Heavy Metal Icon's Son Accused of Plagiarizing Famous Manga

John Funk

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Dec 20, 2005
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Heavy Metal Icon's Son Accused of Plagiarizing Famous Manga



If you're going to think about tracing panels and character designs from a wildly popular manga series like Bleach [http://www.amazon.com/Bleach-Box-Set-Vol-1-21/dp/1421526107/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1279306864&sr=1-1], you might want to do it where the Internet won't notice.

Let's do a fun little mental-imaging exercise, everybody: Imagine that you're your own comic book [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Tweed-Simmons]. That'd be pretty awesome, yeah?

Unfortunately, when it comes out, the Internet notices that the comic in question has character designs that seem to be very heavily inspired by a famous long-running Japanese action series - as well as some panels that seem to be traced line-from-line from their manga counterparts. That'd be slightly less awesome.

That seems to be the case, though, as Nick Simmons' Incarnate has been accused of plagiarism by fans of Tite Kubo's Bleach - you know, one of those interminable "shounen" action series that goes on forever, shows no sign of ending, and still remains perplexingly popular (a la One Piece or Naruto). There are some image comparisons posted on the Bleachness LiveJournal community [http://community.livejournal.com/bleachness/446299.html], and while a good few of them can be handwaved as "Bah, that's just a generic shot," there are a few images and designs that seem more than a little similar.

While nothing has been proven as of yet, there are admittedly enough of these suspiciously-identical pieces to make me think that the accusations of plagiarism might have some truth to them. The similarities are at their most egregiously obvious when the images are overlaid atop each other (for instance, ???? [http://i536.photobucket.com/albums/ff330/Kylara21/plag/18arv.jpg]).

As it turns out, the Bleach fans aren't the only ones who find this suspicious: Production and distribution of Incarnate has been halted [http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=313250786&blogId=529866178] while the matter is investigated.

The lesson here, folks? If you're going to plagiarize something, don't rip off of something that has a massive and scarily-devoted online fanbase. They're going to notice.

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CD-R

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Mar 1, 2009
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Bwaaah haaaa haaaa!!!!!!

He even traced a Deviant Art fan art drawing. What a loser!!!!
 

Casual Shinji

Should've gone before we left.
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Jul 18, 2009
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Hey man, I laugh like that to, coughing blood and everything.

Does that mean I'm plagiarizing Bleach?
 

Premonition

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Jan 25, 2010
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It might not be plagiarism. Not intended anyways. He might get the image in his head for his characters but unfortunately for him, these are from his memories from Bleach ...
 

CD-R

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Casual Shinji said:
Hey man, I laugh like that to, coughing blood and everything.

Does that mean I'm plagiarizing Bleach?
No but you might want to see a doctor about that. What was that line Gene Simmons said about music downloaders "sue them take thier cars". Well I certainly hope the manga company takes this kid's cars.
 

fenrizz

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Feb 7, 2009
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Meh... Don't see the big deal here to be honest.

So he drew heavy inspiration from a manga? So what?
I assume that his comic follows his own story, so in my eyes it's all ok.
 

Gasaraki

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Oct 15, 2009
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after looking at some of those overlays i have to say there is no way that that is a coincidence. Apparently he stole the plot off some game too.
 

Therumancer

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Nov 28, 2007
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Big, fat deal. Truthfully this kind of thing happens all the time, and has even been done intentionally as a homage/joke. I mean crud, in the DC Wildstorm universe they have had brawls where a bunch of comic characters including guys like Spawn and The Thing were sitting around in a bar and started mixing it up. The Authority once fought a whole bunch of genetically created super beings (an army of them) all of whom were based on popular Marvel characters, and very recognizably so despite some minor (and ocasionally disturbing) changes. You even had The Midnighter (gay super hero) sodomize the equivilent of Captain America to death with a wooden post. Albeit the actual penetration/execution shot was not shown. :p

A more well known and infamous example of this kind of thing was when Todd Mcfarlane named a fictional gangster in "Spawn" after Tony Twist(a hockey player) and even made the character look similar. This lead to a successful lawsuit, but was still absolutly stupid, and most comic fans seemed to agree it was a travesty.

