They didn't own Casa Bonita then, but they do now, and the company through which they bought the place in late 2021 — Beautiful Opco LLC — recently lodged a complaint with Etsy...over a cartoon of Casa Bonita that originally appeared on the cover of Westword and is now being sold as a print on Etsy.
The demand emailed from Etsy to artist Karl Christian Krumpholz neglected to mention the irony of an empire built on a cartoon challenging a cartoonist, however:
Etsy received a report of trademark infringement from The Beautiful Opco LLC alleging that certain content in your Etsy shop infringe their intellectual property. When a complaining party submits a report of alleged infringement that complies with our policies, we are required to remove the content cited in the report in accordance with our Intellectual Property Policy. ... Etsy deactivated the 1 listing specified as infringing in the report and, where applicable, refunded the listing fee....Krumpholz is one of the founders of the Colorado Comics Collective; he's created numerous comic books and also illustrated many cartoon features for Westword, all focusing on Denver history and geography. He's been selling work through his Etsy shop for years; currently, Etsy has 31 active Krumpholz listings (his Casa Bonita print would have been his 32nd). Eighteen of them are comics, and the rest are prints of places in Denver and other spots around the country; his current best-seller is a drawing of Sligo Pub in Boston, which just closed.
If the reporting party withdraws the report(s) of intellectual property infringement, the funds in your Payment account will be released.
Krumpholz was living in Boston when the South Park Casa Bonita episode debuted. The Denver woman he'd just started dating had to convince him that it was a real place. And when he moved here in 2007, she took him for his first birthday in Colorado to Casa Bonita.
That may well be his last visit there.
The Casa Bonita at 6715 West Colfax Avenue in Lakewood opened in 1974; it was part of a small Oklahoma chain founded by Bill Waugh. By the time Krumpholz visited it 35 years later (his now-wife warned him about the food), it had been acquired by Robert Wheaton, who put it in his Summit Family Restaurant chain.
In 2015, Lakewood declared Casa Bonita a landmark, one that was a frequent fixture on maps and drawings of metro Denver. None of those appearances were trademark violations; publicly viewable buildings dating back before December 1990 are not protected by copyright.
Logos are another matter. The Casa Bonita name is traditionally done in a special typeface name that was registered as a service mark in 1974 and is still active; in November, the new owners re-registered the mark, asking that it not be used on items ranging from "fitted vehicle seat covers" to "swim goggles" (sorry, cliff divers) to "bobble head dolls."
But Krumpholz didn't use the actual logo. He drew a cartoon version of the Casa Bonita sign on the outside of the building. And even so, he says, "If they came to me and said take the name off the building, I would have been fine." (For the record, the South Park segment on Casa Bonita uses the name, but not the registered typeface.)
But Krumpholz has yet to hear from Casa Bonita's owners, and Westword's requests for information from the Beautiful Opco contact who filed the Etsy complaint have gone unanswered.
Artrepreneur Andrew Novick could be Casa Bonita's biggest fan; he'd eaten there more than 300 times before the pandemic hit in March 2020 and the restaurant was required to close its doors. (Unlike so many others, it didn't reopen when COVID restrictions were lifted.) When Wheaton's Summit Family filed for bankruptcy protection for Casa Bonita in April 2021, Novick organized a group that included My Brother's Bar owner Danny Newman, and they made a bid to buy the place, holding rallies and selling memorabilia and art on savecasabonita.org to raise funds.
During the bankruptcy action, "we got a really lame cease-and-desist to stop selling items we had in the online shop," Novick recalls. Despite the demand's lameness, he says they removed the items, "because we were still trying to stay in the middle of the bidding." The website remained live, however.
But then the South Park deal came down that August (Stone and Parker announced it on a Facebook Live with Governor Jared Polis), and Novick's group wasn't allowed to bid again. "We dropped our objection in exchange for meeting with them," he says. When Novick talked with the new owners' reps, they asked him to take down the savecasabonita.org website. "I told them it was a historical account of what all happened with our campaign," Novick says. "They said they would check with their lawyers, and I never heard back."
As for future meetings, "They said, 'We'll be in touch.'"
They haven't been. "They totally ghosted us," says Novick, who didn't even get one of the friends-and-family invites handed out to thousands of movers and shakers invited to be the first to try the renovated Casa Bonita in late May and June. (See former Westword food critic Laura Shunk's take here.)
Novick has also been the co-organizer with Betsy Rudolph of the annual Casa Bonita art show at Next Gallery, which always inspires creative depictions of the restaurant, often right down to the logo. So far, no one has hit artists in that show with trademark violations, but Novick says he wouldn't be surprised to see one.
Still, less seasonal artists who specialize in satire could be forgiven for thinking that South Park's creators might accept that "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," since their cartoon series regularly depicts real people and places, right down to their logos.
For example, one South Park episode referenced the fictitious South Park Chamber of Commerce, showing a logo very similar to that of the very real Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce, right down to the symbol and typeface. "We take it as a compliment that they thought to include us," says Andrea Zediker, vice president of marketing and communications for the Denver Metro Chamber.
Other institutions aren't as good-natured. Decades ago, Applebee's attorneys sent a cease-and-desist letter to Westword after cartoonist Kenny Be did a takedown of a place he called Crapplebee's using a meticulous cartoon re-creation of Applebee's typeface. After we stopped laughing, we declined to remove the cartoon since, well, it was a cartoon.
Krumpholz isn't laughing. He's been looking through Etsy and finding numerous items still for sale that feature the Casa Bonita logo and definitely can't be confused with art. He's also looking at all of his work thee that has never registered a complaint.
His latest book, Queen City: A Brief History and Illustrated Architecture New and Old of Denver, Colorado, which was nominated for a Colorado Book Award last year, is a collection of illustrations of iconic buildings, bars, theaters and more from this town's founding in 1858 through today, many showing accurate renditions of signs and logos. "I find it kind of funny after doing the whole Queen City book that Casa Bonita is the first to complain about an illustration I’ve done."
Something's funny, all right.
