Chip Mosher, writer of the recently released Left On Mission, posted a message on his blog to people who scan in his comics to distribute them without his permission … but rather than being angry that it’s happening, he’s mad because the quality of the scans is sub par:
This past Thursday I was made aware that a bootleg of issue one was available for download and showing up in rudimentary searches for “Left On Mission” in Google. While the bootlegging of comics is not something that’s new, I was shocked to find that the quality of this bootleg was just terrible, much more so than others that I have been shown.
Putting aside the legal and moral questions, I know a bunch of people in the industry look at this practice of bootlegging as a loss leader – the rationale being the book gets a bigger audience and there is the possibility that some of those downloading will actually buy the book.
Of course, as part of our aggressive marketing campaign for Left On Mission #1, we made more than half the book available on line at Comic Book Resources and MySpace. So you can imagine how I felt, when even those pristine pages that were previously released looked horrible in the bootleg.
In the bootleg, the colors are totally off and there are fingerprints, hair and dust on the scan. Not to mention that the page layout has been messed with so if you look at the book 2 pages showing mode in the .cbr readers – it’s not representative of the real 2 page spreads contained in the book.
Mosher asked several sites to remove the scans, which they did. Is there just no pride in illegal comics distribution anymore? Kids today …
May 29th, 2007 at 10:03 am
Funny enough,
A lot of the scanners take an absurd amount of pride in doing it. To the point that one of the best ways to combat it I heard, was to have Marvel or DC publically release what the scanners scanned but take off the last “sig” page, removing credit for the work of scanning.
That’d frustrate a lot of them into retirement.
May 29th, 2007 at 10:35 am
Same thing happened with Cover Girl – I grabbed a bootleg out of curiosity and was appalled at how little care had been made to color-correct the pages.
But hey, they get what they paid for.
May 29th, 2007 at 10:54 am
To be clear, I certainly do NOT condone the illegal distribution of my work. But the poor quality of the scans that I and others have experienced is just salt in the wound. On top of that, the page flow was tampered with, so the 2 page spreads were off.
Kevin – I think we were both scanned in by the same people.
Chip
May 29th, 2007 at 2:50 pm
This reminds me of the Seinfeld bit where Jerry bemoans the low quality of street-sold bootlegs of movies.
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