[color=#bd527b] Percieve? Allot of those pictures look like traces that have been redressed and slightly tweaked. Fan Art does not get placed out there in a way requesting cash to see it! Heck my Avatar on the forums has Blossom from PPGZ with different ears.

Marz Gurl can you please go over to Benzaie and tell him the correct spelling? He called it Comitek on his video for the Cos Players.

Speaking of Scanlations I mostly DL them for comics which I cannot get localized. Like Codename: Sailor V. I would buy it if an importer would sell it in english but because I do not know Japanese its the only way I'm getting it because I'm not paying for some book I could not read.

Here's hoping that the way this gets settled won't kill any careers.[/color]

As a fan of western comics I have gained a lot of respect of Radical Comics for their handling of this situation publically and proffesionally. All too often this kind of thing is swept under the rug by the publisher as is demonstrated by the infamous case of Greg Land and his "work" at Marvel that have been shown to be traced from profesional photos of celebrities, movie stills, other Marvel artists and pornography.

As it is I worry this incident may lead to some bad blood between anime/manga and western comic fans. Already there is some disconnect and a mostly friendly rivalry between the two fandoms but this has the possibility of bringing this relatively light tension to a head. Not to mention to faint possibility of instilling a general negative view of western comics to anime/manga fans whose only exposure to the medium might be this unfortunate incident.

Excellent analysis of the issue, Kaylyn.

Personally, I don't think Simmons intentionally plagiarized the work, but he relied to heavily on themes he'd already seen in manga instead of trying to develop original concepts. Still, I'll withhold judgment until all the evidence has been brought to light.

Oh, yes, Simmons DID intentionally steal the work. Apparently, some of the members of DeviantArt he asked to draw his comic refused, and have saved notes from him requesting specific page numbers of the Bleach Manga to trace. The guy's a dirt bag.

Its kind of ironic his father sued people over the slightest sign of tribute and he is blatently copying from a lot of manga i mean hell all those panels just looked like he recolored a bunch of bleach panels

I didn't know that. Thanks for bringing it to light.

Because people don't intentionally look at a drawing by someone else and use the pose and composition as a basis for their own drawing? That's bullshit. Anyone who thinks other people's work exists as free templates for their own is an idiot and an asshole.

[color=green]No surprise that this issue gave you plenty to talk about, which is just fine by me. Short ANEs are fine, but this was a lot more fun to watch from beginning to end.

I'm really glad you brought up the status of fan-art in Japan, because it really does contrast the legal limits of distributing fan-art in America. If Incarnate was a Japanese creation by an everyday mangaka, I doubt anyone would see it as little more than an another piece of tribute. But because of our status in America and Nick's famous relation, the media is swallowing this up and not giving it a very favorable angle. And because most American's are informed of the errors of plagerism, it makes stories like this seem like a bigger crime.

Personally, the scans shown thus far really do look like lazy plagerism by someone who not only respects the original work, but liked it so much that they couldn't think of anything more original to illustrate. At first I thought this was actually supposed to be an obvious parody, in which case it wouldn't be so insulting. But near tracing like this just crosses the line from homage to rip-off. I can't really say more without actually reading the manga, though I don't really think that I want to after all this.

Honestly, I think its just a lack of creativity. Some people have it, and some just don't. A deficit of ideas and respect for another does not excuse artistic theft, especially if you're trying to pass it off as your own.[/color]

Nick Simmons should go to jail or at least get a big-ass fine. This is blatant plagiarism there's nothing inspired about it.

JAIL?! I think the humiliation and loss of credibility is punishment enough. He's been Milli Vanilli'd, Ashley Simpson-ified. In prison they wouldn't care what he did wrong. If you really want to punish him, make him attend an anime convention. They'll tear him apart. But he's young and stupid and trying to measure up to Gene Simmons. And Bleach fans, give him a break. He's a Bleach fan like you. He likes anime. He's a nerd like us. Most of us have gotten away with far worse than this.

Bleach fans may cry foul all they wish, but Kaylyn, thank you for bringing to light the glaring issues of our inconsistent ethics and the philosphy of art.

I've noticed my art gets way more attention on DA when it is either visually "inspired" by the work of someone more famous or comments on a popular subject. Compare the views and faves on this piece to the rest of my gallery and you will see what I mean:

http:// bitterlilraccoon.devianta rt.com/art/Nick-Simmons- Doing-his-Laundry- 155496024

Fanart and Doujinshi are a legal gray area to be sure, but in terms of reasons why they're typically better received than outright plagiarism, it's all about identification.

