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Beautiful!!

My take on this hobby, after a year in it and more than 15 years collecting rare and signed books, is very simple. Reread this thread from the beginning. There's loads of good advice in it. Keep a budget, plan your purchases, and buy what you enjoy. Unless you're looking for a specific page or cover, there generally are plenty of excellent examples of your favorite artist's work. For those super rare items, like Infinity Gauntlet splash pages or Erik Larsen's Savage Dragon pages or Frank Cho's Liberty Meadows art, expect to pay for them. So if there is something on your list that you know to be super rare, have the funds set aside somewhere when you go looking because when you find it, you must be prepared to jump on it immediately. Some items will sit for years, but those rare and highly desireable pieces may not sit for even 30 minutes. When the chance comes, go for it. It's about the fun of comics and the love of their art. Let it take you back to the days when you were 8 years old and reading Spider-Man in your pajamas. Good luck and enjoy this hobby.

Who the hell are these people?! Even Madoff's wife and sons believe he was wrong! Other thieves (I know plenty after years of working in and around law enforcement), and one or two hard core I had the misfortune of meeting. The thieves think he got a raw deal and was just trying to "do his thing", why I don't know and didn't care to ask, and the for some reason thought he was being railroaded (or the alcohol was talking VERY loud).

I agree that the panel was a throw-away piece of nothing that no one cared about. I also agree that Lichtenstein's theft and use of it is the only reason people remember it. Where I disagree with some here is that it wasn't "high art" regardless of what people believe. It was theft, plain and simple, and not worthy of the praise that it gets. Good marketing and good spin is why Lichtenstein's copy of the comic panel became famous, not because of artistic talent or genius. Lichtenstein took a very specific image that was created by someone else and claimed it as his own without changing anything of the image. That is theft. No, he's not Bernie Madoff, but I would like to point out that there are people who believe what Madoff was doing was not a wrong or bad thing. They're wrong too. Theft is theft, be it of millions of dollars or of a simple panel of comic art that's worth less than a dollar. I don't understand what is so difficult to understand about the idea that taking something that isn't yours is theft, but there are some here who simply don't seem to understand that. It is my sincere hope that you eventually learn that lesson the easy way, rather than by having your possessions (either material or intellectual) raided and taken by someone else for their own purposes.

In other words, because we don't agree that Warhol and Pollock were geniuses our opinion must not matter because we can't comprehend the ideas and impact they had onthe world? I understand how they impacted our world completely. Warhol wasn't a talentless hack, but he was a poor representation of humanity regardless of his impact on our society. I have found him to be a vain, self-centered, and particularly unimaginative person regardless of what he may have painted. As for my assertation of modern art as a whole, I have found it has very little intrinsic or artistic value to me but I don't dismiss it as a genre any more than I dismiss Harlequin romance novels for their contribution to the romance genre even though I find them to be pedantic and repetitive garbage. From what I've seen so far of his art I find that Lichtenstein had artistic talent, but lacked imagination and creativity. What he had was cleaverness and an ability to copy other artists' work. I find nothing creative or novel in the works that he gave to history. I think his work is trivial and derivative and that is about all the value it has for me. He should have been sued and dismissed like a journalist who has falsified a story instead of celebrated.

Or you could come to the conclusion that Lichtenstein's greatest works are really nothing more than copies of someone else's work. He may have come up with new ways to show them, and that is clever, but his contribution to the art world looks like he was pretty much just an old version of a xerox machine.

Unlike the poster above me, I won't try to make a hero out of a thief. To answer your question, there is absolutely ZERO difference between Lichtenstein and Rob Granito. Both profited by stealing images created and drawn by other artists and claiming they created them. Doing it first only means you paved the way for the rest of the thieves. Getting away with it just means you got to keep all of your money you made by stealing. It's no different than someone robbing your house and getting away with it. They stole your stuff and no one caught them. They got to keep your stuff. Wait, there IS a difference. No one ever CONGRATULATED a house thief and said they were a freaking genius for breaking into houses and stealing property. I guess it's ok if you steal art though. At least some people here think it is. I guess Rob Granito wasn't doing anything wrong in their eyes either. Now we know where they stand.

