In the midst of a growing discontent within the comic book creative community over the use of generative so-called “artificial intelligence” machine learning programs (meaning that a computer/machine has learned information, such as the past work and art style of other artists, and descriptions of characters and images, and then generated a new image using that learned knowledge), comic book fandom has recently been turning its ire on a comic book artist who is alleged to be doing a much-more old-fashioned comic book concept of “swiping” panels from other artists.

Alessandro Miracolo is the artist on Marvel’s brand-new series, Phoenix, part of Marvel’s “From the Ashes” relaunch of the X-Men line of comic books (the series is written by Stephanie Phillips), and fandom has taken issue with what appears to be Miracolo “swiping” other artists throughout the issue.

Who is Alessandro Miracolo alleged to have swiped?

Dylan Carter collected the above panels from Phoenix #1 and posted them on social media along with the panels that Miracolo was allegedly the inspiration for the panels in the issue (a number of other fans have been sharing these panels on social media, I cite Carter because his post is the one I saw, and he had the most panels collected).

In comic book parlance, to “swipe” means to re-use a previous artist’s panel layout. Sometimes this means literally tracing over the original drawing (many fans are calling Miracolo a “tracer”), but in reality, you can “swipe” another artist’s panel designs without literally tracing their work, as you just copy it as you draw. This is a bit of a controversial thing, of course, but obviously, comic book swiping has been going on since the days comic books first began.

Comic historian Arlen Schumer was the first to discover how the iconic cover of Detective Comics #27 by Bob Kane was a swipe of an Alex Raymond Flash Gordon drawing (and Kane swiped many panels within the story that introduced Batman from other artists)…

What is the comic book history of “swiping”?

Again, swipes have been around forever. The iconic Wallace Wood famously told other artists, “Never draw anything you can copy, never copy anything you can trace, never trace anything you can cut out and paste up.”

However, when an artist apparently swipes THIS many panels, it stands out for readers, like when Fabio Laguna filled a Wolverine issue with a great deal of Jim Lee swipes…

and when Roger Cruz used to swipe Joe Madureira so much that Madureira worked in a joke about Cruz swiping him in an issue of Uncanny X-Men.

So this is nothing all that unusual, but fandom loves to point out swipes when they see them.

Source: Dylan Carter