Separated at Birth? Or lightboxing?

[roseembolism]

Courtesy of rpg.net, we have two pictures: On the right, dante from Devil May Cry, and on the left, a picture from the new Hunter supplement from White Wolf.

What's amazing is not only that that this is so utterly blatent, but that the artist obviously thought nobody would notice what he'd done with a popular video game character. Maybe he had a right to do so (I for one couldn't tell Dante of DMC from Dante of Clerks), but he underestimated the eye for detail of the readers.

Fortunately, based on the response, some artist is not going to be working for White Wolf any more. Hopefully he'll have similar trouble in the rest of the rpg hobby.

Comments

[mrteufel.livejournal.com]

I think calling the perpetrator an "artist" is probably stretching it. Each of the Conspiracy archetypes looks to be his work, judging by the 'artistic' splatter of ink over each. At best they appear to be collages (if you can call sticking a head on another body a collage); the illustration for Ascended Ones looks like another total trace job, if from some magazine rather than an artwork.

I hope his name gets passed around the other rpg companies, so they know better than to trust this individual again.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

Well, technically tracing could be considered artwork; I consider Andy Warhol an artist for example. But even in a marginal sense, there's a difference between using a tracing in an artistic context (as commentary, satire, or the like), and simply to make a buck. This clearly the latter case.

From what one of the editors at W.W. said, they were very unhappy, both about the tracing, and the fact that this went public before they could come up with a coherent response.

[mrteufel.livejournal.com]

You've got to be bloody quick to beat things going public in this day and age. Teh Interwebz make this sort of thing so easy to put into the public sphere.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

That's the good thing; the bad thing is it's probably harder than it should be to convince people used to grabbing things to make into LolCat and motivational posters that this is actually a problem.

[mrteufel.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I noticed that. :(