There's a new Mr Men in town, and Hello Kitty is not smiling.
The Daily Mail reports [sic, obv] that Mr Men & Little Miss owner Sanrio is bent out of shape about Mr Jihad. [Wait, who owner what? Sanrio bought Mr Men in 2011 from the dissolution of Chorion just two years after the private equity rollup/MBO? How did I not--never mind. We'll talk about this later.]
Point is, Sanrio's sending cease&desist letters to various retailers to stop Mr. Jihad, but intellectual property terrorists are just like the real thing: they can melt into the online crowd, and efforts to combat them head-on only result in more intellectual property terrorism. Despite Sanrio's efforts, there are over 3,000 items of Mr Men-style t-shirts of varying levels of hilarity and NSFW-ness. And many of them are for iron-on transfer prints, which can turn up without warning on any t-shirt or Onesie.
Maybe it'd be better to find out what caused Mr. Bump to turn to nihilistic violence in the first place. Was it some form of illness-related disorder? Traumatic brain injury? Desperation at the gutting of the National Health Service?
'Mr Jihad' T-shirts showing famous characters in suicide vests land British firms in trouble with brand's owner [dailymail.co.uk via dt reader sean]
Huh, the Mail just rewrote this story from The Sun, which is apparently opposed to t-shirts or tops of any kind. [thesun.co.uk]
Search for parody Mr Men and Little Miss stuff on eBay [ebay]
Or go straight to the Mr Jihad section and show the capitalist west what you're made of [ebay]
