When Is It a COMIC BOOK HOMAGE — and When Is It a SWIPE?
MORRISON MONDAYS! By BILL MORRISON Recently, someone on the Comics Swipes Facebook page posted my cover to Bart Simpson #19 and the 1957 Hot Stuff #1 cover by Warren Kremer, side by side. A minor discussion ensued about whether my Bart drawing was a swipe or an homage, and someone asked, “Aren’t a swipe and an homage very close to the same thing?” I’ve heard variations on this question before, and although I’ve often made an effort to clear things up from my perspective, there still seems to be a good deal of confusion. So, here’s my take on swipes vs. homages, tributes, parodies, etc. I contend that an artist who swipes an image, layout, idea, or pose from another artist, usually does so with the idea that their intended audience may or may not recognize the source material. Probably more often than not, the artist hopes that they won’t. The artist may feel that the thing they’re swiping is so obscure that none will be the wiser, or they simply may not care if someone calls out their image as being derivative of another. On the other hand, if an artist creates an homage to an idea or image, it’s with the assumption that the audience will recognize the source, and in fact sometimes the success of the art relies on that assumption. In the case of my Bartman #19 cover, I was hoping that our Bongo readers knew the Hot Stuff cover well enough to get the gag. In retrospect, I’m not sure that they did. And without that recognition, my cover doesn’t make a lot of sense. The most successful homage images are those that pay tribute to something so iconic that most of the intended audience can’t help but recognize the original image or idea, and that lets them in on the joke. Three examples of iconic comic book covers that I’ve paid homage to are Fantastic Four #1/Simpsons Comics #1, Amazing Fantasy #15/Free Comic Book Day 2010, and Green Lantern #85/Radioactive Man #216. The covers from which I drew inspiration are all well known enough among comics fans to make my versions recognizable as tributes or parodies. A Simpsons Comics cover of mine that I would put into the swipe category is Issue #48 which was inspired by the cover to 1963’s Fantastic Four...
Read more
