| How J. Scott Campbell saved Dasien |
[Mar. 21st, 2008|05:30 pm] |
First of all, I'm way behind and I've barely had a chance to work on comics all week (although, I've quite obviously been home all day today). Sorry, I'm way late on Dasien. But, that's not what I'm here to talk about today.
So, onto today's topic!
I owe J. Scott Campbell a huge thanks for not roasting me alive for a mistake I made as a kid.
If you've been following Dasien for a while, you know that I designed many of these characters when I was a young teen, back when I had a bit less respect for my fellow artists. I was just a dumb kid trying to design characters.
Like all young artists trying to learn how to draw comic books, I copied from greats and evolved from what I had copied. Well, one day, I was flipping through the latest issue of Nintendo Power magazine, and I saw this cool artist who had won a game design contest with an entry called Lockarm. This kid was really good, but I figured it was a million-to-one shot that he'd ever be heard from again. ...after all, Nintendo had no plans to make his game, anyway. So I kind of... in a very Liefeld way... adapted the design to my own comic setting, which ended up being part of Dasien, even going as far as to use the exact same character name from the magazine.
To my credit, I did modify the character. ...a little. At a glance, you would see a definite similarity but not so much as to assume that one was based on the other. The only giveaway was that both were named The Gooch.
Years later, when I pulled all of my comic ideas out of hibernation to start a webcomic, I resurrected many of my old characters, including the Gooch, who was still based on something someone else had designed. I had completely forgotten until I was pretty far into the comic.
And then one day, I remembered what I had done. Imagine my sheer horror when I opened up Nintendo Power volume 6 to find that I had stolen a character from a fifteen-year-old JEFFERY SCOTT CAMPBELL!!!! Oh no! This kid, who I never though I'd see again, actually turned out to be one of my modern day idols, and I've been plagerizing him! That's very, very bad.
Now, the temptation to rationalize this was pretty strong. After all, J. Scott probably never trademarked the name of character, and while the character is certainly similar, there was enough deviation to consider it a unique character. Still, ratiotalization aside, I knew the right thing to do was to contact J. Scott and get this resolved. Besides, if there's one thing i've learned from webcomics (and from Nintendo) it's that presuming to have the law on your side does not guarantee that people won't litigate you into oblivion, anyway! J. Scott could have, at any time, rubbed me into the ground, and there would have been very little I could have done about it.
So I found a way to contact J. Scott and basically threw myself at his mercy. Several months went by without a message back from Jeff, but I kept trying. Finally, I got ahold of him via MySpace, and we worked everything out. The Gooch is now mine to have. J. Scott is the coolest guy in the world (other than Adam Warren), and all is right again with the world.
Thank you, J. Scott Campbell for not killing me and grinding me into a pile of webcomic pulp! Thank you thank you thank you!
Let this be a lesson though, boys and girls. Don't rip from other artists! ...even if you think you'll never hear from them again. |
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In case you're wondering, yes, that's Sue Storm from some early-to-mid 90s Fantastic Four issue. Apparently, that costume didn't last terribly long either, and for once, I think I'm glad. Not that I wouldn't mind seeing Sue Storm running around the Marvel Universe in a leotard, but that particular costume is just a little TOO silly.
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