A Kickstarter campaign to raise money for a sequel to Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are” has been suspended over a copyright dispute. The project, a poem written by Geoffrey O. Todd with illustrations by Rich Berner called “Back to the Wild,” was to chronicle a new adventure in which Max travels with his daughter, Sophie, to see the Wild Things for the first time in 30 years. In the original Kickstarter post, published in May, the authors said they hoped to raise £25,000 (about $37,270) to publish the work and had “been very careful not to impinge on Mr. Sendak’s copyright and have taken the necessary legal advice around this whole project.” HarperCollins Publishers, which published the original book, felt differently. In a legal notice sent to Kickstarter on July 3, the company said, “Any such unauthorized ‘sequel’ would clearly violate the estate’s right to create derivative works.” Before Sendak died last year, at 83, he spoke out against writing a sequel to his 1963 classic in a 2011 video interview with the Web site for the Tate museums in Britain: “Go to hell,” he said. “I’m not a whore. I don’t do those things.”
