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This is funny. I had not seen it before.

Stan vs. 'Striperella'
Excerpted from The Comics Journal #255
By Michael Dean
Posted October 3rd, 2003
A July 9 lawsuit filed by Janet Clover against Viacom TV Networks, Pamela Anderson and Stan Lee over intellectual property allegedly stolen from Clover while she was dancing in Lee's lap is being retooled. Though the original suit was withdrawn Aug. 15, she said she plans to re-file, this time with the help of attorneys -- and direct the suit specifically at Lee. "I'm actually going after Stan Lee," she told the Journal.

Clover had filed the suit in Volusia County, Fla., Circuit Court to stop the cablecast of an animated series about a stripper/superheroine called Stripperella on the Viacom-owned TNN/Spike. Clover's suit asserted that, even though the look of Stripperella is based on Clover's appearance and the title and concept for the series is taken from her stage name and role as an advocate for "sensual dancers," she has received no credit or compensation. In the course of a private dance at the Tanga Lounge in Tampa, Clover had described to Lee her double life as a nurse and a stripper and her efforts to better the lives of strippers under the name Stripperella, she told the Journal.

A couple of months after that, she said, Lee's plans for the cable cartoon were announced. The show features a Pamela-Anderson-voiced stripper who fights crime in her off hours with the help of glass-cutting nipples, a lie-detecting bosom and a digitally scanning tongue.

Representatives of Viacom, Stan Lee and Pamela Anderson have made no public comment on the matter. Before attorneys for the defendants could even move to have the suit dismissed, Clover moved to dismiss her own suit.

Clover filed the original suit herself without a lawyer. "I had an attorney," she told the Journal, "but she wanted $6,000 to file the suit -- just to get started. There's no way I can afford that."

The suit was filed in the name of the Office of the Professional Nurse Advocate -- Moral and Ethical Division, but that impressive-sounding office was not in a position to provide Clover with legal assistance. In fact, it exists only in Clover's head, as a proposal for an international organization for setting standards of practice in the nursing profession. The proposal, she said, is still being considered by the "Office of the High Commission" in Switzerland. In response to questions from the Journal, she admitted that she had filed the suit under that name because she felt it would sound more respectable and serious than a suit filed by a semi-retired stripper. "As soon as you say you're a dancer, all these prejudices come in," she said.

Of legal necessity, however, the suit also listed Clover as a complainant -- aka Jazz in Daytona, Jacksonville and Cocoa Beach gentlemen's clubs, aka Jaz in Tampa Bay clubs, aka JC in Miami and Holy Hill, aka Stripperella.

It was her stripper status and Pamela Anderson's name that caught the attention of the local press. A small story in the Daytona Beach News-Journal was picked up by Associated Press and the national media and made its way to People and Entertainment Weekly. Those stories in turn caught the attention of attorneys throughout the country. "The attorneys in New York are very cool," Clover said. "Quite a few have contacted me about it."

One of the cool things about these attorneys is that they are willing to work on a contingency basis. When the Journal spoke with her, Clover was trying to decide between a plethora of options. She had not yet chosen which attorneys would officially represent her and was vacillating between filing her new suit in Florida (convenient for Clover and her witnesses) or in New York (convenient for her prospective attorneys). All the lawyers agree there's a lawsuit in Clover's complaint, but they're undecided about the nature of the suit. Clover's original suit accused the defendants of appropriating Clover's stage name and likeness and asked for nothing more specific than an injunction against the cable show, something of a moot point since the show has now begun airing. The new suit may be a trademark- or copyright-infringement complaint or it may be a class-action suit on behalf of the nation's exotic dancers. In either case, it would need to be filed in a federal court rather than in the local circuit court, where the aborted suit had been filed.

In her complaint, Clover protested in distinctly unlawyerlike language the damage she anticipated the Stripperella show would do to the public image of sensual entertainers: "When they turn on their television to watch an animated gyrating pelvis hidden in a man's face, acceptance of professional dancers as healthy sensual entertainers will not happen." Clover had not actually seen the show at the time she composed her suit, however. She saw the show for the first time the night before she spoke with the Journal, and was pleasantly surprised. "I didn't have a problem with the cartoon," she said. "I thought it was actually kind of cute."

One bit she did have a problem with was a scene in which Kid Rock tells a Stripperella lookalike in the audience that there's only one Stripperella. Clover took that to be a slam at her and her suit. She also objected to a Spin magazine appearance by Anderson as Stripperella in which the faux stripper dispensed advice to troubled exotic dancers.

What most bothers her, Clover said, is that Lee has failed to give credit where credit is due for the origins of his Stripperella concept.

It was Clover's fellow dancers, she said, who first noticed that a past visitor to the club was being interviewed on the Internet and talking about a stripper superheroine. "They were like, 'Oh my God, you have to check this out,'" Clover told the Journal. "They showed me a picture and said, 'Dude, he was here!'"

Though, she said, "he looked different," she quickly recognized her stage name and her life in his planned TV project and remembered talking at length with Lee two months earlier about her Stripperella alter ego. Angered that Lee had failed to identify the source of "his" idea, she said, she immediately went about trying to contact him: "I tried getting a hold of him, but he's hiding from me. I got no response. If I just had five minutes alone with him..."

The Journal interrupted to say it understood that she had had five minutes alone with him.

"It was more than five minutes, if you want to know the truth," she said. "I'll tell you something. If you have time alone with someone like that -- it doesn't matter what they do for a living or what they look like -- you either find someone you can enjoy talking to and spending time with or you don't. With him, I'll just say I would have forgotten all about him, except the customers and the dancers started bringing in these articles."

Later, though, when the Journal commented that Lee couldn't have been that dull a companion if she had talked with him at such length, she said, "Oh yes, he was a fascinating man or I would never have spent that much time with him. It makes everything more personal, more real, if you get to know the person you're dancing for. But I remembered him coming in moreso because of the $80 he ended up owing me. He didn't pay for the dance the second time."

"He came twice... ?" the Journal started to ask.

"Be careful how you say that," Clover interrupted. "I met him at the club two different times."

Asked how much time passed between the two times she saw Lee, she said, both visits had been within a two-week period. "He described himself as an artist and I think he had two or three people with him," she told the Journal.

"Don't the dancers get paid up front?" the Journal asked.

"We're supposed to," she said, following her answer with a dramatic sigh.

[To read the rest of this article, please see The Comics Journal #255.]