Dave: "Question for the forum - if these were photographs would your opinion change? Is it something about the medium that makes it wrong or is it wrong no matter the medium if the comic artist is uncredited?"

Thanks for pointing that out Dave. I honestly did not realize these were photorealistic paintings. To be honest, that does change my opinion (especially re: my earlier post vis a vis talent and craft). Pretty impressive. Should credit be given to the comic artists? Sure, I'd like to see some acknowledgement. But this takes a technique and craft very different than what the original comic was...and in my opinion is WAY different than the blatant swiping that Lichtenstein did.

To sum it up...I agree with Paulo's post above.

I'd have to know a bit more about her process before I started raving, because these days you can pretty much print compositions onto canvas and paint on top of that, the technology for that exists and is widely used.

The easiest way to do this would be to take a well lit and well staged photo, print it onto canvas and paint on top. The detail may be well executed, but not necessarily taxing craft wise.

The hard, old school way of doing this includes meticulous calculations, exhaustive research of paper textures, curving and light reflection, painstakingly studying each individual style to replicate brushstokes et al.

Without knowing the actual process, it's difficult to know just how admirable the craft is.  

"Based on what I've read on some of the linked-to page, these are oil paint on wood. "

Good point, but the transfer of an image onto wood is still relatively easy, while the painting of course still requires skill. I used the canvas example having watched a documentary about Thomas Kinkade and his faux-painting prints.

My point is that there's a difference in technical skill between painting photo-realistically from scratch,  and painting photo-realistically by taking a photo, tracing or transferring it off, making simple flat color mixes and filling in colours.

And obviously, without knowing the process it's difficult for me to assess the level of skill. Obviously all artists use such "cheats", but they usually transform the image in a personal way through altering compositions or tweaking details in the rendering. Moody's art is about not doing that, which makes the "cheat" more central to the finsihed product and not merely a useful tool in the pre-painting stages.

If you look at her website you can clearly see that she paints these things from scratch and has the skill to do so based on her other works. That doesn't mean she should just because she can. Here is an other example of her work which, formally, is equivalent to the comic paintings:

Everything in the above painting is a copy of another artists work.  Or a copy of an artists photograph of another artists work. There is no difference in my eyes between this and the comic paintings. Both are skillfully crafted, but lack any real artistic value. She has done other still life paintings of flowers and whatnot that are equally soulless and lacking creativity in my view. Why doesn't she use her obvious gifts of technical prowess to make some real art? Make a comic book dammit! If a comic is a valid subject for her *cough* 'fine art' then making an actual comic is equally valid. I challenge her to do so!

Art like that is why strictly representational art fell out of favour. Now, look at illustrators Rockwell, Fawcett et al. and they'd take the same expertise at rendering just about anything and infuse it with such life and personality ... (well, the classic masters did that, too but not as "lively")

It's pretty, but it doesn't tell me anything that you couldn't tell by sticking a photo on the wall.