Permanent Damage

Stephen Grant's Permanent Damage column over at CBR is a good read if you like commentary and criticism on the comic industry and television/movies as well as a bit of political observation thrown in there as well.

This week he talks about Bush's (or the Hand Puppet as he calls him) trip to feed thanksgiving dinner to some troops in Iraq and likens it to Lyndon Johnson's trip to Vietnam in 1966. Neither of them were for campaign purposes, right?

Also he covers the swiping of artwork that is done by many artists in the comic industry and compares it to plagerism in writing. Swiping refers to the using of another artists layout and style for a page or panel. It was very prevalent in the older Bullpen days of comics, and continues through today. It even happens that you'll see someone steal their own layout like Jim Lee did in an issue of Wildcats where he used the exact layout of one of his x-men pages. It boils down to much the same idea of master studies done in art school where you copy an artists works to find out how the produced an image, the only difference is that if you try to sell a master work you may be arrested for forgery.