Steve Saffel

Agree completely, Scott. These might as well be photographs–they aren’t stylized, emotionally charged representations, and as such they aren’t even homages to the original illustrators. If they’re meant to be homages to the original characters and comics, then they come awfully close to trademark infringement.

Dale Coe

This is theft of another person’s work, plain and simple. At the very least, credit should be given to the artists whose work has been copied. Did Ms Moody use tracing paper?

Claude Lalumière

Words fail. I, too, believe in collage as a valid art form, but this is not collage or fair use. This is appropriation, thievery, and as you put so well, Scott: anonymization. To call these unlicensed collaborations would be to give this “artist” too much credit. Anyone who knows comics well enough can recognize the works of these artists at a glance. It is their artistry that’s being exploited here, without consent, compensation, or even credit. Shameful.

Glenn B Fleming

Totally agree with the above, but this practice is not new. I bet the guy who painted on those cave walls didn’t get the credit he deserved!

Michael C. Thompson\

Wow, she has some nerve to not even mention that the panels were originally created by other artists. I might buy that she is just showing a piece of Americana with the comics, if she were to admit that they were not created by her very audibly at every showing of her work. She has an artistic and moral responsibility to make it very clear to everyone that these images did not pop out of her own mind. The fact that she doesn’t makes her nothing more than a artistic con-artist, IMO.

Albert Holaso

I have drawn comicbooks for a number of years and I am formally educated with a degree in Fine Arts. I don’t find Sharon Moody’s work offensive. I could understand Scott’s perspective and I could see how all the commenters so far can mistake her presentation as stealing but you all are missing the point!

Sharon’s art is NOT in the line work. Its in the presentation of turning the page! She is making appropriate social commentary on the dying medium of comicbook pop culture with the advent of digital media. I applaud her work and to me as a former comicbook artist, it feels very sentimental!

Sharon’s point is obvious because I was once a traditional comicbook artist and now I work in digital entertainment. I miss the days of newsprint comics and I know comicbooks as an artform on paper WILL fade away.

—

Albert Holaso
Play Woodland Heroes on Facebook! http://apps.facebook.com/woodlandheroes

Carrie Cuinn

I love this post. As an art historian and comic lover, I agree with you completely. Making a duplicate of someone else’s work and selling it as your own is wrong. Derive from it, fine, we all do that, but make it your own in some way. And her artist statement is essentially that by turning the comic into a painting she’s giving it value it didn’t have before. Pretentious, and ignorant of the value of original comic art.

And to reply to Holaso’s comment – At best, this could be considered “performance” art, because what she’s selling, he claims, is the act of turning the page. Yet it isn’t the page-turning that she’s selling; her work creates a still image, the painting, that replicates a comic book page without giving credit to its original creators, and without reading her artist statement, it wouldn’t be obvious what her intent is.

And having worked with artists on creating their statements at my previous job in an art gallery, I know just how useless those things are – they’re created to sell something after the fact, to justify a work which doesn’t stand on its own. The only statements which have value explain references which might not be apparent, such as listing the comics involved – which she didn’t do – because art which works and is as “obvious” as Holaso claims doesn’t need to be explained.

No one is arguing her skill. It takes a fairly deft technical artist to replicate work like that, provided she actually did and this isn’t a digital canvas print of a photograph. However, her art isn’t in what she created but in the commentary she’s creating about the work. In that case, she has a responsibility to admit the image itself isn’t her creation, and credit the original artist. Simply put, without that credit, she’s stolen someone else’s work and lied about the attribution. I would never buy or show “art” like this.

Bill

Sal Buscema should get a big cut of whatever money this copyist makes on that Captain America piece, in a perfect world.

Albert Holaso

I agree with you that the work ENTIRELY hinges on whether proper credit to the original source is given.

Scott

Albert: While I can understand the artist’s desire to make “appropriate social commentary on the dying medium of comicbook pop culture with the advent of digital media,” that could have been done through the act of creating her own iconic comic book imagery as opposed to utilizing the work of others (down to the cross-hatching) without attribution.

Sarah Beach

I agree with the main points made above — that the artist is presenting something she claims is just to trick the eye. But she is apparently incapable of acknowledging that the viewers would probably want to look more at the original comic book than her painting. I don’t understand how she thought she was beyond asking permission or giving credit where credit is due.

