Cartoonists Ted Rall and Danny Hellman's long legal tango continues Sept. 10, when judges are scheduled to convene to consider whether a complaint of injurious libel against Hellman should be reinstated or dismissed.

Rall's charge that an e-mail prank perpetrated by Hellman constituted injurious libel was one of five complaints in Rall's original lawsuit against Hellman, a suit which has divided the New York cartooning community not so much between supporters of Rall and supporters of Hellman as between detractors of Rall and detractors of Hellman. Both have attracted their share of enemies -- Hellman by virtue of his nose-thumbing Internet persona and dirty tricks and Rall by writing a Village Voice article that many felt was an unfair and petty attack on Art Spiegelman (See TCJ #216, Newswatch: "Rumble in the Village" for the full story on Rall and the Voice piece).

Rall's suit against Hellman crept another step closer to trial, June 5, when the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court ruled that Rall's suit against Hellman could proceed on a single count of libel per se. Rall and his attorney immediately issued a press release exulting that the court had "paved the way for setting a trial date shortly -- as early as this fall."

Hellman acknowledged that his side "did really badly" during the hearing, at which five judges aimed questions at Hellman's and Rall's lawyers. "The judges beat up on my lawyer," Hellman told the Journal, "saying things like 'The defendant has made a devastating attempt to damage this man's career.' They were very polite to Rall's lawyers, and Ted Rall was there grinning from ear to ear."

Rall recalled the hearing with pleasure, quoting the judges as saying, "This was one of the most vicious examples of character assassination they'd ever seen. They said he couldn't have done anything worse short of shooting me in the head."

Rall's grin may have lessened somewhat, however, when the judges issued their ruling: Four of the five complaints were dismissed. Rall's claim of intentional infliction of emotional distress and all claims requiring proof of quantifiable pecuniary damages were dismissed. Only on the libel per se complaint did the judges deny Hellman's motion for dismissal.

Rall may have put a self-serving victorious spin on his press release, but he did have a point. Only one bullet needs to get through, and, according to Rall's attorney, Paul Levenson, this was the one they expected to reach its target. "Libel per se was the first and most important complaint we filed," he told the Journal. "It's not the type that's readily disproved."

It's also not the type that's readily proved. The idea behind libel per se is that a person can be harmed by libel in non-quantifiable ways, such as Rall's claim that his professional reputation has been harmed. In such a case, Rall's initial demands of $1.5 million will go out the window, and the jury, if it feels libel has been proven, will award whatever damages it feels are appropriate, if any.

All of Rall's complaints stemmed from an August 1999 prank perpetrated by Hellman, in which he circulated a phony e-mail purporting to be an invitation by Rall to form a posturing, iconoclastic e-mail group. Hellman has said the prank was intended as a satire on the arrogant tone of Rall's criticism of Art Spiegelman in The Village Voice.

Rall filed five complaints or "causes of action" against Hellman: 1) libel per quod, the other kind of libel complaint, which asserts that Rall suffered financial losses from Hellman's prank, including certain business opportunities because it distracted Rall at a time when he was pitching ideas to entertainment executives on the West Coast; 2) libel per se; 3) injurious falsehood -- which claims damages resulting from Rall's expenses in obtaining legal counsel and tracking Hellman down as the source of the phony e-mail; 4) that Rall's civil rights were violated by Hellman's appropriation of Rall's name for advertising purposes; and 5) intentional infliction of emotional distress through the fabricated e-mail and through incitement of threatening statements on an Internet message board (The Comics Journal Message Board).

The judges, in their ruling, agreed that there were sufficient grounds for the libel per se complaint to be brought before a jury, saying, "Where, as here, an act of literary impersonation imputes facts to the person impersonated that damage him in his trade or profession, a cause of action for libel per se is adequately pleaded."

They did not buy Rall's libel per quod complaint, however, saying, "To the extent that the complaint alleges that certain meetings with potential employers in the entertainment industry went poorly, there was no allegation that plaintiff actually lost a single client as a result of the e-mail."

The judges also dismissed Rall's injurious falsehood complaint, but left the door open for possible reinstatement if it were pleaded in greater detail. "While costs, such as counsel fees, incurred in avoiding damage to plaintiff's reputation and business may be actionable under an injurious falsehood theory," the ruling stated, "plaintiff's complaint was nevertheless deficient, as he failed to identify his special damages with sufficient particularity." This is the complaint that Rall's attorney has amended with specific information about Rall's legal expenses and submitted for reinstatement. The judges are scheduled to rule on that following the Sept. 10 hearing.

The ruling was especially scornful of the civil rights complaint, saying, "As plaintiff concedes, the relevant inquiry in the context of this case is whether the e-mail attracted customers to defendant and/or helped defendant make a profit. What is evident is that the complaint fails to provide any explanation (let alone an allegation) as to how defendant's criticism of plaintiff served a trade purpose. Rather what is alleged is that defendant utilized the criticism in order to generate 'discussion' on a website, a site to which defendant was not even alleged to have been commercially connected. This is hardly the basis to assert a Civil Rights claim."

