Why is one more ethical than the other?  To continue the comparison we're sorta using here: the times than John has done this make up a fraction of a fraction of a percent of his body of work.  And this is key to me - he could have drawn any of these scenes differently if he so chose.  And they would have looked just as good but maybe not had the impact he wanted in the story.  In Rob's case, he practically made a career out of lifting images; large and small, famous and commonplace, and at that point in his career, he could not have drawn it himself as effectively.  That's the difference to me.

But you have to look at each artist individually and see how often they do it and how they use it.  I admit in most cases it's tricky......in some, though, not so much.

WO

I've gotten this issue down to the simplest question I could.

What was the artist's intention when he copied a previous image?

If he/she did it to pay homage to the previous artist/art then it just that a homage. In this case i think it would be obvious that the image is a homage.

If the artist did it with the intentions of trying to pass the copy off as his own then we have a swipe.

Then there are times when there is only so many different ways you can draw a scene that hasn't been done before. It may look like a swipe or a homage but might not be so. It may just be a coincidence.

 

"In most cases the answer would be: there's no way of knowing for sure"

But can't you make a judgement based on how many times an artist does it and whether or not he uses it to complete his art instead of complementing it?

WO

Just for reference, you can see a bunch of Liefeld swipes on this page:

http://forum.dvdtalk.com/showthread.php?t=524592&page=4& amp;pp=25

Referring back to the Jack Vettriano post: his defense for using referenced material so closely is that, in the beginning of his career, he had very little money and resources to, say, hire models.

Clearly that is no longer an issue.

So I wonder, is there a natural "tolerance factor" that should be granted newbies who are trying to break into the field?

If Rob Liefeld had swiped for the first three years into his profession as illustrator and then blossomed into an amazing talent with an artistic invoice all his own, would he be forgiven his past transgessions? Or is the real issue with Liefeld that he overstayed his welcome as a swipper?

Looking back at Barry (then non-Windsor) Smith's earliest Conan drawings ... there are places where he was clearly looking at some side-by-side Kirby (the Kirby big knobby knees are a dead giveaway) yet I've never come across anyone referring to Barry (now-Windsor-) Smith as a former swiper. Sounds like Smith benefitted from a tolerance factor -- or grace period -- wherein he carved out a personal niche and a nice, personal style.