But I also cannot help but be staggered by her overweening presumption. Not just that she believes comics to be “disposable”, but that “the relatively new (in the entirety of human history) concept of childhood; physical objects used as playthings; the process of play as a way to learn; and the commercial branding of products for sport and play”.

Excuse me? Is she completely ignorant of archeology and anthropology? When have physical objects NOT been used as playthings? What makes her think the “process of play” as a way to learn is not as old as the human race? Does she REALLY think this is something that is “relatively new”?

There’s a core of arrogance about the whole hsitory of the human race, that her disregard of the origins of the art she is copying is hardly surprising.

I am staggered.

Richard Van Ingram

I’m not so sure I wholly agree with you.

In the history of art, it has been common practice to repaint the works of other artists. To name one figure who everyone knows, many of Salvadore Dali’s paintings include direct “lifts” from artists such as Messonier and Velazques. As you mention, Dali does recombine the images — in the same way hip hop artists use sampling in audio, but the areas of the painting containing the excerpts from the other artists are direct re-paintings and they lack a footnote to tell one they are. They count on the audience having a background in art history to get the joke.

But if we go further back in art history to Christian art, when ikons were the dominant form, the problem becomes even more pronounced. First, ikons were anonymously painted — there was no cult of the individual at that time. Secondly, there was a formula for each image — a Theotokos painting, for example, had to contain certain symbols in a particular order. Thirdly, the artists copied one another directly — again, there was no sense in which the artist “owned” the image; the idea someone could own an image was odd to them — and if one thinks deeply about it, it *is* a bizarre concept. The same sort of process was at work in ancient Egyptian art.

My point is, what this artist has done is nothing radical or strange. It has venerable precedents.

Kirby, Buscema, et alii, are all, to people *outside* the comics world, anonymous artists — many people know their images and style but almost no one knows their names, any more than they do Bill Ward or Leyendeker or Andrew Loomis; but our visual world in popular culture is influenced by them. It’s only people with specialized background knowledge who know the names of these artists — to everyone else, their images are part of the furniture of their world, much the way apples growing on wild fruit trees were the furniture of primitive people’s worlds.

The artist in question here appropriated images that are a part of everyone’s world (and people like Kirby did work in a medium that was partially anonymous and public and mass produced) and has chosen to freeze them on canvas (I assume) in another medium (paint of some sort). In a sense, it is an honor and an homage that this artist has chosen these *iconic* representatives of comic book art — they are instantly recognizable and special to everyone, and that speaks to their power. The artist has re-presented them to a public that probably hasn’t seriously considered the power of comics images to move them in a very long time.

And the artist has changed the images — by recreating them in another medium, in a two, not three dimensional way, in a static, not dynamic fashion (a part of the art of the comic is it takes time — page turning — to read them), so that the objective is to see the object as a work of art, a portrait of something important, in much the same way as an ikon or image of a king is a presentation of something important.

She, the artist, has not just had a printer reprint an issue of a Kirby comic and then signed her name to it — in which case I think your points would apply more strongly. She has frozen a dynamic and changing medium, reinterpreted it in a static medium through her own judgment, and made another work of art.

Does the work involve Kirby? Certainly. But all artists, when they create, are involved in a conversation with many other artists, all of the ones that influenced them, and they never get a mention, either. This woman is beholden to the trompe l’oeil artists that have gone before her… but then again, Michaelangelo was beholden to the Greek and Roman sculptors who went centuries before him, and there is no footnote attached to the David or Pieta. Artists count on their audience to care enough to learn whom they are conversing with — they are inviting you into the world of art. They are not writing an art history guide, they are making the art a history guide talks about.

I think there is more here to consider than you may have thought about. And the real question, in the end, is whether these paintings are good or bad art, why, and what are the standards we should use to determine that.

Mike Haseloff

I feel like some credit isn’t being given to the nature of the art.
This isn’t the kind of hoodwinking that comics fans have been up-in-arms about before. These aren’t deceptive recreations intended to improve the portfolio of a dishonest hopeful, or pad the output of a lazy commercial artist. These images are by definition recreations, but recreations that are entirely forthcoming about their nature.

