Colorful Illustrations 93°C - Clarification
May 6th, 2008I was given no credit or was the LCS for the interviews used in the book. They were passed off as the fake ADs, hence why I have stated this to be plagiarism in previous articles.
All of the images in the book were taken from the LCS, the illustrators personal websites, with a few from Flickr. All the images are web quality 72dpi. They did not obtain hi-rez images for the publication, but to turn a web quality image into a print quality image is not that difficult. Just divide the width and height by 4.1 and you’ll then have a 300dpi print worthy file. Although the publishers of the book in question are not that clever - a number of the images in the book are considerably distorted through pixelation where an image has been stretch to fill a space.
The artists were credited for their work, but also in some case for other peoples work or with an incorrect URL to their site. Just giving someone credit does not make it OK to steal their work.
Me and the rest of the team at the LCS are planning to put together an official LCS publication which will be in the form of a lowbrow magazine.
If you’re writing up an article about this for general press get in contact with the illustrators directly if you want to use any of their images. Also you are welcome to take quotes directly from this blog without permission, but not from the comments section. I would appreciate a link to the LCS in any press. If you want a hi-res images of a certain page - check the gallery http://apefluff.com/ci93/ and email me the page URL(s) and I’ll see what I can do.
I can no longer spare anymore time to pursue or seek out the people behind the fake publishers. If anyone else involved is making any head way and posting about it, email me and I’ll link my posts to your blog, so you can continue with updates. My blog will be returning to my regular rantings with hopeful a couple thousand less visitors per day as I mainly only maintain this blog for my personal use.
May 7th, 2008 at 4:37 am
You did more than most buddy! We all thank you for that. And we all did a great job collectively at drawing a great deal of attention to it. I think that’s the best we could hope for in all this. Everyone, you and I included, have enough going on in our lives that it’s really impossible to pursue stuff like this “to the bitter end.”
In the long run, a lot has been learned by everyone. Among the people affected by this, I believe, are the ones who bought the book online. They ended up getting a book full of low-rez art. At least people buying the book in a bookstore were able to leaf through it and realize it wasn’t worth buying.
And we artists probably learned a few lessons about what work we share online, and how we do it. I don’t want anyone to freak out and take everything off-line, that’s definitely the wrong response. But I’m seriously thinking about keeping far FEWER images online — on my site and other soc-net sites, like Flickr — to at least be able to better keep tabs on what’s out there. I don’t know if it’ll make a difference in the long run though.
Thanks again Darren, and everyone!