The Ink Stained Wretch #179 4/2/25

Rolling Stones, Fighting Internet Larceny, Losing Batman, and a MAD Sneak Peek!

Here we go with another of the farcical, flimsy, and frankly flippant flapdoodles that are these newsletters! This week's sketch is tangled up in blue, we look at the realities of posting art on the interwebs, say goodbye to a Caped Crusader, and share a little MAD sneak peek... on with the 'Wretch!

Sketch o'the Week: Bob Dylan!

Click here if you are interested in this original sketch.

We Minnesotans claim Bob Dylan as one of our own, as he was born in Duluth, spent most of his childhood through high school in the small town of Hibbing, and went to the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis before dropping out and heading to New York to pursue a career in music. However I don't think old Bob thought much of Minnesota, since he has been quoted as saying he ran away from home 17 times and was brought back 16 times.

To be honest I've never been much of a Bob Dylan fan. He's a middling guitarist and he has a singing voice that you would be very generous to label “an acquired taste”. That said, I don't think anyone can dispute that he's one of the greatest songwriters of all time, maybe THE greatest. Personally I'd put Paul McCartney ahead of him, but not by much. Maybe I only think that because Paul was also a top musician and a fantastic singer. Then again maybe the fact that Dylan did not possess that level of physical talent and yet still wrote some of the greatest songs ever recorded makes his accomplishments that more impressive.

Back in 2012 Minnesota Monthly magazine did a story on the years most prominent Minnesotans, Dylan being one, which I illustrated. This was the opening page (the colored circles were for copy):

I find it fascinating to compare caricatures of the same subject at very different ages. The effects of aging go way beyond just adding wrinkles. You can still see the remains of the young Dylan in the old Dylan’s face, but the exaggeration choices change a lot.

You Can't Beat 'em

I don't think a single week goes by without someone sending me a screen capture of something from the web that is using a piece of my art without my permission. Here's one that has been ongoing for some time now. It's part of some lame A.I. program that supposedly creates a cartoon/caricature of a person from a photo:

Funny, if it actually works why would they need to use a drawing from an actual artist as a fake example? They even forgot to erase my signature.

I couple of artists I follow are currently up in arms and incensed that something similar is happening to them with a piece of art they posted online. It's being used as a meme, or posted on someone's instagram as bait for followers, or worse yet being sold as Etsy garbage with no credit or link back to them, let alone renumeration. One artist who has a drawing he did making the rounds as a meme is railing about a "zero tolerance" policy and spending who knows how much of his time and emotional energy trying to fight every instance he sees of this happening.

That's exhausting, and worse yet it is an unwinnable battle. Too much of the theft takes place on unreachable servers or via web hosts from outside the U.S. who could not care less and have no inclination to do anything about it. Even hosts or companies inside the U.S., where copyright laws are supposed to be enforceable, require you to spend a lot of time and jump through a lot of hoops to prove your case before they maybe do something about it. The reality is that if you post artwork online it will be stolen and used without your permission. Your only fully effective recourse is to not post any of your artwork online. That's like killing the patient to cure the disease.

No one likes it, but it's just a cold hard reality. A long time ago I came to grips with this, mostly by realizing that 90% of this theft does not in any way really impact my livelihood or ability to generate revenues with my artwork. The majority of it is done by what is sadly the average user of the internet... people who literally do not see anything wrong with taking an image obviously created by someone who is not them, and using it for any purpose they wish. This is the mentality of Gen Z'ers, and they think it is normal. In fact, if you succeed in reaching someone doing it and try to show them what they are doing is wrong, they will actually think you are the asshole.

That genie is out of the bottle. There is no putting it back. Trying to educate the internet about copyrights is like trying to drink the ocean with a straw. It's not worth the time or synaptic energy.

So what is my point, here? Am I saying "have at it, internet thieves! I don't care." No, not at all. What I am saying is you have to decide if a fight is warranted or worth it. Most of the time it is not. This artist that is upset about his art being used in a meme? Unless his business model is selling art for use in memes (as far as I know that is no one’s business model as no one pays for visuals used in memes), this has no impact on his wallet. Yes, it sucks that he is getting no credit for the use of his work, but he is losing exactly no paying jobs as a result, and no one is getting paid for stealing his art. That's not a fight worth fighting.