The tone of your post feels more fitting for the charlatans who deliberately disguise the origins of the work. The painters, pencilers and thieves who deliberately duplicate in ways that leave a casual observer no other option but to accept that they are the originator. These images suggest the prefabricated product in its natural state, I think.

She shouldn’t be obligated to invent her own product, radically reinterpret reality, or develop an unassociated style. That would be something all together different. Fair to expect some credit to the original artists, and perhaps some information about the issues themselves, though.

Howard Simpson

Even rap artists have to pay to sample another’s work. This goes way over just sampling. I’m not on the east coast, but east coast artists should protest this show in some fashion. Raise the alarm.

Pat Crowley

This is Trompe l’oeil. It doesn’t matter if the subject is a comic book, an old issue of Life Magazine or a used Kleenex.

I’m sure the LAST people who would be offended by this are the comic artists themselves.

sean

some of you are just ridiculous. As a non-artist, and non-comic book nerd, I looked at these and thought she photographed them. When I found out they were paintings, I was blown away. Yet at no time did I ever think the painter did anything but literally paint an actual comic book page created by somebody else in order to make it look like a photo.

I admire it, it isn’t plagiarism, its a freaking still-life. Get over it. If it was a still-life of an Apple, Michaelangelo’s David, or Times Square, complete with Movie Poster artwork on the billboards, none of you would be whining or crying.

You Dinks out there are bitching not about the fact that Marvel/DC’s intellectual property might be infringed by this artist’s still life, but that the original guy who drew Marvel/DC’s intellectual property as a “work for hire” and has no claim to it isn’t getting recognized for it, as if that matters an iota to anybody. I wasted four minutes I can’t get back on this nonsense.

Scott

To respond to several questions at once:

While I don’t think “Andy Warhol owed a credit to the industrial designer who created the Campbell Soup label,” or that Sharon Moody needs to credit whoever designed the Hershey bar wrapper (which she drew in one of her paintings), I do believe Kirby, Buscema, Novick and the others need to be acknowledged, the same way Lichtenstein owed a tip of the hat to Kubert, Sekowsky, Romita, and all of the artists he copied. It is wrong for the original artists to be left nameless. She could have celebrated her unwitting collaborators in her Artists Statement. She did not.

Context counts for so much. It’s one thing to say — I loved that feeling I got reading the great comics of X, Y, and Z as a kid, and I want to share the emotions those creators gave me with you, by letting you see what it felt like flipping through those comics. It’s quite another to mask the source and not give credit where credit is due, as if the original artists had noting to do with whatever power is running through her own pieces.

She did, after all, choose more than just any old boring comics page picked up at random. She chose THOSE pages by THOSE artists, and to not share the identities of those who are being celebrated, to only speak of her intentions in terms of artistic theories, is like throwing a party and keeping the guests of honor locked away in a back room.

As for the comment that, “Artists count on their audience to care enough to learn whom they are conversing with—they are inviting you into the world of art. They are not writing an art history guide, they are making the art a history guide talks about.” Agreed that something like that is more the role of the curator or the gallery owner than the artist. But I think that by saying nothing, a sin of omission has occurred. I’m almost tempted to call the act of failing to credit the source material a form of cultural misappropriation … but I’m not quite ready to go there yet until I give it a lot more thought.

And as for the comment, ” Fans especially need to stop being so elitist, it only leads to an incestuous industry and fan base that’s diminishing an art medium I love,” I’d say that it is the failure to give credit to those who have gone before that is the elitism here. It diminishes, rather than elevates, the original work, and says, it is only important when Ipaint it.

As to whether I have reached out to the artist, I may do so, but only after I have visited the gallery to see what my reaction is to the works themselves as they hang on walls.

Mike Gloady

I have to express my agreement with the sentiments expressed so ably above.

What do you call someone who passes off the work of others as their own? A cheat maybe, or a plagiarist – or maybe just a liar? Whatever you call it – try it in an exam and find out what esteem it’s held in. You’d be failed and expelled in a heartbeat and your name would be mud. Unless, it would seem, you’re an artist (more specifically a commercial artist). Then you’re expected to suck it up because only the fine art mob can make your work worth taking even remotely seriously.

