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.
Jack Kirby and George Klein, 1963
Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, 1962
Neal Adams, 1971
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 #23, by Jack Kirby and George Roussos. I don’t feel that the original FF cover is iconic enough to be recognizable to most Bongo readers as the source. However, in this case I was hoping that some Bongo-heads would get it, and for the rest, I think my cover worked well enough on its own, without any knowledge of the original (unlike my Hot Stuff #1 tribute.)
Even the best comic-book artists have resorted to basing drawings on the work of other artists, and I don’t want to swipe-shame my fellow pros with examples. You can find plenty of those at the Comics Swipes Facebook page. But here are a couple of great covers that are tributes and/or parodies of well-known images. In these cases, they are from the worlds of illustration and photography, instead of other comic book covers.
The first is the cover to 2003’s JSA #54, by Carlos Pacheco and Jésus Merino. It’s quite obviously based on Norman Rockwell’s iconic Thanksgiving-themed 1943 illustration, “Freedom From Want.” You would be hard pressed to find a person, especially an American, who is not familiar with the Rockwell painting. And though the success of this cover relies to a great extent on that fact, anyone not hip to the Rockwell piece would probably still find it to be a fabulous cover.
Reaching way back to the Golden Age of comics, I’d like to point out the cover to 1945’s Speed Comics #38, by Pierce Rice. This cover is based on the brilliant, Pulitzer Prize-winning picture by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal, of the U.S. flag being raised on Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima.
That photo was ubiquitous in 1945, and Harvey Comics took full advantage of its fame by replacing US soldiers with their characters, Captain Freedom, Shock Gibson, and Black Cat.
I’d like to underscore that the audience is key to whether an image is a swipe or an homage. Many artists take commissions from fans to parody a favorite cover that may be very obscure, but for that particular fan, the image is very well known. Thus, what might be considered a swipe to a broader audience, is definitely a tribute to the audience of one who commissions the artist.
My name is not Merriam Webster, so my definitions of these words are not definitive. This is just the way I see it, and I welcome further discussion. If you see things differently, let me know!
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Want more MORRISON MONDAYS? Come back next week! Want a commission? See below!
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MORE
— THE ART AND THE TOY: Bringing THE SIMPSONS’ KING HOMER to ‘Life.’ Click here.
— BAT-GIRL vs. BATGIRL: The 1960s DETECTIVE COMICS Issue That Should Have Been. Click here.
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Eisner winner BILL MORRISON has been working in comics and publishing since 1993 when he co-founded Bongo Entertainment with Matt Groening, Cindy Vance and Steve Vance. At Bongo, and later as Executive Editor of Mad Magazine, he parodied the comics images he loved as a kid every chance he got. Not much has changed.
Bill is on Instagram (@atomicbattery) and Facebook (Bill Morrison/Atomic Battery Studios), and regularly takes commissions and sells published art through 4C Comics.
March 9, 2026
Ah, one of the perennial comic book questions. Particularly since there’s still an open and notorious active comics site that likes to run a “swipe file” on similar images for the purpose of stirring up trouble. I’m with Morrison: if it’s instantly recognizable, it’s a homage, not a swipe.
And I always loved how well the Simpsons comics were able to fit into the comic book medium rather than just duplicate the show.
March 9, 2026
Thanks, Adam! At Bongo, we always felt that we could do comic-related jokes because we knew our readers were more comics-savvy than mainstream Simpsons fans.
March 9, 2026
I enjoy a good homage. I’m probably one of the one that would not get the Bartman-Hot Stuff homage… but the Bartman cover is funny on its own. The Simpsons 48 cover works on its own as well. Just me, but I would not consider it too much of a swipe, since it seems pretty original. Maybe “inspired”?
Good column!
March 9, 2026
Whether a swipe or homage, it should have a signed note with the current artist’s name and “ after ( the original artist)” .
March 9, 2026
Yes, I agree. That’s relatively new etiquette though, and unfortunately I wasn’t hip to it in my earlier days at Bongo. Or at least, I wasn’t consistent.
March 17, 2026
However, when done in comic *strips*, whether an performing an homage or featuring someone else’s characters, the cheekier convention is putting “apologies to (the original artist)” under the signature.
March 9, 2026
Hi, Bill. Regarding the Green Lantern/Green Arrow-Radioactive Man pairing, I’m pretty sure when the latter bears functionally no resemblance to the former aside from some contextual appropriation, it’s not a swipe…
March 10, 2026
Steven, by “functionally, no resemblance” do you mean that it’s an homage to the idea, more so than the poses of the characters? I consider the Green Lantern/Green Arrow – Radioactive man cover an homage, but also a parody. It’s more about the idea than aping the poses and art style.
March 10, 2026
Yes, that’s what I mean. Let’s face it, “homage’ has been a long time euphemism in comics for (at least since the ’70s, when fan sensibilities were spilling over into professionalism more & more, & various writers in particular were carbon-copying favorite other-IP characters, changing the names slightly but keeping most salient, well-known aspects of the characters, & calling them “homages” rather than swipes to validate them as something other than*:) “theft.” With single images like covers, it’s more a matter of genuine homage, but usually in those (as in your FF homages, for instance) the homages capture character positions, relationships in space, & general situations, so that if you look at both covers side by side or you’re familiar with the original, you’ll immediately get the correspondence. This is not the case with GL/GA-Radioactive Man, where a shared visual context is absent & both character positions & the spatial relationship between the character is fairly significantly changed. It’s like, to use your example, someone does a cover of someone lifting a car over their heads. The Action Comics cover is a very specific visual, with a very specific context. I don’t know that I’d call a cover that had a single character, looking directly at the viewer & pictured only from the torso up, lifting a car above their head, with no one else around or reacting to it in any way, an Action #1 homage. Inspired by, maybe, but not an homage.
Anyway, this is just a difference of opinion, but that’s my argument.
*I can’t tell you how nuts this used to drive me. Especially when the characters recurred…
March 10, 2026
Shouldn’t a homage have a credit to the original artist. I normally see “after Kirby”
March 10, 2026
It certainly can and it helps, but any comic cover that shows someone lifting a car over his head is, I think, well within the realm of obviousness.
(Plus, this only seems to apply to comic of comic homages. There’s been a ton of “Pieta covers” and nobody has ever written “After Michaelangelo” that I’ve seen.
March 11, 2026
See comments above.