So I noticed that Kevin Eastman is selling the original colored pages of Bodycount on his site.
In case you're not familiar, Simon Bisley did the pencils and inks, Kevin Eastman did the layouts, Steve Lavigne did letters as well as colors by hand with watercolor, and then Lavigne's colored pages were sent to A.C. Farley's Altered Earth Arts for some computer magic.
The pages being sold are Lavigne's colored pages without Altered Earth's processing.
I don't want to be presumptuous here because I'm sure Eastman got everyone's approval before posting Lavigne's colored pages for sale, but something about selling them rubs me the wrong.
It seems to go against a few tenets of the Creator's Bill of Rights, especially these ones:
- The right to prompt and complete return of our artwork in its original condition
- The right of approval over the reproduction and format of our creative property
I know it's kind of a big ask to leave money on the table and require creators to keep original copies for decades, and I'm sure the photographic negatives are somewhere safe, but I doubt any negatives were made before Lavigne's colored pages were sent to Altered Earth. So, in other words, with all of those pages scattered with different owners now, we can never get a version of this comic with just Lavigne's raw colors with no computer processing (not that anyone in particular was asking for that).
I dunno. It just feels bad for some reason.