And they can sell and you don’t get anything. That’d be considered as something akin to fraud in any other arena wouldn’t it? Especially if the artist isn’t even credited. Even if it isn’t strictly speaking illegal it’s definitely immoral and unethical.

It’s not a remix – there’s nothing being done with the images that a photograph wouldn’t nail. It’s not a collaboration – any more than my tracing this piece and selling it is a collaboration. It’s not collage – as nothing is being done to change the context of the image. And that artist’s statement is just pretentious twaddle that’s being used to desperately justify this act of theft.

Danny Fingeroth

Short thought: It would have taken nothing away from the paintings to credit the pencilers, inkers, writers, letterers, colorists, editors and publishers of the comics the paintings are based on.

Longer thoughts: It looks to me like she’s trying to create the illusion of comics left lying on a table by a non-collector; by a kid perhaps called away to dinner, the comics folded over and the wind blowing the upper pages, which is a sort of cool idea.

Having said that, and whether she picked the comics at random from a quarter bin somewhere, or from her own childhood collection, or whether she’s an expert in comics, it is troubling that no credit is given to any member of the creative team of the originals. It’s not as if any research would have had to be done—the credits would all be on the first page or two of each comic. Most charitably, maybe one could say that even with the credits clearly stated in a comic, creators’ identities are interchangeable to non-fans. (Maybe that’s even a point she’s trying to make?) A comic stands as a cultural artifact the way, perhaps, a building does. When does one have to credit an architect for a photo or painting of a building? If the building is famous, is the responsibility to do so greater? Another thought: Would we feel differently if she had used The Mona Lisa or Michelangelo’s David without crediting the creators? What about lesser known works of art?

The Pigman

She’s a pathetic excuse for an artist, but there is nothing we can do about that. Now if someone would inform Marvel and DC that their copyrighted material is being ripped off we might get some action.

b

Okay, I have to disagree w/your assessment here. There’s a qualitative difference between what she’s done and what Roy Lichtenstein did.

These are trompe l’oeil paintings. in which the objective is to create a @D images that momentarily fools the eye into seeing it as a 3D object. in this case, comic books that have been opened with pages rolled back.

What Moody is doing is not emulating the story art per se, but as part of an object. It is immaterial to the point of her work if the sotires are by Kirby or Ernie Bushmiller; she’s not copying the story art as art, but the story art as an element of a 3D object.

In other words, she’s doing the exact same thing Norman Rockwell did when he used the covers of real EC comics as part of his painting of a group of rustic musicians practicing in the back room of a general store. The point was not the cover art itself, but rather used the cover art as part of the overall mise en scene.

What Lichtenstein did was to isolate a single discrete image in a larger work and base his painting on that w/o adding any further insight or originality to the final work. Perhaps if he had gone for an extreme close up, just a fraction of the total image, it would have been excusable, or if like the collage artist known as Winston Smith he had combined / juxtaposed different images to form a third meaning.

Moody is focusing on the physical comic book as a work of art in three dimensions, not as a series of illustrations. You say “The intended market of buyers for these works of art would probably assume that the comics depicted in them sprang whole from the mind of the artist, and are a commentary on pop culture in general…” I can pretty much guarantee you’re wrong simply from the titles of the paintings alone: Moody, quite the contrary, is banking on a comics / pop culture literate audience (otherwise they’ll look at her paintings and say, “What the hell is this?”).

Lichtenstein, on the other hand, did assume his audience was ignorant of the origins of his work and would interpret it as wholly original works of art, not rip offs of other artists (a couple of whom he served which while in the Army, IIRC, thus providing motive for his plagiarism).

Lance Karutz

I am not a litigious person, but I very much hope that Marvel and DC bring legal action against this person asap. While I appreciate the claims she makes about trying to capture the joy of what-is-to-be-found-on-the-next-page, the fact of the matter is that these paintings are copies of copyrighted work. She made no attempt to alter he images she appropriated, much of which has been reprinted by the copyright owners within the last few years, and she is claiming the work as her own. This is wrong, and she should not be allowed to profit from it.

