Marge Litch

Or Thoughts on Property and Propriety…

Japanese pop music is not a genre with which I can claim to be terribly familiar, but the other day a record album on the back of a French fantasy art catalogue caught my eye.
Principally because the cover looked rather familiar…

Now, Turkish double bubble is one thing, but this was getting a bit too close to home, so after a quick phone call to the record company a few days later I had my very own CD of Marge Litch: Fantasien 1998.
While there’s not a lot to be done in cases like this except hammer out some kind of arrangement after the fact, it did get my train of thought shunting off the siding.

In the category of blatant rip-offs:
http://search.stores.ebay.com/search/search.dll?sid=9062519&store=Chris+and+Helena%27s+Art+Store&colorid=1&fp=0&query=gandalf&srchdesc=y
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3544696500&category=20149
This one takes the first prize, for sure. Chris and Helena’s Art Store is happily marketing “Gandalf on the Path by Tolkien”  (BY Tolkien?) in the form of ceramic tiles, t-shirts and prints. They also have photographic prints of “Bastion”, which looks strangely familiar. I did notice the Gandalf ceramic tile a while back, but I had thought it was an isolated incident. Given the number of happy customer comments they seem to have, it looks like it is a thriving business.
I’ll keep you up to date on how it goes; the pages may already have come down by the time you read this. I did order a tile first this time, though.

Straight-forward theft of images is one thing, but there are much more interesting examples to show and tell…
Sword in the Storm is a painting I did for a David Gemmel title.
Compare the original http://www.john-howe.com/portfolio/gallery/details.php?image_id=302 with the paperback… you know how it is with wild animals, they never hold still.

But, is it still my picture? More or less, but frankly I find the inverted ursus hard to… bear.
Perhaps the graphic artist’s name should be added to the credits. “Cover by John Howe, substantially improved to fit by…” At any rate, I complained very loudly, and it has never happened again. (Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve done any covers for them since, which effectively has substantially reduced the chances of it happening again.)
Tolkiens Erbe (Heirs of Tolkien, more or less, in English) was published last year by Heyne Verlag in Germany, and I stumbled on it in an airport somewhere. Goodness, I thought, that character looks familiar but I do seem to remember a different colour scheme.
Naturally, I raised a racket, but soft-heartedly gave in when the poor graphic artist responsible for commissioning the picture explained that Heyne was going to make her pay for any damages. I settled for a straight-forward sub-rights sale and the new cover appeared with another of my illustrations.

Heyne actually made a bit of a habit of “hommages”, as this earlier cover illustrates…
Compare it to http://www.john-howe.com/portfolio/gallery/details.php?image_id=240
I was assured it was a coincidence.

 

The wonderful tools at our fingertips today allow considerable manipulation of images (so what’s new?) and signifigantly more important, an “image bank” attitude, where the original is considered either as raw material or as a step among many on the way towards the final layout. In the days of cut and paste, illustrations were pretty much immune to fiddling, as it was technically difficult and the results unsatifactory. Now, with Photoshop, it’s no longer a problem.
Well, for some…

 

That a picture be re-cropped and framed differently is fine, but even with the rather more primitive tools at my disposal, I can do something slightly more subtle than this flat slab of blue water. And where did all my painstaking reflections on the water go? Sacrificed in the name of legibility, I guess.

The problem is an ethical one. When does it become another person’s work or more importantly, no longer your own, even though you are credited with its creation? It’s far from an idle question.  Rights of use, naturally, but rights of abuse…

Actually, Japanese pop is not that bad. Not so easy to sing along with, though.
CLOSING DOORS:

Much to my dismay, the ONLY remaining art shop in this town is closing. Naturally, I can still pick up stuff to do fake stained glass, little wooden boxes to apply stencils on, and a wide variety of styrofoam shapes to decorate from the local hardware, but real art supplies will no longer be sold in Neuchâtel. Thirty thousand souls, and not enough artists (and illustrators) to keep an art shop open… very sad.

GRUYÈRES
The opening date of the exhibition is closing in fast, I always feel like the last unicorn, pursued by the red bull in these cases, where I have blithely agreed to do all sorts of things in order to help prepare, and the days are falling away like autumn leaves.
The new limited print of Legolas and Gimli at Helm’s Deep won’t be ready in time, but the other three will be for sale at the castle. With a little luck we’ll have it ready for mid-October.

See you next week!