In the case of someone taking your art and selling it on T-Shirts or whatever on Esty or some other online flea market website, that sort of thing can have an impact on your ability to earn money with your work. After all you could be selling items with your work on it, and this is taking sales away from you. At best, someone else is selling your work and not compensating you. That is a fight that might be worth taking on. Still, that can usurp a lot of your time and energy, which might be better spent elsewhere.

In this 21st century, in the face of the inevitable theft of your work online, there is only on thing you can do to fight it... give people a place to support you and your work legitimately.

I did this years ago with my book The Mad Art of Caricature. About a year after the book was published in 2011, I started offering (and still offer) a digital PDF version in my webstore. A few pals of mine thought I was crazy, telling me someone could take that PDF, put it online on any of about a billion file sharing websites, and anyone could get the book for free. I pointed out to them that his had already happened. PDFs of my book, apparently created when someone(s) took a copy, cut the pages out with a razor blade, scanned each page, turned them into a PDF and placed them for download all over the place. For a time I tried contacting these websites to demand these files be removed, with almost no success. I had one website admin try to convince me having my book stolen and offered for nothing on their website was a good thing (exposure!). I could have spent days searching the internet for pirated copies of my book and attempting to have them taken down, only to see them pop up again elsewhere.

My eventual solution to this problem was to put a PDF of the book up for sale myself for $9.99. The logic behind doing this was twofold. First, I was not going to be able to prevent the book being available for nothing on hundreds of file sharing websites. It was out there and there was no pulling it back. Second, I came to understand that almost all of the assholes out there downloading a free copy were never going to buy a copy, even if a free one was not available. They only downloaded it because they had a mild interest and it didn't cost them anything. Had it cost them even a dollar, they would have passed it by. Those people were never potential customers to begin with. Their downloads cost me zero sales of the book.

Offering a legitimate way for someone who actually does care how much work and time it took to write and illustrate that book, and the years of experience and knowledge that went into what it contains, gives them a place to support that. Those are real customers, and they can't buy a legitimate digital copy unless I provide them with one. So, that's what I did.

Of course, I knew that this much better, fully digitized PDF would now end up on those file sharing websites instead of those manually scanned versions. That's why I added this message to a page to the digital copy:

Do I sell a lot of digital copies of the book? No, not really. However, I do sell a few dozen copies a month, which is better than a poke in the eye and helps pay a few bills. I spend no time and experience no aggravation trying to fight the pirated versions directly, and I get a couple of bucks from people with integrity that buy a real digital copy. That's an acceptable compromise, in my opinion.

The internet taketh away but it also giveth. Things like this newsletter are another way to offer a place for people to support artists and their work. Patreon is another. While the interwebs provide a place for thieves to steal people's work with relative impunity, it also gives artists, writers, musicians, and other creative people a place to share what they do, and build an audience who enjoy their work and are willing to pay for access or products or both to allow those artists to keep creating. That's part of today's reality of being a "creative". It's a different world than it was when I started freelancing back in the late 80's. Learning to live in it is the only way that works.

Going Gently into that Dark Knight

Yesterday we lost one of the live action Batman actors with the passing of Val Kilmer at the way too early age of 65. He famously struggled with throat cancer and its fallout over the last ten years.

Kilmer starred in a LOT of big movies in the 80’s and 90’s, two of my favorites being “Willow” and “Tombstone”. He played Bruce Wayne/Batman in 1995’s “Batman Forever”. The above caricature of him was from my sold out Batman print.

I was not a big fan of “Batman Forever”, although I thought Kilmer did a decent job as both Bruce Wayne and Batman. My Batsuit is the one he wore in the film, and despite the nipples I still think it’s the best of the film Batman suits.

I would have drawn him for the SotW but I’d already committed to doing Dylan. Next week I’ll draw him as “Doc Holiday” from “Tombstone”.

Sneak Peek MADness

I have two MAD pieces coming out this month, one is a new interior piece in MAD #43 (a TV show parody, the first of those I've done since "The Manmaid's Tale" in MAD #10, Dec 2018!) and the other is the cover for a MAD special edition. Here's a couple of tiny peeks at what's on the way. I'll share more once the issues drop!

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