This morning we posted photographs that clearly
showed that IDW Publishing was blatantly ripping off Banksy. We’ve received a
ton of emails about it all day. While we hadn’t contacted IDW before we put up
the post, 5000! in LA did. This afternoon we received an email from the author
of the series, Alex de Campi asking that we clarify her and IDW’s position in
this. Rather than paraphase from Alex’s email and be accused of misrepresenting
her position, here it is in it’s entirety:



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Hi there

Today you posted a piece on how the covers of a series I write, SMOKE, are based on two Banksy images.

Both Igor Kordey (the artist on the series) and I love Banksy, and we would never use any artist’s image in any way without proper credit. Those covers will be credited, ON THE COVER, as “After Banksy”, and we have a line on page 1 of the comic directing people to Banksy’s website for more information on him. We never intended otherwise.

The covers you have are early, “solicitation” covers, with no text or other cover furniture (our names, the series logo, the IDW logo, etc) and so naturally the credit would not appear in the early version you have.

You have my solemn assurance, however, that the images will be credited as I say. I just wish someone had contacted us first to talk about this, rather than assuming we’d just rip and skip. Artists are artists and their work has to be respected, whether it be painted on sidewalks or on canvases in the Louvre. We ain’t that kind of people - and I’d appreciate it if you could put a note to that effect on your writeup on the site, saying the images will be properly credited.

Kind regards

Alex de Campi

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Our first reaction from reading
this email was - “You’ve got to be joking?? Since when does giving credit to
someone justify ripping them off????” To us what was missing in Alex’s email was
that she never said that she or the publisher contacted Banksy. Banksy never had
the ability to say “No thank you very much, these are my images and you can’t
steal them” They did it behind his back and for this reason we posted it up on
the Wooster site. To us, saying that “we couldn’t find a contact for him” is
again another poor justification for stealing.

So after replying to
Alex that I thought the excuse was “lame” we asked her if Banksy was contacted
by IDW. Here’s her response:

“We didn’t contact Banksy -
we didn’t think it was necessary for a credited
homage. And we’re not
trying to justify ourselves “in the lamest way possible”.
In our silly way,
we thought hey, we love Banksy, let’s do an homage to him for
a couple of
our covers and maybe see if we can get some comic fans into his
stuff. The
way comics covers work is they release the underlying image, then in
a
month or two IDW releases the proper version, with their logo, our logo, our
/>names, credits, etc.”

So to this our response is “once you
dig a hole, don’t dig it any deeper.” In some strange we feel that perhaps Alex
is indeed being honest about this (she’s a writer not a corporation) but to us,
the explanation only makes this issue worse. It’s one thing to steal and get
caught. It’s even worse to steal and then try to say that you had the right to
steal.

But as we told Alex, we do hope that IDW reconsiders their
position and drops the covers. We dhope that bringing this issue onto the
Wooster site will help not only Banksy but other artists as well from being
ripped off.

If we receive any more info from Alex or IDW we will
indeed post it here. Our hope is that we do indeed receive an email from them
and it says this:

“After reconsidering, we have decided to drop our
homage to Banksy and are moving ahead with alternative covers. The issues raised
on the Wooster site made us rethink our actions and being that we have not yet
published the books we have made this change.”

If IDW does this we
will be their biggest fans. If they don’t, then we will add them to the list of
people who rip off other artists and do nothing about it. This type of crap must
be stopped and we hope the Wooster site can help because unfortunately there
aren’t many other ways to fight it. Banksy may have the money to sue. Most
artists don’t and because of this the thieves get away with it. Hopefully not
this time. Let’s see.