The Atom is the cover image from The Atom #1 Looks to me like Ramos was no better than Lichtenstein.

Copyright/trademark infringement aside, is there any evidence to suggest Ramos lifted those images or did he create the scene/pose on his own? The Atom piece would provide the most evidence since it's not just a static pose.

Exactly. I agree with you on this point. There is artistic merit in seeing something where others don't. Lichtenstein did that. Where he failed was when he decided to just copy the original. It's obvious he was inspired, but to just crop and copy the panel and lead people to believe that he was the person who created that art was simply not the right thing to do. It's no different than if an author were to take some lyrics from the middle of a song and publish them as a poem under their own name. In the publishing world, if you use a portion of an author's work without the permission of the author it's called plagerism. If you use a portion of an author's work and call it your own (whether you have permission to use it or not), it's called being a hack. Apparently in the art world it's called inspiration.

To me the big difference is you have Everhart taking a known character and doing an interpretation that is very different from the source material and thus original to the artist. Plus he is doing that work via a contract with the copyright holder. Lichtenstein took the source material, bkew it up and took out a few words. By subtracting a few words it changed the meaning and subtext of the art (I'm speaking solely of the panel with the man looking through the peephole here. I found no value artistic or otherwise from the other examples beyond the original panel.). While that IS inspired, it speaks nothing of his artistic ability. All it says is he saw something a little different that the artist who created it. As for if he did it with permission or not, work for hire or not, and all that I will say this. IF he had written permission from the copyright holder at the time (with no evidence to attest to that, one must assume he did not) then the pieces are legit. Otherwise, they are theft plain and simple and the copyright holder should be compensated, whether that holder is a publishing company or an individual. Regardless of anything else though, one can surely say that Everhart, Picasso, and even Pollack CREATED their art. Lichtenstein copied his.

The publisher doesn't necessarily own the copyright. Depending on how the contract reads, the artist may retain the copyright in the same manner that a writer retains the copyright for their materials. The publisher my have printing and rights to the artwork, but those rights generally are not transferable to another entity beyond the publisher and are not the same as the copyright.

Aman619 So basically, what you're trying to say is it's ok to steal as long as some uber-rich people say it's ok? Well let's just goahead and let Bernie Madoff out and get his stuff back because he obviously didn't do anything wrong by taking the money that was gleefully given to him to invest. After all, they gave it to him. And I'm certain other uber-rich people won;t disagree that he didn't do anything wrong. Forget all this "art is this, and art is that" junk. Let's get down to the real meat of the argument. Is it ok to profit from the use of someone else's property without having their permission to use that property? I say "property" to mean ANYTHING that is legally owned by a person or entity such as a business. That means patents, copyrights, equipment, buildings, monies, and anything else that can be covered as legally ownable. You DO understand that this is exactly what happened don't you? Lichtenstein painted an image (through whatever method) that was owned by someone else by copyright law without their permission and profited from it. Do you think us to be such sheep that because a few of the "elite" of the art world like his work and think it great work, we are going to believe he did nothing wrong? Heck, I like what he did too, and I could actually see some value to it had he gotten permissiontouse the panel first. As it stands right now though, it's nothing more than stealing and all the profits from his works should be taken from his estate and heirs, divided up, and given to the artists and their families/heirs whose work he stole.

Basically, he Granitoed those pieces. That's the whole point.

No you don't. He stole someone else's work. Whether they recognized the value in it or not, it was theirs. If someone comes into my house, takes a quarter sitting on my dining room table (where anyone coming into my house can see it along with other change), pockets it, and then sells it for thousands of dollars because it happens to be a very collectible coin is he in the right just because I didn't recognize the quarter was valuable? No it doesn't. He stole from me, and anything that he profits from that theft should be rightfully mine as it was MY property that led him to have those very profits to begin with.