Hey, what a coincidence! We're evil-underlings too!

Well, I just learned, from my mother of all people (her secret Native American name: She-who-finds-things-for-you-on-search-engines), that there's already a comic out there with a similar title, and a slightly similar concept to my Minions. I refer you to the folks at Dandelion Studios, who have a comic series titled "Zephyr & Reginald: Minions for Hire."

The strong similarity (based on looking at some of their samples) is that Zephyr and Reginald work as minions for various evil overlords and deliver ironic humor. But the execution couldn't be more different. These are black-and-white (far as I can tell) multi-panel comics about a pair of engineers who, when the job market goes south, turn to mad science. These guys actually build evil devices for their masters. My guys would be lucky to operate a can-opener, much less build one. Their guys actually seem to aspire to evil. My guys probably got recruited as minions at a job fair somewhere, and took the job only because the main alternative (possibly the chicken processing industry) sounded even worse. My guys wear uniforms, while these guys don't look in the least interchangeable. Heck, they even have real names. My guys just have numbers (except for "Rookie").

So I don't see any foul here. I've never heard of these guys before, though they've been out there for a couple years at least. We're clearly riffing off the same source material, though in much different ways.

As for the title, well, the only reason this blog is called "Minions for Hire" is because just plain-old "Minions" was taken (and not by anything useful, but by a "test" blog made years ago and completely abandoned). I'm not terribly attached to "Minions for Hire" as a blog name, but I'm reluctant to just abandon it after I've put so much work into spreading it around. But I just checked, and "Are we not Minions?" is also available here, and in fact, I just created a placeholder to reserve it in case I decide to move.

I think I'll contact them, explain the situation, and see if we can reach a gentleman's agreement. If they feel like the blog title is stepping on their toes, I'll likely vacate it as a courtesy, even though I don't think there's any legal obligation to do so. If there are to be changes, I'll let you know.

Meanwhile, new Minions on Monday.