Swipe is a comics term for the intentional copying of a cover, panel, or page from an earlier comic book or graphic novel without crediting the original artist.
Artists Jack Kirby, Neal Adams, Hergé, and Jim Lee are common targets of swipes, though even those artists may not be above reproach; Kirby was known to have swiped from Hal Foster early in his career. [1] Similarly, many Golden Age artists kept "swipe files" of material to be copied as needed. [2] Certain contemporary artists have become notorious for their swiping, including Rich Buckler (who favors Neal Adams and Jack Kirby), Rob Liefeld (many artists), Keith Giffen (José Antonio Muñoz), and Roger Cruz (Jim Lee and Joe Madureira).
There is a long tradition in comics of using fine art as "inspiration" as well. Most observers do not consider this as objectionable as swiping from another cartoonist's work.[ citation needed ] Examples include Art Spiegelman swiping an image of the Russian artist M. Mazruho's in Maus , [3] Eddie Campbell swiping Diego Velázquez, [4] and Jill Thompson swiping the work of Arthur Rackham. [5]
Cartoonists have also swiped images from mass media and commercial art. Examples include Batman creator Bob Kane repeatedly swiping from early 20th-century illustrator Henry Vallely, [6] [7] Greg Land repeatedly swiping pornography as well as many popular comic book artists, [8] [9] 2000 AD artist Mick Austin swiping an image of Toni Shilleto's from Mayfair: Entertainment for Men, [10] Jon J. Muth swiping a 1940s photograph, [11] and David Chelsea swiping from Spanish pornography. [12] Sometimes the swiping happens "in reverse", as in the example of an illustration from Organic Gardening magazine swiping the iconic Kirby cover for Fantastic Four #1. [13]
Swiping brings to mind the amusing conundrum of whether an artist can swipe from himself. One example is two almost-identical Peanuts strips by Charles Schulz done almost ten years apart. [14] Another comic strip-related ethics question was invoked by latter-day Nancy artists Guy & Brad Gilchrist swiping Nancy creator Ernie Bushmiller. [15]
Though not technically swiping, some artists have made a career "cloning" other artists. Phil Jimenez has been quite open about his work being modeled on George Pérez's, [16] though he has never been accused of directly swiping a Pérez drawing. Bryan Hitch started off as an Alan Davis "clone". [17] Bill Sienkiewicz's early work was blatantly derivative of Neal Adams, [18] as was Tom Grindberg's, [17] Michael Netzer (Nasser)'s, and Mike Grell's. Industry veteran Dick Giordano maintained that cloning is not only acceptable, but actually preferable, when an artist fills in for a regular artist on a title. [19]
Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein made a splash in the 1960s with his "appropriations" based on the work of Kirby, Russ Heath, Tony Abruzzo, Irv Novick, John Romita Sr., and Jerry Grandenetti, who rarely received any credit. Jack Cowart, executive director of the Lichtenstein Foundation, contests the notion that Lichtenstein was a copyist, saying: "Roy's work was a wonderment of the graphic formulae and the codification of sentiment that had been worked out by others. The panels were changed in scale, color, treatment, and in their implications. There is no exact copy." [20] Comics industry figures don't have such a sanguine attitude about Lichtenstein's swipes. [2]
Similarly, Canadian artist Kevin Mutch once drew an entire comic book entirely based on swipes. Mutch's 1993 comic Captain Adam was a "narrative collage" of images and texts from over fifty separate Silver Age and Bronze Age comics, randomly put together to form an original story.
Comics pastiches are blatant uses of swipes, cloning, and appropriation, usually using the same characters as the original source. French-Canadian cartoonist Yves Rodier is known for his many Adventures of Tintin pastiches, as is the anonymously written comic book The Adventures of Tintin: Breaking Free . In his Masterpiece Comics series, American cartoonist R. Sikoryak cleverly mixes exact cloning of famous cartoonists' styles with classic literary texts, creating unique comics "mash-ups". Alan Moore and Rick Veitch's 1963 series is another example of pastiche in comics form, as are the many take-offs of the Charles Atlas ads found in old comic books.
