Its totally an homage you guys, I'm homaging all these great artists from the internetz.

You guys. You guys pls.

 

An "homage"... Wow.  

 

This is an homage:



That is straight-up theft.

 

Fucking dirtbag didn’t even have the balls to own up on it. Just dig that hole deeper, my man.

 

That title is some serious design porn.

 

Thanks mate, I really appreciate that.

 

It was so considerate of him to credit each of the original artists he "homaged". Oh wait, he didn't do that. He straight up admitted he stole art and passed it off as his own.

 

In today's art scene you can steal someone else's work, cross out their name and put yours then it's considered new art. I was in a contemporary art class recently and there was only a single individual who could draw line art.

 

Hello Greg Land
JIMSMASH ! ! !: MORE GREG LAND TRACING

 

It's nice, but I have no idea what it says.

 

DEICIDE.

 

What makes this especially egregious is that it isn't even well collaged - the placing, size and posing of the characters is all over the place. Scorpy, Fortress Maximus and Rodimus don't even have legs.

 

Ah, right. I couldn't tell if that was a 'D' or an 'O' at the start or if the orange circle was supposed to be an 'O' as well or if I had to look through it at the buried blue 'I'. I thought it might be 'DECIDE' but that extra 'I' was throwing me off. What does DEICIDE mean?
Not trying to be a dick. Just trying to get my head around it.

 

I just want to check: You get that the CID and orange circle form the Matrix, yeah?

Deicide is the act of killing a god.

 

Yes. I recognised that.

Ah, okay. I did do a quick Google but all I got back was some metal group. Which I assumed wasn't it.

 

Sweet. I just wanted to make sure the motif was coming across.

Yeah, it mustn't be a word used all that often if a metal band comes up before an actual definition.

 

So... were there no reference models?

 

Priceless!

IDW u so crazy.


Edit:
The main reason for this eff-up is them hiring an established comic book artist who's not a TF artist. That means the artist isn't familiar with the theme and can't draw it well. So he did fall back to googling and swiping.

IDW wants to be be bigger on the general comic book market but the "general" comic book artists don't always manage drawing mechas. Just to mention the Avengers vs Transformers and the Hearts of Darkness minis also drawn by established comic book artists.

It works the other way too, Figueroa humans also didn't always look great.


Sure you have artists who can draw both human and TF characters well, but it's less common. But those novelty variant covers IDW is commissioning from the known and established comic book artists often don't end well.


You can tell that the artists isn't familiar with the theme when he was swiping more modern art instead of falling back to using mostly the really iconic G1 poses... You know, those like Optimus jumping high and shooting his blaster. Or to using more G1 designs for the sake of "iconic".


Edit 2:

The Terminator looks iffy too. The hands look like if they had four fingers only.

 

I haven't worked on too many, but I'm pretty sure on retailer exclusives like this they approach/commission IDW with their preferred artist for said cover. So I wouldn't land this ALL the way on their shoulders. (But it does still go through IDW AND Hasbro for approvals like anything else, I believe)

But stuff happens. Maybe it shoulda been caught? Maybe they thought it was acceptable enough because it's such an exclusive cover commissioned by one individual retailer. I don't think it makes swiping right, but just saying I guess. I don't think there's any grand sinister scheme behind it  

 

The number of ways to say "artistic plagiarism" is astounding.