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05/06/2003: giving credits when re-using artwork...
As I read some of the discussions about ownership and "stealing" of fan works and the importance of giving credit etc. (for example The Brat Queen's post), I noticed once again how seldom the artists are credited on fan pages when fans use comic artwork on their sites. While there's always a disclaimer that such and such characters and universes are owned by DC or Marvel or whoever, it is really rare that there are notes somewhere indicating which artists did a picture of a character or a scene, or from which issue it is, so you can at least find out who did it.
And sure, sometimes I can tell from the artwork where it comes from, but often I cannot, and it is not as if the artwork only belongs to the companies, it belongs to the artists as well. And while the company ownership of a character is fairly obvious and widely known, the artists are often much less so, thus it should be even more important to make their contribution visible, not less. At least if giving proper credit is really so important to the fan community.
I use cutouts from comics on my site as well, but they're next to artist recs so it's fairly obvious whom they belong to, and I also put the artist name and (for the most part) which comic it's from in the "alt" and "title" sections of the image tags. I use one image that is credited only to DC and a comic issue, because I felt listing the penciller, the inker, and the colorist, as well as DC in a title attribute was a bit of an overkill, but since I credited the source issue, it's still relatively easy to find out where that image comes from, and who made it. Actually I'm not only annoyed with the missing credits for comic artists because I think their creative contribution should be visible in some way (I mean people do it with every text quotation, why not with pictures?), I also more than once have wondered which issue a picture or panel was from because I would have liked to track that issue down (for its art or because it seemed an important character moment), but with just an image credited to DC in general that's nearly impossible.
