Art Theif?

I had my own gallery article this week on http://themedes.org/ The mission of the site is to discuss "Social Injustice." So I got to talk about some of my more controversial pieces and what I was thinking going into them. You can use the dots at the bottom of the article to scroll through the pieces and the word balloon icon at the bottom left to view "artist comments." The website has a very minimalist/concept oriented navigation and has recently been redesigned. Here's a screen cap of one of the four pieces I had this week.

I was also informed by an anonymous email user that an "artist" in Australia was re-inking over my inked art and not being up front in saying that it wasn't his drawing. This brings me to the larger issue of gallery sites like deviantart. I want to share my art with the world at large but people will screen cap instead of buy, use the art as their own to get a job or copy large portions of a smaller artist's work to shortcut their own, assuming the artist is not and will never be well enough known to find out, especially someone in Australia. I pursued the matter and it would seem that I was fired up by his brother in some sort of family fued. The part that really set me off was he even mentioned that he would not take pictures of "his" art straight on or post scanned images because of the same process that he is using to steal from me and others like me. Its so meta in the worst way. Anyway, I was very rude and angry and somewhat out of line. I would have been flattered (as Heath -the penciler- was) If he would co-sign the piece, or put my name up front with Heath's but he would only mention it if someone asked and even then only to say that the "free hand drawn" pieces were "not his idea entirely." Some may see it as a gray line but I definitely don't. Some of my friends do similar things and it angers me, I guess it's a function of the "breaking in" of the business. Unless you are huge, chances are you won't ever see if someone is doing it and there isn't really a way to know. I've also been contributing to http://keepitfreshsketchblog.blogspot.com/ recently. Super psyched to of heard the Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire audio drama, after trudging through the Thrawn Trilogy everyone hails so much. Also, excited to hear the Batman: Knightfall and Superman Lives adaptions by BBC radio as well as get the Batman: No man's land adaption by graphic audio sometime in the future. I've recently discovered the podcasts: Science... sort of, the deceptionists, fuzzy typewriter, and Books and Nachos

The Medes and Nerd Nation

I was on another episode of Nerd Nation where I talk about my upcoming projects, the podcast here. I also won the Medes contest at Denver Comic Con for a piece of art that highlighted social injustice and it is featured on their website. Hover over the glasses on the right side of the screen for the menu and click on my name. The website has a very original design and navigation. You can see it here. I also realize that I kind of went off on some things in my last post, and I think that's good. It's the opinionated reason I read other's blogs. This week I've been irritated with the trend of having character lose a family member or loved on as the inciting incident or in the first act of the movie/story etc. I've been listening to "the deceptionists" writing podcast and enjoying that and trying to get someone to make either an Aliens or Predator audio drama, there are none! And I find that extremely odd because I think they could be great. Especially an adaptation of the Steve Perry novel/comics trilogy, Earth Hive, Nightmare Asylum, and Female War - which follows on the heels of Aliens for an out of continuity alternative history. It sounds great, and I would love to hear them since each character/franchise really has some very iconic music and sound fx associated with them. I've also joined another sketchblog after the last one peetered out. This one is called keepitfresh.blogspot.com and I've already posted for the Spider-man movie and Saga.

Interviews

Me and James were just interviewed by Invest Comics about our upcoming Blue Water and Cosmic Times work, as well as our take on digital comics which you can read here and I'll be appearing on Sunday's episode of Nerd Nation for a round table discussion with Gene Hoyle, Martin Pierro, and James Whynot about our upcoming comic from Cosmic Times entitled "From Blood."