Happy Easter... Cartoon · 13 April 2006
About 5 years ago, I started setting up my room as a studio for work. The ‘studio’ was really just an old desk that I found on the side of the road, a couple of jars full of old paint brushes and pens, a ruler and an empty bottle of beer…
I decided I should have something on the wall in front of me – both for reference material and for inspiration; so I collected faces that I would regularly draw (ie. Howard, Ruddock, Bush. 
Blair etc.) along with a postcard of the Perth skyline, a picture of a sloth, (they’re just so goddamn funny to look at) and a cartoon that made me laugh without fail every time I looked at it.
I recieved the cartoon through an email forward back in 2001 – It was very simple; a one-panel cartoon of a couple of chocolate easter bunnies, the first saying “Happy Easter!” and the other, having had his ears bitten off saying “What?” Pretty funny, right?
The absurdity of it really appealed to me, and I kept it there as a reminder of how an idea so simple and clever, could be so funny.
A couple of years later, as often happens, I recieved the cartoon again in an email forward, had a laugh, and deleted it without giving it another thought.. That is, until last Thursday, when I received an email with a ‘very clever’ and ‘hilarious’ cartoon attached.
This is the cartoon that was attached:
“Looks familiar..” I thought, remembering the original one I saw. Same gag with a different set-up line. It’s a funny idea, yes, but not original by any means, and it’s certainly not appropriate to put an artist credit on the bottom right corner of the “Cartoon”. (Let’s call it a cartoon, even though it took stuff-all artistic talent to produce.) The credit line was to “D Revoy 2005”
Now, I happen to know that the original cartoon was created at least in 2001, making it at least four years since D. Revoy created his little gem. Incidentally, “D. Revoy” is the signature of French Illustrator David Revoy. He lives in Toulouse and is quite a talented artist with some impressive concept art to his credit – but why rip off an old cartoon (with a photo no less) and then put your name to it? There is, and always has been, the “co-incidence” excuse that has been at every artists’ disposal for years, but in an age such as this where viral emails spread faster and further than the plague, you have to wonder.
So anyway, I filed that email and went through the rest of my inbox. It was then that I was unpleasantly surprised by another email from a different sender, with a “very funny” cartoon attached. (Again, it’s not a cartoon, but for arguments sake, we’ll refer to it as such.)
This is the cartoon that was attached this time:
This time, I got a bit more irritated. Not only because the ‘artist’ had blatantly ripped off the idea AND the set-up line AND the gag line, but they had made it look plain ugly by photoshopping it to death.
So that’s three cartoons with the same gag floating around the viral email circuit and no one will ever truly know who created the original. Anyone can claim it – hell, I could tell you I did it – but it’s just a very common factor of the cartooning industry in the present day. There are thousands of ideas that have been plagiarised and reproduced all over the world – this is merely one example.
It is true that you can’t copyright a specific gag, but you can copyright the artwork; but where has the moral factor in creating stuff like this gone? If you’ve seen a funny cartoon, and you like it enough to share it with people – send them on the original. Don’t re-hash it and re-badge it as your own and try to take credit for it. It’s the artistic equivalent to taking a stolen car into a spray-shop.
There was a good example of a similar thing happening to an American Illustrator, Robert Ullman who sent a promo postcard to Entertainment Weekly, only to find that they had ripped it off and used it 3 months later in one of their March issues. Now, this case is slightly different, in that the drawing was of two politicians as Rockem’ sockem’ robots and it has probably been done at least two dozen times before, but it still brings to light the issue of concept plagiarism in the cartooning industry.
Oh yeah, Happy Easter.
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