names, Ed might want to revise that column. The guy who took over the strip in the eighties was Bobby London not Bill London.