comics

If Marvel Wants to Win Over Alien Fans, This Was a Bad Way to Start Things Off

Courtesy of Tristan Jones on Twitter (@WallMeatJones)

Courtesy of Tristan Jones on Twitter (@WallMeatJones)

by Patrick Greene

Anyone who knows anything about comics knows about Greg Land and his well documented, extensive, controversial use of “references.” He’s made a career—somehow, a hugely successful one—out of tracing over the work of others. Whether it’s photos of recognizable celebrities or still frames from porn, Land has managed to illustrate marquee titles like Ultimate Fantastic Four and Uncanny X-Men by transplanting other people’s images into his own.

So it came as no surprise when, just days after Marvel announced the upcoming Aliens Omnibus Volume 1 collection with a cover “by” Greg Land, Twitter lit up with more accusations of plagiarism. This time, it was the original artist himself—Tristan “T. Rex” Jones, friend to Perfect Organism and one of our all-time favorite Alien illustrators—who noticed it first.

Before we get into just how many layers of awful there are in this, let’s take a moment and see where else Land took his “inspiration.”

Adam Zeller, another friend to PO (and co-host of the always entertaining AvPGalaxy Podcast), worked with Twitter user @SizzyBubbles to track down the source for Land’s star ovomorph: NECA’s life-sized xenomorph egg replica, which features that EXACT image right on the website.

One thing conspicuously missing from Land’s trace of Tristan’s art was the head. In the original, Tristan’s xenomorph had the characteristic head of the creatures he’d designed for the fantastic Aliens: Defiance (which he illustrated for Dark Horse in 2016-17). So perhaps at least Mr. Land had done something original?

Nope. Turns out the head was also lifted from someone else’s art—Andy Brase.

The use of references, of course, is completely commonplace in visual art (and has been for hundreds of years). It’s totally normal (and acceptable) for an artist to use a photograph, a model, or a posable figurine in service of their art. It’s even normal for comic pencilers, who are almost always under strict deadlines, to plagiarize themselves occasionally (Greg Land does this too—A LOT).

But Land’s consistent, overt, shameless lifting of the work of others is infuriating. And not only is it infuriating, it’s BAD STORYTELLING. When I read a comic Land illustrates (which I’ve unfortunately had to do quite a bit of over the past year, as he’s been drawing a couple of Symbiote Spider-Man runs with Peter David (and I’m a Spidey completionist), it’s not even that I’m distracted by recognizable faces of famous people or images I’ve seen on movie posters. It’s that he’s limited by the source images he’s copying, so the characters have an extremely limited set of positions, movements, expressions, etc. It makes for such wooden, boring storytelling. And it makes it hard to even tell what’s going on half the time.

It’s just garbage. And Alien deserves better than that.

So let’s break this down:

  1. Marvel takes the rights from Dark Horse.

  2. Marvel’s first new Alien content is … not new Alien content. It’s the first few years of some of the Dark Horse material, repackaged.

  3. One of the covers for this collection is by a notorious plagiarist.

  4. The other cover, a direct-market exclusive, is just a repainted Mark A. Nelson cover from the original Dark Horse run.

  5. One of the primary pirated sources for the Land cover is a beloved artist who previously worked on Alien content for Dark Horse, and is now facing financial hardship as a result of lost Alien and Predator opportunities since the IP transition.

Keep in mind that Dark Horse has already made all of these early comics available in countless forms, including multiple Omnibus collections over the past few years. So Marvel, without producing any new content, is simply publishing this stuff they had nothing to do with. And maybe this wouldn’t strike me as being so terrible if they hadn’t also allowed a pirate like Greg Land to sully the first cover of the first announced Marvel Alien publication by stealing the work of one of fandom’s most beloved artists.

If Marvel wants us to get onboard—and I still very much hope that ends up being the case—they need to distance themselves from this sort of practice. Produce real art. Hire independent artists. Create new stories. Honor the incredible legacy Dark Horse has cultivated.

Put great storytellers on this IP.

Get Greg Land as far away from it as you can.