"There's no hard ethical consensus when it comes to swiping."

Well, actually .. there I think there's a sharp dividing line between those who swipe and those who do the swiping. 
Part of the great uproar against Lichtenstein and the reason he got called on the carpet by the NCS was his outrageous swiping. Then he got embraced by the "Fine Art" crowd and the comic book publishers weren't going to take them on. Not after decades of being vilified as trash. They saw "Pop Art" as a way of gaining legitimacy when it was just another way for people to point and laugh at the "trashiness" of comics.

If comics are a serious medium, then if serious ethical standards haven't been enforced in the past, they should be now.

Anyway, I thought the point of THIS debate was trying to find (for this small corner of the net anyway) some hard ethical standards and definitions that we could agree on?

One consensus that I think has always been there is that if you swipe too much, you're an indifferent  hack. And for an industry that never had much money or fame to spread around, a hack who cared so little for his craft and integrity that he'd swipe not just out of necessity but as a rule, a guy like that wouldn't get any respect from his peers.

And that, I think, is the only way you can look at it. Wally Wood may have even had a code that was pro-swiping, but his peers still respected him. Liefeld swiped a lot and was very obvious about it  and at this point I don't think there are many artists who have any respect for him as a professional because of it. (He seems to be the butt of an extraordinary number of jokes at least.)

Color me hapless: Tarantino didn't come up with the glowing suitcase idea? That (the fact we only saw the glow and never what was inside) was one of the only good things about that film.

So this is a case in point: I got taken in by that movie bit. I could well imagine someone who only read Marvel or only read super-heroes not knowing that Liefeld was "homaging" Miller with that Ronin rip-off*. And we all know that there are many people who were definitely in one of those camps, especially at the time those New Mutant books came out.

* I know at the time Ronin came out that many people didn't pick it up precisely because it was published by DC and not Marvel. Because Miller had "defected" to DC. (To quote a friend: "there's no way I'm going to pick that up! DC only publishes crap!")

Miller himself is not above swiping or at least borrowing.

Bruce Wayne's dialogue in Miller's 1986 DK ("There nothing wrong with you, Joker, that I can't fix with my hands") sounded like it came straight out of a Spillane Mike Hammer novel. Really. And then there's Batman attacking Superman with a sonic gun, Batman hitting the sauce, Batman getting down and dirty street figthing in a mudhole, deliberately breaking his opponents limbs one by one, Selina as a Madam, etc, etc, etc.

Really. Read some Mike Hammer and then re-read Dark Knight 1986 and see what you think.

Given Miller's apparent fascination with Noir and Crime Fiction (anybody read Sin City?) this leaves me wondering whether Miller was paying homage, swiping, borrowing, mixing genres, etc, etc, etc.