IMAGE: The front and back of a Miss Mizzou bookmark created to promote the Miss Mizzou book.

This is a bit of a personal post I wanted to write to explain why I didn’t want to create any Miss Mizzou merchandise to go along with the Miss Mizzou book. A couple of practical reasons:

• I wanted to err on the side of caution while dealing with a complex character with a controversial past. The character is not as simple and beloved as the Truman Tiger mascot for example.
• The rights to Miss Mizzou are complex; MU has the “Mizzou” trademark, but the Caniff Estate owns the character. Luckily I got permission to do the book because it was history, but merchandising might be a different situation.

More than these reasons, merchandising didn’t interest me because I want to promote the story of Miss Mizzou, not the character. I’m interested in sharing the story with a new generation of Columbians, MU students, and comic fans. While a lot of my book examines frivolous things, I think there are also interesting lessons to be learned from the story of Miss Mizzou. My role is amateur historian and comics scholar, not intellectual property marketer.

With the interest of sharing the story, I did create one item that might fall in the merchandising category: Bookmarks. These are hopefully a modest promotional tool that I’ve been handing out for free so I can promote my book, and the story of Miss Mizzou.