The comic book series is about a fictional species of creatures, Revenants. The Revenants are almost immortal as they can regenerate their bodies. The storyline focuses on a Revenant named Mot, who has lived for hundreds of years because of the Revenant’s regenerative capacity. Mot desires to die honorably on the battlefield for the Revenants, but can’t because they are almost immortal. However, when the “SANCTUM” organization finds a way to kill Revenants, Mot sees the avenue to his death. The storyline is typical of manga genres with an ambiguous concept of good and evil.
from Wikipedia
Actually, I asked how Mat Moylan,(from Udon) being part of a publishing company himself, feels about the matter, and what his reaction would be if he was in Radical Publishing's place.
If this situation happened at UDON, I'd probably do the same thing. Cancel the series, destroy all copies, apologize profusely to the Japanese creator & publisher, and never work with that "artist" again.
I would not really put any blame on the publisher though, this pretty much all on the artist. Even though Bleach is massively popular, you can't expect everyone to have read it. I read some manga but have never read Bleach, so I would never have picked up on it that way. A few others at UDON who have read the series probably would have noticed.
Probably the Radical publishing's big mistake here was relying on a celebrity name and nothing else to sell a book. Basically that Nick's dad is Gene Simmons. Ignoring the fact that so much content is plagiarized, the quality of the final artwork is really not at a professional level. It should never have been published in the first place in my opinion. Pretty much all the book had going for it was that Nick is the son of someone famous.
Will be interesting to see how this story plays out this week. The best that can come of this situation is that other swipers are scared off of swiping for a while.
Posted on: March 16, 2010, 05:27:17 PM
Actually, ALSO from Wikiapedia...
The series was originally called Skullduggery and was due to be released in 2007 by IDW Publishing, who publish the Simmons Comic Group family of titles, headed by Nick's father Gene Simmons. However, this deal fell through because, according to Nick Simmons:
“ Well, first off, the art simply wasn't good enough. The people at IDW must have had the patience of saints to deal with the chicken scratch I turned in to them. My art was messy and juvenile. Amateur at best. I'm nowhere near pro now, to be sure, but I'm miles beyond what i used to be, especially in character design and overall neatness. And, with the help of Nam Kim and his team, the book has really turned into something I can be proud of. ”
Simmons was planning on continuing the series in some form, perhaps as a webcomic, but Radical Comics co-founder Barry Levine saw some art when negotiating a deal with Gene Simmons and offered to publish Incarnate, although he did tell Nick Simmons to start over. The series was then relaunched in mid-2009 with Radical holding a launch party at the San Diego Comic Con. The 3-issue mini-series is intended as the first part of a longer story: "I've always planned to make this a long-running series and it continues to evolve as I plan the second and third arcs". However, production was halted, on the comic books and collected editions, due to accusations of plagiarism.