Doujinshi don't try to pass the characters off as their own. Neither do fanartists. There is no doubt as to whose characters are being used, and the creators of the fan-media are the first to admit to it. Because it's so open, especially with the Japanese Doujin industry, it serves as cross-promotion of the source material and this use, coupled with the fact that doujinshi are where the majority of mangaka start to cut their teeth, is the very reason why Doujin and professional fanart are typically permitted with minimal objection.

With "Incarnate" Mr. Simmons didn't simply draw the characters in his own style. He wasn't being a fanartist. He patently STOLE the character designs, then proceeded to try to pretend they were his own 100% unique and original character designs, denying even credit to the obvious original sources before the controversy exploded. THAT'S where this becomes completely and wholly different from the other things people compare it to.

With regard to the scanilations... yeah, there is some irony to be had in manga pirates pointing out a plagiarism scandal. I don't have the statistics or information at my disposal to argue for or against scanilations, so I won't pretend that I do, but I will point one thing out. the "LOL! why should we listen to what they report about Nick Simmons! They're stealing the manga!" argument is inherently flawed and counter-logical.

Yeah, what they do is technically immoral, but does that make the facts they point out less valid? No, not even a little bit. If an arsonist points out that there's a murderer nearby, should the people he warns ignore him because he's immoral, too?

Pretending that "Incarnate" is free of blame because of the shortcomings of those who exposed it is a flawed way of thinking.

I really think artists should have to prove themselves to draw things without having the trace other works. It just doesn't put a lot of confidence that the artist could draw properly.

Looking at Nick Simmons's apology makes me think that this isn't a case of outright plagiarism, so much as Nick's lack artistic creativity being brought to light. He talks about paying homage to those who inspired him. Fair enough, it's okay to be inspired but the problem is that you have to properly channel and digest those influences into something more unique that you alone have ownership of. I'll give you an example; Me and my brother do a webcomic and he does the art. He was inspired by the likes of Mike Krahulik and Charles Shultz. If you check the art for the comics at the link at the bottom, you can see the similarities and the influences, but what you see principally his own style. That's because my brother has his own style and has digested those influences. Nick Simmons has not. In short, I'm not calling Nick out as a plagiarist, but I am calling him out as a mediocre artist.

http://www.facebook.com/ pages/Fanatic-Gumbo/ 486393610276?ref=nf

half the art ive seen in anime-cons mostly true , the most ive seen copy work i MEAN copy and just selling there fan art , half of them cant draw for crap some people spend most there time copy famous art from anime they like and when your doing that its kinda hard to get out of for me i was huge fan of DBZ art back in the day but when i was trying to draw something different i kept going back to DBZ so i had to really quit drawing it cause i hated it.

i love original ARTS it think people should do more on those the copyright art as for me i will not do any fan art of any series your not going to make any money of it its just the same bullshit you when someone trace and copy it sometimes photoshop it.

as for that Simmons boy he should be sued trace & copy gets you nowhere!

The bottom line for me is the dude obviously ripped of someone elses art. It wouldn't matter to me if it were from a famous manga or not. There's no way anyone could look at the similarities and not see the flat out plagiarizing going on. It would be a shame even if he put his little comic out for free viewing but to be paid for it is just wrong.

Even the doujinshi artists in Japan STILL DRAW THIER OWN ART even if the characters they draw are someone elses intellectual property. To be honest Japan lets way to much slide when it comes to their copyright laws in my opinion. But that's not my point.

Bottom line, he did a lazy immature crappy thing and doesn't deserve for a single copy of his books to sell if he's that creatively bankrupt. There's nothing wrong with fan art but this isn't fan art. It's using someone elses work to make a yourself look good.

I don't read manga but this reminds me of Greg Land's comic art. Just be thankful Nick Simmons doesn't do porn/O-faces during fight scenes and shit.

Yeah, someone e-mailed me asking my opinion about this. Here's what I said:

"Before this story broke, I didn't care who Nick Simmons was.................... and I still don't. When I first heard about this, my thoughts mirrored that of Bleach creator Tite Kubo. I can't believe Nick Simmons is really a comic artist!

As for his claims of homage, they seem weak once you place the two books side by side. Now, I've never read the comic, so I don't know much about the story except for what I read off of wikipedia, but it seems clear that the art was heavily influenced from manga such as Bleach. Not only the art style, but various poses, whole pages, and even some lines seem to be similar.

