I’m less disturbed by the plagiarism than by this:
A bound woman is about to be hacked up by a guy with an axe and that’s … sexy?
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Yup, that was my takeaway from this too. Jeez!
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Oh come on! Even the bottom line and vanishing points are matching perfectly as well as the upper edge of the wall in the background. All the swiper did was altering the angle of the neck of the woman and simplify the background scene.
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the block and floor are at a different perspective, which I think is an improvement.
The Chan drawing line work reminds me of someone at Mad. Thinking mainly of the executioner’s belly there.
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The original EC cover is by Jack Davis, who was a long time MAD artist; so that might be where you are getting that vibe from.
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I’m just trying to decide which is sexier–Black Canary’s exposed nip or the executioner’s saggy diaper.
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And if you copy it at much larger scale in oil paint, it’s artistic appropriation.
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It’s just a coincidence. There are only a limited number of comments a boinger can make on a story about cartoonists swiping images, and this is a common one.
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I made a gif for the “swipe or trace?” crowd. The source image of the later painting doesn’t appear to be flat, so I took the liberty of correcting it unscientifically with photoshop’s distort tool. But the actual painting has not been tampered with.
It has an underlying correspondence that suggests the layout was traced, but it’s clearly been redrawn throughout in the details. One pre-photoshop tool was drawing over projections, and something about this gives me the “drawn over a projection” tingle.
This actually resembles a modern technique of hard-pressed artists: using liquify to tug and pull swiped source material around so it won’t be too obvious when you paintover.
Plenty of space in such practices for legitimate work, obviously: liquify is great for creating charicatures, but no-one wants a disgusting, creepily photorealistic charicature, so of course it’s then painted/cartooned over.
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Disagree. You might have a point if the pose was the same and nothing else. Then you have the same clothes, setting, and context - it is clearly a swipe.
They did change things up, so it isn’t a direct copy. But parts are.
It is well documented, especially in the earlier days, for cartoonists to swipe. Theses were commercial art on a deadline. Some of them had stacks of “swipe books” which had collections of art and photos for reference. While less common today, comic artists still swipe from references and each other from time to time.
ILLUSTRATORS, then and now, almost ALL work from references. It isn’t tracing or cheating, it is getting accurate renders. This includes some comic artists like Alex Ross or Bill Sienkiewicz.
It really is “how the sausage is made”. And for people who aren’t into illustration is may seem like cheating or a strike against them, but it’s just what people did/do.
Here’s an example of one detail that convinced me this had to be at least partially traced. This is resized to match but in the original aspect ratio with no other distortion:
Yes, it is entirely possible for a skilled illustrator to get his drawing to match the original that closely without resorting to tracing, but then the question becomes “why WOULD he?” If you’re going to copy a portion of someone else’s drawing to that level of precision then there’s no reason NOT to just take the shortcut and trace the thing.
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Yeah, to be fair (to be fairrrr) hands are hard and that’s where the swipe was most blatant. He did change the horizon, dropped it lower, you can see the perspective difference at the top and bottom of the block and in the wall decorations but I think the real change was in the interest of a compositional emphasis – the wretch in the original is staring at his hands; the Canary figure is staring at, well, the executioner’s crotch. So, maybe some thematic implications… Anyway, the original horizon is just a bit above the victim’s eyes, where you’d expect, but in the swipe it’s lower, shifting from the executioner’s belly button to just below his knees, but the foreshortening hasn’t changed to match, you’d expect to see more of an upward angle on the face. His head’s distinctly smaller though, and the upper torso is shifted back a bit, so maybe the artist’s making a nod to foreshortening there? But the hands and axe haven’t changed angle or size (did I mention that hands are hard?). So maybe the head shrinkage is just from going with a more superhero-y seven-head figure… Either way the anatomy for his whole upper torso looks kinda wonky. Eh, irrelevant, that’s just stage dressing, the point of the piece is of course the fetish Canary and the executioner’s crotch. (Is that the title, “The Canary and the Crotch”? ) And the Canary figure looks pretty well done, technique-wise. Anyone wanna track down its source? I liked the color too, nice kinda watercolor effect
Maybe the executioner moonlights as yet another executioner.
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Don’t care about the swipe but Ernie Chua’s inks over John Buscema’s Conan pencils were and are awesome. Seventies Conan got me into reading comic books.
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Oh dude, Ernie CHUA! That name I remember, he was one of that influx of Filipino artists who hit American comics in the 70’s, great stuff. I was thinking the Canary figure looked a lot like 70’s Aparo and of course Chua and Aparo did the art on one of the best Batman runs ever in Detective Comics and EVEN better the Mike Fleisher Spectre run in… Wikipedia pause… Weird Adventure Comics! The Conan connection is cool – the inks on the executioner’s musculature look a lot like those Buscema/Chua (Chan) Conan’s… Tsk I should’ve Wikipediaed Chan first thing, seen the name change, stupid me.
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Can you tell by the pixels?
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They’re even using the same brand of axe! “SKULL! The Champagne of Axes!”
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I find that gif oddly reminiscent of the whole blue & white vs. black & gold dress photo a la 2015.
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*snickerz
Welcome to a small taste of what women go through all the time, no matter the topic or scenario.
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