In comics, it is understood that the difference between a swipe and an "homage" is generally whether the source is directly acknowledged — as opposed to being exposed by a third party. Throughout the history of the medium, artists have engaged in homages – most often of well-known cover images like Action Comics No. 1, Detective Comics No. 27, Amazing Fantasy No. 15, and Fantastic Four No. 1. (John Byrne is particularly fond of doing homages to the latter, having produced at least seven versions to date.) [21] Some observers find homages as objectionable as swiping. [2]
From 1991 until at least 1997, the industry magazine The Comics Journal kept a "Swipe File" which documented perceived swipes in the comics field,[ volume & issue needed ] a tradition that continues on the TCJ website.[ citation needed ]
Alleged Swiper | Source | Notes |
---|---|---|
Michael Allred | David Chelsea [22] | Allred denied the charges. [23] |
Chester Brown | Joe Orlando [24] | |
Rich Buckler | Neal Adams [25] | Buckler has a dubious reputation as one of comics' top "swipe" artists, [26] with his early work in particular filled with "homages" to artists like Jack Kirby, John Buscema, and Neal Adams. After being publicly accused of the practice by The Comics Journal in the early 1980s, [27] Buckler denied the charges [28] and sued the magazine for libel; [29] he later dropped the suit. [30] |
Jack Kirby [31] [32] | ||
Charles Burns | Hergé [33] | |
Denys Cowan | Gil Kane [17] | |
Glyn Dillon | Jaime Hernandez [34] | |
Steve Ditko | Will Eisner [35] | |
Ron Frenz | Jack Kirby [36] | |
Keith Giffen | José Antonio Muñoz [37] [38] [39] | Giffen has acknowledged Muñoz's influence, and in 2000 referred to the controversy this way:
In 1986 Giffen was one of the most popular comic book artists in the industry. The ensuing swiping controversy hurt Giffen's reputation. [2] [41] |
Bob Kane | Alex Raymond [42] | The classic Batman pose on the cover of Detective Comics No. 27 (the first appearance of Batman) is swiped from a 1937 Alex Raymond drawing of Flash Gordon. [42] |
Gil Kane | Jack Kirby [31] [43] | |
Jack Kirby | Hal Foster [1] | |
Peter Kuper | Rius [44] | |
Ralph Steadman [45] | ||
Alan Kupperberg | Gil Kane [31] | |
Roy Lichtenstein | Irv Novick, Bruno Premiani, Jerry Grandenetti, Russ Heath [46] [47] | |
Rob Liefeld | Brent Anderson [48] | |
John Byrne [2] [49] | ||
Frank Miller [2] [50] | ||
George Pérez [2] | ||
Ron Wilson [48] | ||
David W. Mack | Adam Hughes [51] | Mack admitted the Hughes swipes online:
|
Todd McFarlane | Otomo Katsuhiro [53] | |
Joe Phillips | Barry Windsor-Smith [54] | |
Joe Simon | John Prentice [55] [56] | The stories "Man in the House" from Young Romance #101 (August-September 1959) and "Take Me Back" from All for Love #16 (October-November 1959), both credited to Joe Simon, are swipes of entire Prentice-drawn stories "The Irresistible Bum" from Young Romance #72 (August 1954) and "One More Time" from First Love Illustrated #41 (June 1954), respectively. [55] [56] |
Andi Watson | Mike Allred [57] |
Question: What did you do as Buckler's assistant?
Pérez: Basically, I helped him with layout. Or I'd go through his swipe file — batches of comics — looking for suitable swipes for the story he was doing. Since at the time he was doing Thor and Fantastic Four, that meant lots of Jack Kirby books.
The Fantastic Four is a superhero team appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The team debuted in The Fantastic Four #1, helping usher in a new level of realism in the medium. It was the first superhero team created by artist/co-plotter Jack Kirby and editor/co-scripter Stan Lee, and through this title the "Marvel method" style of production came into prominence.
Jack Kirby was an American comic book artist, widely regarded as one of the medium's major innovators and one of its most prolific and influential creators. He grew up in New York City and learned to draw cartoon figures by tracing characters from comic strips and editorial cartoons. He entered the nascent comics industry in the 1930s, drawing various comics features under different pen names, including Jack Curtiss, before settling on Jack Kirby. In 1940, he and writer-editor Joe Simon created the highly successful superhero character Captain America for Timely Comics, predecessor of Marvel Comics. During the 1940s, Kirby regularly teamed with Simon, creating numerous characters for that company and for National Comics Publications, later to become DC Comics.
Harold Rudolf Foster, FRSA was a Canadian-American comic strip artist and writer best known as the creator of the comic strip Prince Valiant. His drawing style is noted for its high level of draftsmanship and attention to detail.
The Silver Age of Comic Books was a period of artistic advancement and widespread commercial success in mainstream American comic books, predominantly those featuring the superhero archetype. Following the Golden Age of Comic Books, the Silver Age is considered to cover the period from 1956 to 1970, and was succeeded by the Bronze Age.
