TomRath

Good show guys. 

I'm of the opinion that if artists uses another artist's work without crediting them or at least asking them, it's plagerism.  It doesn't matter if people like working with the guy or if he's a nice guy or whatever.  It's getting paid for work you didn't do and have passed off on your own.  You do that in school and get caught, you get a fail (or you should).

It's damn obvious from that picture of Spiderman you showed that Land took someone else's work and passed it off as his own.

Phototracing or photorealism - I don't care about that.  I like Ross's art.  I like some of the photo stuff that was done in Promethia and Terry Gilliam and John Cleese did some pretty amusing photo comics before Monty Python.

Then again, a lot of what Gilliam did on Monty Python was made up of public domain art and stock images, and I don't think of that as plagerism, so I don't know.  Maybe the line moves around a bit depending on how you use the stuff.

I read comics for the writing anyway.  I appreciate some artists, but I'm not going to follow them from book to book.  The only time it comes into play is when it is so poor I notice and it takes me out of the story.  This seemed to happen a bit in the mainstream books (DC and Marvel)in the 90s (maybe because of the birth of Image?) but I don't notice it so much anymore.