Now, I'm not going to go right out and accuse him of plagiarism since I have never read his entire work, but I do think he was influenced heavily from Bleach, and Viz Media has a legitimate case against him."

Of course, I hadn't considered the fan art or dojinshi aspects of it. However, dojin artist are more interested in getting noticed than actually making profit, and once hired by a publisher, they stop drawing copywrited material, and start creating their own. I think the problem is that Nick is, whether he realizes it, a published writer, hired by a company to create an original work. IF, and I stress IF, Viz Media feels that this work infringes on their property, they have the right to intervene.

Of course, they probably won't, since it would be costly and a waste of time. Furthermore, while these events may hurt Nick Simmons in the long run, the attention he is receiving now may boost sales of Incarnate if the series is ever reprinted.

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at times like this I think it's important to remember why there are copyright laws on the books. the simple fact is that they are there to encourage people to continue with their works. this basically (in my opinion) falls into, is it hurting the copyright owner or not? again in MY opinion that is the answer to the legal question. I'll admit being on the low end (I just post a few paintings and stories of mine online) if I found someone outright steeling my stuff my first thought would be flattery.

[color=#bd527b] Actually the Original Copyright was to protect the creator of a work from having to defend against others exploiting their work. It initially lasted only 14 years with the option to extend it an additional 14 should the originator of a work still be alive at the time it ended and wanted the extension.

That allowed a decent time frame for the creator to profit off their own work and still encouraged further works because it would become public domain before people who first heard of it would die of old age.

That's been repeatedly messed with especially by the family of Sonny Bono and the Disney Company. Now you'd be lucky if a 5th generation after a work is created can have access to do something with a work without breaking/infringing on the copyrights of the "originator" - company holding the property while the true originator already died before the 75 + 50 after death years have passed.[/color]

I do agree with most of what is being said and pointed out but theres one thing i've been thinking over in my mind around all this. Allot of people are trying to point out it wasn't orginal and it even looks traced. i think this might be harsh and blurring the facts. artiest rarely get to start out with there own style it develops as they gain experiance. i dont know much about mister simions or how he trained for art. however many try to immitate other works down to a fine art were you can not tell the diffrence. this allows starters to work along side and in lower postions and the understanding can be brought back to their own work. its a sign of a great hand.

As far as i can find he has only ever done one other major work. and the photos a see online though yes very similair in pose and style do look diffrently drawn. think simmons maybe becasue of his name was phushed to soon into his own style not having found it and so we get something very omashish. and this is normally the grey area Doujinshi sit it. though again its not the poses are the main locker here for the diffrence. becasue it comes out looking traced but it takes a long time to understand the human fourm and come up if proper human fourms and not everyone does it well linkra him self points this out almost weekly.

so ill summerize. this is someone who wanted to stand up within the manga crowed but doesnt have the skill yet and simple took from what he could do. if what ive said is how it went im looking forward to his coming works as he grows and hopefully gains more confadence in himself. if not however those who have this comic hold on to it with a death grip for it is not coming back as we know it and will be come collectable.

steal ideas and design is not really the issue here. nick is practically tracing the art and taking whole panels/pages. doujin artists actually draw their own art in their own styles.

ps. i love kubo's response to this whole thing

Glad to hear your two cents about this issue.

Obviously the artist/creative side of me is offended by the blatant ripping off of such popular works. Yeah, some people may argue tracing is a good learning tool for drawing, it can easily become a crutch. He failed to create his own style basically. Also if Simmons really did wanted to do homages to the manga titles, there are more subtle ways to do than ripping off the actual panels. Regardless, he just shot down any possibility of rising up as a comic artist.

As for the argument about scanlations, legally, yeah it's illegal. At the same time though, it's sometimes the only way a manga title can be seen outside of Japan. An example would be "Saint Onii-san/Saint Young Men" because of the basis of the storyline alone which is Jesus and Buddha living together in an apartment in Tokyo, or a lot of the genre of BL manga because of obvious reasons. Let's not forget that the scanlators themselves always say "support the official release".

There is a difference between doujinshi and this professional publication. Or at least in Holland. (yes it's everywhere)
It mostly have to do with the number of Circulation. A small group mostly produces a 50 copies a novel. That is mostly not a number that can cover a weekend anime convention + a booth. (plus the many other expenses.) Also when a group is getting popular they aim more at own original work.
How I see the case is that Simmons jr will get lot's of pennies for tracing.

