A Few Updates On David Simpson’s Recent Plagiarism

A few updates on cartoonist David Simpson's recent rash of plagiarized cartoons in Urban Tulsa and his having his connection to that contract gig severed as a result.

* Alan Gardner reprints David Simpson's letter of apology to the widow of Jeff MacNelly, the late cartoonist from whom he appropriated to the point of tracing a couple of recent Urban Tulsa cartoons. As Gardner notes, Simpson's claim to have plagiarized an earlier version of the cartoon which must have come from the MacNelly cartoon both lines up with his reasons for copying the cartoon that got him fired from the Tulsa World five years ago, and adds any number of bizarre complications to the back story. I think the thing that doesn't seem all that convincing to me is forgetting you stole this blatantly from a cartoon years and years ago, whether it was a rare thing or a common thing.

* Susie MacNelly responds, also at Daily Cartoonist. Brutal.

* one blog found a bunch of different examples of cartoons appropriated by Simpson, and didn't take long in doing so.

* another blog uses the occasion to discuss the matter of plagiarism in the digital age. It's always a subject worth engaging, although I think it'd dangerous to place what Simpson was doing on any sort of equivalency with things like not citing a link properly or even borrowing a part of an image or a line or two of prose. I also can't imagine why anyone thinks, as some of these arguments assert, that because you can attribute something or pay homage to an image that this has anything to say to an act of tracing.
 
posted 8:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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