Hmm...'Cars of the X-Men'...so, would Nightcrawler drive a Gremlin?
Or would Storm drive a VW Scirocco?
Sunfire, after making a...ahem...fiery...speech protesting Xavier's attitude for providing him with a Japanese car, would drive off angrily...in a Chevy Nova.

You do realize that you would be violating trademark and copyright on the comic images, if they are not in the public domain? You could let yourself open for some major legal issues. Disney and Warner aggressively protect their rights.

Creating a collage for yourself is not a problem;  mass producing the same work could be.  When you start making money off of someone else's work or your stuff is derived from their work, you get into dangerous territory.  I would consult a specialist in trademark and/or copyright law, before doing anything beyond small scale custom orders.

I work for a printing company and we get customers bringing in stuff created by people on Etsy that are filled with trademark violations (Disney characters, superheroes, Star Wars, etc...).  Etsy pretty much washes their hands of it and lets the rights holder go after the individual, until (probably) they get enough pressure to act, by delisting the person or something.  Ebay used to be a haven for this stuff, until they were forced to clean up the violations going on.  The problem is that technology has made reproducing things rather easy and relatively cheap, compared to older printing technologies.

The other issue is, even if you are within the law, the conglomerates have enough economic resources to tie you up in legal red tape to make it too costly for you to fight.  They are Godzilla, everyone else is Tokyo.

Also, would you be paying royalties to the artists who created the work you are using to make a profit with? It may not be legally required, but it is the ethical thing to do. There's a difference between using found art to create a personal art piece and using found art to make a commercial product for profit.

It's a slippery slope. A lot of cons will allow artists to sell prints using corporate characters if they created the artwork themselves, but will not allow vendors to sell unlicensed reproductions of other artists work as prints, t-shirts, or other products unless they can show a contract with or permission from the trademark holder and/or a contract with the artist who actually produced the artwork. I know Heroes Initiative is allowed to sell cover reproductions as prints because it is for charity and the publishers signed off on it, but a private vendor doing the same thing without that permission would be shut down.

I see vendors using other people's art for unlicensed products without paying royalties to the artists who created the art getting called out all the time on sites like Bleeding Cool, and either cons shut those vendors down and bar them form selling those things or fan boycotts of the products are arranged to make life miserable for those vendors. Many often make the artists involved aware who then take steps to send cease and desist letters to prevent someone else profiting form their labor that they have received no compensation from. Most of them have reprint rights that kick in if a publisher licenses the art out for use in commercial products where they would get royalties/residuals from someone using their art for products like that.

So I am not sure if you would be violating the letter of the law doing it, but there are a lot of places in the comic book community where that type of things is not well accepted or welcomed.

-M

I'm certainly no expert in this area, but my understanding of it is that making these collages of copyrighted superheroes for yourself would come under "fair use". As soon as you start to charge other people money for them, you're making money off of corporately held characters and infringing these company's copyright for monetary gain. That's when you would get the lawyers sicced on you.

Maybe Slam_Bradley can shed more light on this and give you a more definitive answer about the legal aspects of this endeavour of yours.

I appreciate your enthusiasm, Hondobrode! I think honestly most of the guys here are getting ahead of themselves. My sister-in-law did some etsy stuff with licensed properties, and no one bothered her.. at first. Once she got close to having it be a legit business (selling enough items a day to make a few hours of work each day)... she suddenly stopped doing it. She never confirmed she got a cease and desist, but that's mostly because my brother was mad I warned him about it

As Crimebuster said, if you do this a a once in a while thing for friends and by word of mouth, you'd be fine. If you start trying to make it an internet business and making any kind of real money, you'll probably get shut down.