James Howell

Comic book art has always been looked at by the “legitimate” art community, as not being art. That we create “junk food” art for the masses, not real art. Old school Illustrators had to deal with people looking down on them for how they made a living, at the same time, had to deal with others making money off of their creative works. From Movie and TV rights, merchandise, to owning their creations outright, artists would see their creations exploited, without receiving credit, much less given compensation. Comic Book Art isn’t good enough to be sold as fine art, but painting a reproduction of Comic book Art IS fine art. These Comic Book Legends were incredibly hard working professionals, who put all of their creative talent into making the best books they could make for the medium. They deserve better than to have the larger art community reproduce already-published works, without acknowledging the creative works of Comic Book Artists that were used to create new art.

Mars Will Send No More

Scott, we applaud you for sticking up for the original artists. But we’re not offended by these pieces. The best thing about your article is not the attack Sharon but instead that you pointed out her original comic sources. That’s positive informative stuff we enjoyed reading.

Unfortunately, the artists do not own these works. They are owned by Marvel and DC. So in a legal sense, the artists are not due a check. But again, we appluad you for giving credit where credit is due. If Sharon’s works bring about a greater awareness of comics as an art form, we can totally groove on that.

Interestingly, we just received a gift. It is a painting of the same Silver Surfer panel Sharon has painted, except it’s blown up to about 4 feet wide and has some interesting color additions and an impasto style. Very cool. It was done for us by another Jack Kirby fan.

Sleepy Sam

I think this is a fascinating argument about the nature of art that is well worth our time and energy.

Then again, I just woke up today from the coma I’ve been in since 1961.

Is Sharon Moody a Copyright/Trademark Infringer? « Irene Vartanoff

[…] Scott Edelman cited [ed. note: he’s my husband] of artist Sharon Moody creating works of art by copying entire comic books spread open and creating a trompe l’oeil effect on an otherwise blank canvas has several […]

Nick

I’m not sure it was abundantly clear in the article and it certainly doesn’t seem that the commenters understand this, but:

Those are trompe l’oeil paintings. That image that you see that looks like a comic book glued to a canvas painted a solid color is actually not there. They are 2-dimensional paintings. No paper or comic book was used. The only material being used to convey that image is oil paint.

The artist isn’t striving to be original or creative (not all art has to be….look at concert musicians who follow the symphonies of the greats note-for-note). These paintings are her attempt to practice the art of trompe l’oeil. Too see how well she can take a 3-dimensional still-life and make a 2-dimensional painting look like that still-life.

John Platt

Moody shows real talent in her ability to simulate three dimensions, but the two of the three images you show here are little more than traced comic book pages with a little bit of curve added. (The Captain America painting shows more skill and imagination, but still focuses on the recreation of one or two primary pages.)

I would equate this with something like the Eiffel tower. You’re not allowed to publish a photo of the tower without the owners’ permission. You shouldn’t be able to paint a copyrighted work without permission, either, even if you add a few of your own flourishes.

The origin of fan consciousness in the breakdown of bicameral culture | Wis[s]e Words

[…] That joke Scott McCloud put on the cover of Amazing Heroes #200 neatly shows the attitude of most comics fans to the occasional plundering of comics by the high art world: slightly amused, somewhat defensive but mostly irritated. To see Roy Lichtenstein get the credit, fame and fortune for swiping the work of other, largely anonymous artists is annoying, though I do think we can get a bit too defensive about it as comics fans, not an artform adverse to a bit of creative stealing itself. Nevertheless I can understand Scott Edelman’s annoyance at encountering a modern Lichtenstein repainting comic book pages panel by panel allegedly without crediting the ori…: […]

Super I.T.C.H » Blog Archive » Blinkin’ Lights # 533

[…] http://www.scottedelman.com/2011/12/17/a-few-words-in-defense-of-jack-kirby-sal-buscema-irv-novick-a… — booksteve […]

hondobrode

To utilize or be inspired by these original works is one thing, fine, but to not give reference to the artists who slaved to create the originals these are based off of is morally wrong. At the very least, since these paintings wouldn’t exist as they are without these comic originals, the original artists should at be partly compensated for their contributions to the foundations of these pieces.

Matthew

Two things.

First, the person posting as Nathan Greno above is a troll and not the real Nathan.

The below was posted at Bleedingcool.com by the moderator Joe B. Pangrazio.