The judges had little sympathy for Rall's fifth complaint, in which he alleged that he had suffered emotional distress from Hellman's prank and by threatening posts on The Comics Journal Message Board, which, among other things, encouraged readers to vomit on Rall on sight. In a fairly insulting assessment of the TCJ Message Board, the judges concluded that one would have to expect such things to happen if one hangs around places like the message board, engaging in its so-called "discussion." "Defendant's impersonation of plaintiff, while undoubtedly wrongful, was not so outrageous and shocking so as to constitute a basis for this claim," the ruling stated. "To the extent that defendant is alleged to have made statements encouraging people to Ôvomit' on plaintiff, these statements were apparently made in e-mail transmissions on The Comics Journal website. Considering the content of the statements vis-ˆ-vis the website at which they were published, defendant's statements cannot be viewed as actionable."

Rall complained, "One of the things I have to deal with is the attitude toward the comics field that these are wacky, out-of-control people. It's hard to make the judges understand that this is a business like any other."

According to Hellman, he first conceived of his prank as a result of a TCJ Message Board posting: He had posted the text of Rall's article for The Village Voice on the message board and Rall sent him an e-mail in response, saying, "You have violated my copyright, but your secret is safe with me." The tone of this e-mail so irked Hellman that he began plotting his own pseudo-Rall e-mail. "That's really what motivated me to play the prank," he told the Journal.

In the intervening two years, the controversy surrounding Rall's Voice story might well have faded if not for the spin-off conflict between Rall and Hellman. Partly as a result of the ire aroused by Rall's attack on Spiegelman, many cartoonists have rallied around Hellman. "The Dirty Danny Legal Defense Fund" has just released a 256-page benefit anthology of comics contributed by an impressive list of talents. The book, called Legal Action Comics Vol. 1, features work by 70 cartoonists, including Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Robert Williams, Spain, Julie Doucet, Kim Deitch, Tony Millionaire, Jay Lynch, Gary Panter, Mike Diana, Mary Fleener, Kaz, Steven Weissman, Doug Allen, Peter Kuper, Dame Darcy, Dean Haspiel, Sam Henderson, Ron Regé and James Kochalka. Though Hellman had earlier assured Rall that the book would not mention him, many of the contributions are about the lawsuit and feature pointed attacks on Rall, including the book's back-cover piece by Spiegelman, which quotes from a letter written by Hellman to the Voice and depicts a temple of cartoon gods with a Rall-shaped urinal in its Men's Room.

Hellman said, "The book is full of people whose feet I would kiss, people I'd never met before this."

Asked if many contributors might not be motivated less by their support of him and more by their animosity toward Rall, Hellman said, "It's hard to say where the disgust for that article leaves off and support for my case begins. A lot of people felt that article was a sloppy hatchet job." Including apparently Spiegelman himself, who refrained from commenting when the article appeared, but who, Hellman said, "did feel awful at the time." In Rall's opinion, "Most of the cartoonists in the book are there for Art Spiegelman. Of the 70 cartoonists, 58 of them, nobody's ever heard of -- they don't matter. As for the big names, I have to think this is an 'enemy of my enemy is my friend' kind of thing. I just hope Art Spiegelman doesn't have to go through what I had to go through. I think a lot of people in that book haven't given a lot of thought on how they would feel if something like this had happened to them."

Rall identified certain demographic lines along which allegiances have been mustered in the cartooning community. "I don't think the cartooning community speaks with one voice about anything," he told the Journal. "I think comic-book people lean toward Danny's side. People in editorial cartooning are aligned with me. And comics-strip people couldn't give a shit about any of it."

Noting that "Comic-book people are pussies," Rall accused Hellman of exploiting "America's predilection for sound bites" by characterizing the conflict between the two as "rich cartoonist versus poor cartoonist" and a battle in defense of satire.

Hellman recently got into hot water at the New York Press, the alternative weekly where he does regular illustration work, by speaking out against the Press's dropping of his friend Kaz's Underworld strip and by writing a letter of protest to the paper. Rall wrote a tongue-in-cheek letter to the Press praising Hellman for risking his Press income by standing up to the paper and its publisher: "Could actual humanity be in the future for Dirty Danny?"

Asked if the long conflict between Hellman and Rall might not be bringing them closer together over time, in the manner of, say a hostage and captor, Rall said, "It has been a danse macabre. It's true, a lawsuit is a very intimate relationship."

Rall denied that a love-hate relationship was evolving, however. "There's no love," he told the Journal, "and I don't pretend to hate Danny. From what I'm able to gather he's an intelligent guy, a good illustrator and obviously a character."