The Comics Journal, often abbreviated TCJ, is an American magazine of news and criticism pertaining to comic books, comic strips and graphic novels. Known for its lengthy interviews with comic creators, pointed editorials and scathing reviews of the products of the mainstream comics industry, the magazine promotes the view that comics are a fine art, meriting broader cultural respect, and thus should be evaluated with higher critical standards.
Keith Ian Giffen was an American comics artist and writer. He was known for his work for DC Comics on their Legion of Super-Heroes and Justice League titles as well as for being the co-creator of Lobo, Rocket Raccoon, and Jaime Reyes.
Wallace Allan Wood was an American comic book writer, artist and independent publisher, widely known for his work on EC Comics's titles such as Weird Science, Weird Fantasy, and MAD Magazine from its inception in 1952 until 1964, as well as for T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, and work for Warren Publishing's Creepy. He drew a few early issues of Marvel's Daredevil and established the title character's distinctive red costume. Wood created and owned the long-running characters Sally Forth and Cannon.
David Emmett Cockrum was an American comics artist known for his co-creation of the new X-Men characters Nightcrawler, Storm, Colossus, and Mystique, as well as the antiheroine Black Cat. Cockrum was a prolific and inventive costume designer who updated the uniforms of the Legion of Super-Heroes. He did the same for the new X-Men and many of their antagonists in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Joseph Leonard Sinnott was an American comic book artist. Working primarily as an inker, Sinnott is best known for his long stint on Marvel Comics' Fantastic Four, from 1965 to 1981, initially over the pencils of Jack Kirby. During his 60 years as a Marvel freelance artist and then remote worker salaried artist, Sinnott inked virtually every major title, with notable runs on The Avengers, The Defenders, and Thor.
Richard Joseph Giordano was an American comics artist and editor whose career included introducing Charlton Comics' "Action Heroes" stable of superheroes and serving as executive editor of DC Comics.
Nelson Alexander Ross is an American comic book writer and artist known primarily for his painted interiors, covers, and design work. He first became known with the 1994 miniseries Marvels, on which he collaborated with writer Kurt Busiek for Marvel Comics. He has since done a variety of projects for both Marvel and DC Comics, such as the 1996 miniseries Kingdom Come, which he also cowrote. Since then he has done covers and character designs for Busiek's series Astro City, and various projects for Dynamite Entertainment. His feature film work includes concept and narrative art for Spider-Man (2002) and Spider-Man 2 (2004), and DVD packaging art for the M. Night Shyamalan film Unbreakable (2000). He has done covers for TV Guide, promotional artwork for the Academy Awards, posters and packaging design for video games, and his renditions of superheroes have been merchandised as action figures.
Gil Kane was a Latvian-born American comics artist whose career spanned the 1940s to the 1990s and virtually every major comics company and character.
Rich Buckler was an American comics artist and penciller, best known for his work on Marvel Comics' Fantastic Four in the mid-1970s and for creating the character Deathlok in Astonishing Tales #25. Buckler drew virtually every major character at Marvel and DC, often as a cover artist.
Richard Bache Ayers was an American comic book artist and cartoonist best known for his work as one of Jack Kirby's inkers during the late-1950s and 1960s period known as the Silver Age of Comics, including on some of the earliest issues of Marvel Comics' The Fantastic Four. He is the signature penciler of Marvel's World War II comic Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos, drawing it for a 10-year run, and he co-created Magazine Enterprises' 1950s Western-horror character the Ghost Rider, a version of which he would draw for Marvel in the 1960s.
In the United States, creator ownership in comics is an arrangement in which the comic book creator retains full ownership of the material, regardless of whether the work is self-published or published by a corporate publisher.
Topps Comics was a division of Topps Company, Inc. that published comic books from 1993 to 1998, beginning its existence during a short comics-industry boom that attracted many investors and new companies. It was based in New York City, at 254 36th Street, Brooklyn, and at One Whitehall Street, in Manhattan.
Arthur Suydam is an American comic book artist known for his work on Marvel Zombies, Deadpool, Black Panther, and KISS Zombies. He has done artwork for magazines including Heavy Metal, Epic Illustrated and National Lampoon, while his comic book work includes Batman, Conan, Tarzan, Predator, Aliens, Death Dealer, and Marvel Zombies.
Notable events of 1971 in comics.
Notable events of 1970 in comics.