I e-mailed Ms. Moody directly after all of this blew up (and again, at the urging of my artist friend). And got a response. I’m not going to post any of it yet (as I’ve asked permission and have yet to hear back) but I will share some of what was shared with me.

At the actual gallery, the original artists of the comics in question are credited.

As well, there is a book “The Art Prophets” which has a chapter devoted to early comic book history (well, Marvel/DC early history at least). It is on hand at the gallery and honestly, it seems like they’re doing everything I would have wanted to “be okay” with it (as though that matters). I hope that this puts some others’ minds at rest, as well.

Jack Kirby Art and Morphological Resonance « Mars Will Send No More

[…] of his Silver Surfer painting in our 2011 review of Mars. Then it got weird. Just a few days later, Scott Edelman posted on Reddit about artist Sharon Moody. We read the column and dug a little deeper. We looked […]

Peter Sanderson

Scott, have you seen this “New York Times” article about “appropriation” in fine art? It seems to me that according to this Roy Lichtenstein sufficiently “transformed” his source material from comics to escape legal charges of plagiarism, but Ms. Moody has not. But in both artists’ cases, it is only proper that they acknowledge the creators of the source material, which neither of them did. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/arts/design/richard-prince-lawsuit-focuses-on-limits-of-appropriation.html?_r=1&ref=arts&pagewanted=all

Peter B. Gillis

I think there are two larger issues at work here, both of which bother the hell out of me with regard to the universe of contemporary art.
The first is the cult of the object. Is there anything more wonderful or genuine about a creation designed for mass reproduction than one intended to be a single object? I don’t see it. It was Bad John Barnes who pointed out (at least to me) that individual objects are lionized and canonized so that rich people could acquire things. Lichtenstein, IMHO, did not rake it in because he had such a delicious sense of irony–it was that he took reproductive art and turned it into individual objects that could be collected. And I find that problematic–if not loathsome.
And the other is art by catalog paragraph. An earnest description with the proper vocabulary asserting that no! Really! I’ve got ironic distance! is something a) that’s a poor excuse for actual vision and b) something that I thought the Conceptualists effectively slaughtered decades ago, making it as obsolete as, well, trompe-l’oeil in the era of photography.
It’s the tendencies that are anti-democratic that make me see red in this regard.

Steve Lundin

This is an interesting discussion, but I can’t help but wonder how much of it is proceeding at cross-purposes. There is an assumption at work here that as far as I can see has not been adequately addressed (I’ve read most of the comments, barring the last dozen or so). These artists employing comic book pages have little compunction about doing so because, to put it bluntly, they do not consider comics to be art; nor do they consider comic book illustrators to be artists. To these artists, comic book pages, SF book cover illustrations, etc, are cultural artifacts, no more and no less. This is the only way to make sense of their appalling indifference and lack of acknowledgement.
Moody could just as easily have painted a partly folded red and white checkerboard tablecloth from a roadside diner, and most of her artistic statement would still apply. On her part, with respect to comics, she is proceeding from ignorance (as far as I can tell): she invokes notions of nostalgia and childhood (but I seriously doubt that her childhood had comics in it), but in both instances her sense of how things are remains unaffected by how things really are (ie, comics are not going extinct as a medium, and comics are not the exclusive purview of children). So, in that sense, her work’s actually missed the mark. But either way, it simply doesn’t occur to such artists to actually acknowledge the original creators of whatever cultural artifact they are exploring.
It’s a lofty world up there among the conceptual arts, where copyists thrive and critics indulge in vague, meaningless hyperbole than passes for analysis: their definition of what constitutes art does not, alas, include ‘illustrators.’ One other thing about doing art based on cultural artifacts: it’s dissection, not vivisection. So, imagine the surprise when the seeming corpse on the table yelps in indignation! Of course, you can yelp all you want: if they eventually get irritated, they’ll just turn their scalpels elsewhere.
By the way, I’m all on the side of indignation. That said, you will only win when comic art is finally acknowledged as a true art-form. At least by that point, artists will have to use attribution, and speak in terms of homage, and the blatant ripping-off that’s presently going on won’t be able to continue, because the idea of comic art as a cultural artifact will no longer stand.
Good luck.

Scott Fresina

For Shame. What unmitigated gall.