The main thing that separates what Nick is doing and what doujinshi artists are doing is that doujinshi artists aren't claiming originality or copyrights.

Japan tolerates doujins, seeing them as good for sales of the real thing I assume. Nick presented his comic as an original work and his property. That's not cool.

Talk about copying work of mangakas. Defenetly this goes beyond normal similarities seen in basic shounen and shoujo mangas.

I agree about the tracing issue and Nick Simmons should be in a lot of trouble, but honestly, scanlations and fansubs are not the same thing as tracing someone's work and calling it your own.

From my point of view (not an artist), what Nick Simmons did was essentially copy and pasting, tracing and colouring, then passing it off as his own work.
Doujinshi "Circles" in general have their own drawing style and different stories, which makes it *slightly* more okay since artists at Artist Alley and at Comiket are selling their own artwork (and occasionally their own characters). Plus they don't try to say something like "Yes, 'Shinigami' is my series" and have characters that look very similar to "Bleach" characters.
I don't know what this is like for Japanese doujinshi, but from the English-language ones I have found they credit the original game/anime/manga, and to me that is a difference.

EDIT: I didn't realize someone already stated what I wrote (and much shorter ^^; ), but I didn't copy. I thought of what I said without looking at the previous comments :confused:

Well, they say if you're going to steal, steal from the best.

Oh wait, he stole from [i]Bleach[/i].

What a tool. Next time he should at least steal from a series that isn't fucking horrible.

Or a series that nobody cares about and few people are reading. He might not have gotten caught if that were the case.

But noooooooo. He had to copy one of the top 4 popular manga in Japan. :pinch:

Simply amazing...

popular or not, bleach for me is down the sewers recently, especially the story
which I quite frankly find anti-climatic each week
ya I read scanned comics
why?
well, concidering how slow they are released over here.
but I see no wrong doing in me for I usually just end up buying them whenever I could anyways, once they are released(prabably half or a year late in many cases.......)
I don't see that as stealng, I see that as drinking slurpee at 7 11 and pay before I leave.
although, if I were to copy what I've bought, maybe add I panel or so of my own, and pass it on as my original work, then I deserve to be called an plagerizing a-hole and a theaf

This is like a manga version of the ordeal between Queen/Bowie against Vanilla Ice.

But I can see how he would defend this as paying homage which is a great form of flattery in japan. Of course as americans we just see it as blatant plagiarism (which it is).
The real problem here is the kid's response. (which was very remenicent of Ice's infamous response... i suggest you youtube it)
he should have just come clean.

I don't know about comparing what's going on with Simmons' comic and Bleach with fan art.
Fan Art is art of characters from Movie/anime/books etc, it is meant to be recognised as those characters, fan art is not trying to be seen as characterters the fan artist has created themselves.
What we have here is a [b]possible[/b] case of art theft in the vein of tracing. (Which is where you put someone else's art under a thin sheet of paper and copy the lines you see top layer. it's generally frowned upon on art sites)
Simmons did not draw a doujinshi and he's not doing fan art, that much I can say for sure.

His non-apolgy is one I'm familiar with from visiting feminist sites. Often you'll see responces from companies with sexist advertising etc apologising 'if anyone was offended it wasn't out intention'which while being a patronising non-apology is also a way to keep from saying anything that would be incriminating. In this case Simmons apology was in the similar vein of avoiding saying that he outright copied anything in order to avoid any legal action that could be taken against him.

[quote=penguintruth]Well, they say if you're going to steal, steal from the best.

Oh wait, he stole from [i]Bleach[/i].

What a tool. Next time he should at least steal from a series that isn't fucking horrible. [/quote]

This penguin speaks the TRUTH!

I knew this was gonna come in Anime News Editorial soon.

I've been raging over this for a week or so now, and now that you brought up fan art i've had sort of a revelation on this, i wouldnt call what nick simmons is doing "fan art" though considering he's not using characters form bleach in his own manga/comic thing. he's made characters that are essentially clones of bleach characters and i think this is wrong, stealing, and unoriginal. when it come to Doujinshi artists i do think it is a form of saying "hey i love (insert anime here) and am gonna draw it and sell it" but theres somthing about what Doujin artists do that doesnt seem wrong, where it feels dirty and wrong for What Simmons has done. i dont wish evil upon him any more but i do hope that he could at least make something original, or at least that the publishers stops permanently all production of his current comic.