Success is 99% other people's inspiration

I'm usually a person who supports the proliferation of greater amounts of Hayley Mills merchandise. But this image from a users' personal online store of Hayley and a Sleestak on a t-shirt caught my attention this morning.

The image of a Sleestak posing with Hayley Mills that is used on the shirt and poster is from a quick-and-dirty photo manipulation I did for the for the blog back in back in November 2005. The only change to the original image I posted is the addition of some text at the bottom commemorating a fictional band and concert. I don't know how long the t-shirt and poster have been for sale. The seller information says 2007 but I regularly search for Hayley Mills and Sleestak references and this is the first I have seen of it.

While I don't own the original image of Hayley Mills and her father that I pasted a Sleestak head into, I don't make any money off of it either. I use it for review, parody and unabashed fan purposes. The image isn't a secret as you can find the original on the web. Heck, there is even a colorized version a friend fancied up for me.

This guy is charging a lot of money for a t-shirt where 99% of the product is from work done by someone else. The thing is, anyone can make their own customized t-shirt at much less expense. The website he is using is only one of many custom clothing sites that are available. Furthermore, anyone with a printer and an iron can make their own and far more original hipster pop-culture t-shirt at home for even less.

Now I know how Tony Abruzzo must have felt.

Planetary #20 vs. Infected

How likely is it that the cover art for the novel Infected was inspired by the cover of Planetary #20 drawn by John Cassaday? These are some facts. Planetary #20 was published in September 2004 and may have been prepared some time prior to that date due to publishing delays. Infected was published as a novel in 2008 based on a 2006 Podcast (a sequel is due late this year). Since both covers feature a close up of an eye with an angular iris, I imagine the odds are pretty good against this being a coincidence.

While similarity in cover art is something that happens a lot in publishing, particularly for Mystery and Detective novels, I don't see a stylistic coincidence between these two covers even though the "eye in the triangle" is not a new idea. It is possible that there is some fan overlap between the two forms of publishing media and one idea might have inspired the other. If someone knows of Sigler and his Podcast work then it is highly probable they are also aware of Ellis and Cassaday and vise versa. Most of the creators involved in both the Planetary series and Infected are well known on the internet and could be considered "internet literary celebrities" in some circles.

This cover appears to be an example of an art swipe from a comic book by a publishing company that didn't care about creator rights or failed to vet the art properly.

By the way, both the Planetary series and Infected are good reads from edgy writers (and artists) with a unique, sometimes creepy voice. Go out and get them.

More comic art swipes: Dr. Strange and X-Men

M.D. #1 (Apr-May 1955) & Dr. Strange #169 (June 1968)

• As initially mentioned by BookSteve in comments to the post about the Adkins/Finlay swipe, here is the source and the offending panel. This was just shameless.

X-Men #132 (April 1980) & Astonishing X-Men #15 (August 2006)

• I'd call this an homage even though Whedon went through too much of a contortion of this Hellfire Club story to have Kitty just happen to solidify deep in the earth in a small cavern that held some breathable air and waist-deep water. If intended as a hat tip to previous creators, it's fanboy-ish, awkward and clumsy.

Dr. Strange, Master of the Swiped Art

In what became known as the self-proclaimed Marvel Age of Comics, new heights of quality story-telling in comic book art was achieved by ground-breaking artists like Ditko, Steranko and of course Jack Kirby. Steve Ditko in particular stunned readers with his wonderfully bizarre landscapes of surreal dimensional space while drawing Dr. Strange in the Strange Tales anthology series of the 1960's.

In my opinion some of Steve Ditko's best 1960's work was during his tenure on Strange Tales. Art that was at first average swiftly improved in creativity. It appeared as if Ditko wasn't all that interested in Dr. Strange at first or was not sure what direction to take it creatively. It was somewhere in the story arc with Strange fighting to survive against Super-Villain Team-Up of Dormmamu and Mordo and while seeking the cosmic entity Eternity that Ditko really seemed to start to care about the character and the work that he put into the book. It was this period I have come to think of as Ditko Unleashed.

After Ditko ended his tenure other illustrators stepped in to perform the art duties, most notably, Marie Severin. Other artists, while competent enough, were not in Ditko's or Severin's class and had to refer to outside sources for their inspiration. One of these artists was science fiction aficionado and fanzine editor Dan Adkins.

While browsing Datajunkie's site I rediscovered this classic science fiction image, drawn by the great pulp and SF artist Virgil Finlay for the for the reprinted S.S. Held story, The Death of Iron in the 1952 Wonder Stories Annual.



The picture rang some bells so I looked through my Dr. Strange collection and found this page depicting a worried Stephen Strange contemplating threats from other worlds in Dr. Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts #169 (June 1968, v1).


It is a safe bet that before the internet and greater interest in pulp magazines it was easier to use another artists' work as a muse and have the swipe pass unnoticed by fans. It's unlikely that other professionals did not recognize the origin of the image but I bet this page made the kids' eyes bug out when they saw it (Scenes like this are also part of the reason why Dr. Strange was a must-read title among college students back in the late 1960's).

This swipe is as obvious, though ultimately a bit more harmless in its deception, as the one spotlighting Bob Kane's artistic integrity and creativity vis a vis Batman, as related at the Vallely Archives.