by Paul MavridesBy redefining the original manuscripts of my comic pages as printers aids, the BOE could dun all creators of these forms of literature a tax on their income. The basis for this questionable position was the fact that in the literary fields of children's books and comics, obvious to all of you, the authors construct their work by using sequential or inseparable imagery.The gov't said, in effect, that if I mail my work to my publisher, the act of mailing makes this transaction taxable. Then they say that if I digitize my comic strip and used a modem to send it to my publishers computer it's not taxable. The method of transportation was besides the point. I could shave cats and dogs, tattoo my panels onto their skins, and ship the live animals to my publisher and that would be considered a manuscript by the BOE, as long as I only wrote on them--prose text is intangible intellectual ideas represented by the alphabet characters, but a cartoon's value is tangible and taxable because the publisher requires a physical copy of the cartoon in order to reproduce it. At my last oral appeal I directly asked a Miss Elsa Vega, a senior tax auditor, for the literary standards the board was using to make their literary determinations. She replied and I quote her "There are none, but we know it when we see it". Another board employee told me that the board considered my work basically no different that the design for a smile face coffee mug decal.
|