The fact that "Incarnate" has guys that look identical to characters from another comic series is really no big deal. Unless the creators of "Bleach" themselves complain (which doesn't seem to be the case unless I missed something reading it) I don't see this as a big deal.

What's more, I can't even remotely fanthom why Bleach fanboys would be upset, rather than flattered that their series if influential enough to see someone doing something like this. As far as the identical panel shown above, that could be bloody intentional and intended to amuse Bleach fans if the writer is also a fan.

While the specifics elude me, I seem to remember a numer of occasions as well where the classic Batman "Spine breaking" scene involving Bane has been used almost verbatim, albeit usually with the hero in Batman's place finding some way out of it.
 

The Random One

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May 29, 2008
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Oh, man. Bleach? With thousands of obscure manga(s? does it pluralize?) that are known only to a couple of japanophiles the entire internet is used to ignoring, he goes straight for the manga equivalent of Friends. He could have gotten away with it, too!

If he can't draw he should just get someone else to do it. Not doing something that is, indeed, a copyright infringement.

At this rate he will never be called anything other than 'Gene Simmon's son'.

EDIT: Now that I've seen several parts of the comic, it seems that Nick Gene Simmon's son is quite found of grinning psychopaths that can dismember people with their bare hands. Now, grinning psychopaths that can dismember people with their bare hands is one of my favourite badass evil character archetypes, losing only to well-dressed serious psychopath that kills people as an afterthought, but there's a limit to everything, and when you have a page in which one grinning psychopath dismembers someone with their bare hands while three others watch grinning, you're way over that limit.

Also, I can't navigate the posts of Livejournal, what the fuck is wrong with it.
 

MrMisfit

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Apr 8, 2008
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John Funk said:
The lesson here, folks? If you're going to plagiarize something, don't rip off of something that has a massive and scarily-devoted online fanbase. They're going to notice.
Words to live by.
 
Dec 14, 2009
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Therumancer said:
Big, fat deal. Truthfully this kind of thing happens all the time, and has even been done intentionally as a homage/joke. I mean crud, in the DC Wildstorm universe they have had brawls where a bunch of comic characters including guys like Spawn and The Thing were sitting around in a bar and started mixing it up. The Authority once fought a whole bunch of genetically created super beings (an army of them) all of whom were based on popular Marvel characters, and very recognizably so despite some minor (and ocasionally disturbing) changes. You even had The Midnighter (gay super hero) sodomize the equivilent of Captain America to death with a wooden post. Albeit the actual penetration/execution shot was not shown. :p

A more well known and infamous example of this kind of thing was when Todd Mcfarlane named a fictional gangster in "Spawn" after Tony Twist(a hockey player) and even made the character look similar. This lead to a successful lawsuit, but was still absolutly stupid, and most comic fans seemed to agree it was a travesty.

The fact that "Incarnate" has guys that look identical to characters from another comic series is really no big deal. Unless the creators of "Bleach" themselves complain (which doesn't seem to be the case unless I missed something reading it) I don't see this as a big deal.

What's more, I can't even remotely fanthom why Bleach fanboys would be upset, rather than flattered that their series if influential enough to see someone doing something like this. As far as the identical panel shown above, that could be bloody intentional and intended to amuse Bleach fans if the writer is also a fan.

While the specifics elude me, I seem to remember a numer of occasions as well where the classic Batman "Spine breaking" scene involving Bane has been used almost verbatim, albeit usually with the hero in Batman's place finding some way out of it.
Plagiarism as in copying an image. The fact the character looks similiar is not the issue, the actual drawing itself is pretty much an exact duplicate.
 

Zero=Interrupt

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Nov 9, 2009
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Onyx Oblivion said:
One or two panels, okay.

But any more...IS WRONG!
Nope, sorry, not even one is okay. You rise and fall by your own merits, period.

Hey Gene: parent your dumb kid.