Nitta Youka copying fashion photos for manga covers and promo artwork
This is really disappointing.
Granted, I loved Nitta's work for her characters and writing, not just the artwork, but her artwork was always gorgeous and I loved her compositions. I knew that her work always felt very much inspired by/taken from fashion photography, which made sense given that Kato and Iwaki especially did lots of work in front of the camera, and I knew she had to be using references to get everything that clean and the anatomy so precise, but I wasn't aware that it was to this extent. Knowing that at least some of those awesome poses and scene setups were copied like this makes me very sad.
I'm really wondering how this is going to play out. Nitta is a big name in the BL industry, but I don't know if that means she'll be punished more or less harshly. We might see a halt in her publishing for a while, at least. And honestly, though I really like her work and it'll suck to lose out on it for a while or permanently, I certainly couldn't fault Libre or anyone else for doing so. Many of these went beyond simple reference and they were copyrighted photos.
My hope is that this will be bad for a little while but that Nitta will learn from this and come back without relying on these kind of photo references for her covers. I think she's obviously still a talented artist, as it seems like her equally good artwork for the majority of her pages wasn't borrowed like this. I still think she's doing great work on the characters and writing front, so it would be sad to lose that over these issues with her artwork.
And at least it's better than people like Greg Land, who can't even tweak their pornographic trace sources enough to make the characters look like themselves or have facial expressions that are remotely appropriate for the scene they're in.
It seems like this keeps cropping up, like in 2005 when it was being reported that Slam Dunk's Inoue copied a number of NBA photographs for his manga. Not to mention the various inter-manga plagiarization issues like Inoue's own manga being copied by Yuki Suetsugu (as referenced in the previous link) or Kayano's ripping off of a ton of not just poses, but entire panels and scenes from BL mangaka Takashima Kazusa (which almost ended Takashima's career due to manipulation of the system by Kayono's parents, though I think Takashima is working again). I could swear I remember some manga that had ripped off a lot of scenes from Hajime no Ippo, as well. I guess when your job is drawing things and you've got mountains of work on very tight schedules, it gets easy to cross the line from "let me use this reference to check this piece of anatomy" to "sweet, here's my entire cover for this week/month."
Granted, I loved Nitta's work for her characters and writing, not just the artwork, but her artwork was always gorgeous and I loved her compositions. I knew that her work always felt very much inspired by/taken from fashion photography, which made sense given that Kato and Iwaki especially did lots of work in front of the camera, and I knew she had to be using references to get everything that clean and the anatomy so precise, but I wasn't aware that it was to this extent. Knowing that at least some of those awesome poses and scene setups were copied like this makes me very sad.
I'm really wondering how this is going to play out. Nitta is a big name in the BL industry, but I don't know if that means she'll be punished more or less harshly. We might see a halt in her publishing for a while, at least. And honestly, though I really like her work and it'll suck to lose out on it for a while or permanently, I certainly couldn't fault Libre or anyone else for doing so. Many of these went beyond simple reference and they were copyrighted photos.
My hope is that this will be bad for a little while but that Nitta will learn from this and come back without relying on these kind of photo references for her covers. I think she's obviously still a talented artist, as it seems like her equally good artwork for the majority of her pages wasn't borrowed like this. I still think she's doing great work on the characters and writing front, so it would be sad to lose that over these issues with her artwork.
And at least it's better than people like Greg Land, who can't even tweak their pornographic trace sources enough to make the characters look like themselves or have facial expressions that are remotely appropriate for the scene they're in.
It seems like this keeps cropping up, like in 2005 when it was being reported that Slam Dunk's Inoue copied a number of NBA photographs for his manga. Not to mention the various inter-manga plagiarization issues like Inoue's own manga being copied by Yuki Suetsugu (as referenced in the previous link) or Kayano's ripping off of a ton of not just poses, but entire panels and scenes from BL mangaka Takashima Kazusa (which almost ended Takashima's career due to manipulation of the system by Kayono's parents, though I think Takashima is working again). I could swear I remember some manga that had ripped off a lot of scenes from Hajime no Ippo, as well. I guess when your job is drawing things and you've got mountains of work on very tight schedules, it gets easy to cross the line from "let me use this reference to check this piece of anatomy" to "sweet, here's my entire cover for this week/month."