Granted this one is a little bit out of our normal wheelhouse, but it recently came to my attention that something troublesome might possibly be afoot in the world of comic books, and yes there is a action figure connection here, so bear with me.
Artist
Tristan Jones has recently made a claim on
social media stating that artist
Greg Land has traced his work for the cover of the upcoming
ALIENS OMNIBUS VOLUME 1 soon to be released by
Marvel Comics. If you hadn't heard,
Marvel is taking over from
Dark Horse Comics the publishing of
Alien and
Predator comic books, likely due to Disney's recent acquisition of 20th Century Fox who holds the rights to those properties. This upcoming Omnibus is one of the first Alien offerings being put out by
Marvel.
For those not familiar,
Jones worked on the original 2016
Dark Horse Comic limited-series called
Aliens: Defiance as well as doing the packaging art for the
NECA action figure based on that same series, hence the action figure connection to this story.
Jones states that
Land traced his work for the cover of the upcoming
Marvel publication and provided visual proof in his accusation.
I've been stewing on this all night: I'm 100% sure I've been Greg Landed.
Here's "his" cover for Marvel's upcoming omnibus reprinting the original Dark Horse run, alongside my drawings. NECA even made a figure of the one most egregiously ganked from, and I drew that alien on the box for that too.
I saw this pop up on IG and recognised the hands right away. Then the rest. Photoshop's snap function even recognised my line work and locked in place when I put it over "his".
I'm not just seeing things, right?
If you do a quick
google search on artist
Greg Land, it doesn't take you long to see this isn't the first time someone has made an accusation of this type against him.
I don't personally follow the inner-workings of the comic book industry enough to know how common a problem this type of thing is, or even if tracing with modifications like the claim states is legally considered plagiarism. I would think it would be, but seeing this isn't the first time Land has been accused of this, and he seems to continue to be employed by a company like
Marvel, not to mention
Jones is seemingly going to social media instead of seeking out a lawyer, I just don't know. Legal or not it definitely doesn't seem like a very cool thing to do.