West Virginia entrepreneur Robert Kiblinger has a thriving business selling castles, characters and other items accumulated by players on games like Ultima Online.

FORBES: Holy Cybersuit!

All of these characters are haunted by business practices that worked for them in the past.

FORBES: An Organizational Ghost Story

An informal census by the Times Square Alliance, a business group, counted 52 costumed characters clustered in the plaza on Saturday evening.

WSJ: Street Characters Tread Fuzzy Legal Ground

Two maverick characters, one from business (Mikitani Hiroshi, the subject of this post), one from politics (Hashimoto Toru, the focus of my next post), personify the new legitimacy being accorded to change-drivers.

FORBES: Can Rakuten Maverick CEO Mikitani's New Organization Change Japan?

Lisovsky's business has been connected with some unsavory characters.

FORBES: Godfather of the Kremlin?

Intruding on the story to interview his characters as they go about their business, Porterfield draws their suppressed turmoil to the foreground.

NEWYORKER: Putty Hill

Scrooge and Marley is basically a collection agency micro-business, whose proprietor did not even make the Forbes 15 List of Wealthiest Fictional Characters.

FORBES: Malthus and Scrooge: How Charles Dickens Put Holly Branch Through The Heart Of The Worst Economics Ever

Our acquisition of Marvel three years later combined Marvel's strong global brand and world-renowned library of characters with Disney's creative skills, unparalleled global portfolio of entertainment properties, and an integrated business structure that maximizes the value of creative content across multiple platforms and territories.

ENGADGET: Disney acquires Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion, plans more Star Wars movies