It has not been a good month for Japanese artist Yuki Suetsugu.

Now, heaven knows I'm no expert on manga. But Suetsugu is no novice. She has - or rather, had - an extensive back catalogue in print. Unfortunately for her, Japanese fans have pointed out that one of those books, EDEN NO HARA, was riddled with plentiful swiping from the highly popular SLAM DUNK. Suetsugu has promptly admitted copying, which is hardly surprising given that the similarity of the art is glaringly obvious even on a casual glance.

In Japan, it seems, they take this stuff seriously. Kodansha, Suetsugu's publishers, have pulled her entire back catalogue in response. They've also cancelled her current series, SILVER, which was being serialised in their monthly anthology BESSATSU FRIEND. At Kodansha's request, Tokyopop have pulled the planned English-language release of EDEN NO HARA from their schedule. And Suetsugu has made a public apology, which, even allowing for the fact that Japanese apologies have a habit of sounding excessively sincere when literally translated into English, nonetheless comes across as fairly grovelling.

To be honest, pulling an entire 25-volume back catalogue because of allegations about one particular item does sound a tad harsh. It's tempting to wonder what else might have come to light when the publishers started asking questions. Suetsugu was, after all, caught out by copying SLAM DUNK. Even I've heard of SLAM DUNK. It ran to 31 volumes, was credited with an upsurge in the popularity of basketball in Japan, and spawned an anime series and four movies. It's source material so popular and well known that you're pretty much asking for trouble by swiping from it. There must be any number of other, less obvious sources that an artist could draw on if so inclined.

'In Japan they take this seriously. Kodansha have pulled Suetsugu's back catalogue.' Nonetheless, no matter how fidgety Kodansha might be about copyright issues, there's clearly a gaping culture gap between the Japanese and American industries here. Periodically, artists working for the major American publishers are similarly accused of swiping from other comics, often with equally persuasive visual evidence. Almost inevitably, nothing comes of it. At worst, it's seen as a minor embarrassment.

So why don't we care?

Well, one element is the way we perceive the artists involved. Generally speaking, artists caught swiping in the USA tend to be mainstream artists doing work for hire on mainstream stories. We tend to view these guys more as commercial illustrators than as 'Art with a capital A' artists. When you buy a copy of EXCITING CROSSOVER COMICS #19, there is no unspoken expectation that the creator will be offering a deeply sincere glimpse into his soul. The objective of the exercise is to entertain.

And in the context of pure entertainment, notions of authenticity, sincerity and originality are rather less important. The creators simply offer to tell you a story, and although it mustn't be hackneyed (since that would not be entertaining), nor does it need to break new ground. After all, the genre lines for most American comics are pretty rigid to start with.

Matters would be rather different if one of the critical darlings of highbrow comics were the subject of these accusations. When you buy one of those comics, you expect to get something that is authentically the work of the artist. Sure, on one view it doesn't really matter as long as the end product holds up in its own right. But those aren't the values that most people bring to Proper Art. If those guys were to swipe, it would feel more like they were violating an unspoken contract. Of course, the sort of creators who go into that line of work don't really have the mentality for swiping. It would rather defeat the point of what they were trying to achieve. In the American mainstream, things are a little more erratic.

Most people would draw the line at the copying of entire pages of art, or the outright recycling of other people's covers (at least where explicit homage is not involved). Marvel didn't get a tremendous amount of sympathy for the ludicrous HOUSE OF M promotional artwork, which amounted to little more than Magneto's head drawn over a photo of the King of Spain. By any reasonable standards, that was a flagrant violation of copyright.

'The objective of the exercise is to entertain. Authenticity is less important.' But most swipes are subtler than that. Instead of copying somebody else's work wholesale, it reuses individual panels. Even then, frequently the artist will only reuse the layout while redrawing the whole thing with his own characters. The issues here start to become more blurry.

After all, if the swiped work is presented in a totally different context with different-looking characters, it can hardly be said that the artist involved is passing off somebody else's work as his own. Besides, on a purely practical level, how many ways can you draw Spider-Man anyway? How many ways can you draw two people having a conversation on a park bench? Can you really object to another artist reusing an idea for how a character might be standing, or how a panel might be laid out?

Instinctively, one feels that this sort of thing tips over the edge into plagiarism when the artist reaches for his lightbox and actually traces somebody else's art as a template for his own. But if the figure is then redesigned to look like a different character, and the figure is placed in a different context, how much difference does it really make whether it was traced or copied by hand? Is it really that far removed from the use of photo references?

Besides, although it takes negligible talent to swipe, it takes rather more talent to do it effectively. Good comic book art is not simply a matter of drawing pretty pictures, but of arranging them to cumulative effect. The panels need to have some kind of flow to them. A bunch of randomly swiped panels may look good individually but generally won't work too well as a whole. I suspect most artists who make extensive use of swiping will never break out of the pack for that reason. As a result, it's not that much of a shock when they eventually get caught, because they weren't rated that highly in the first place.

Suetsugu's art, while undeniably swiped, is ultimately no more offensive than many examples that have seen print in America. Largely it involves the obvious re-use of poses from basketball action sequences, some of which have clearly been traced. While it would be frowned on in America, it wouldn't be regarded as career-killing by any stretch of the imagination. Evidently they have higher expectations of their artists in Japan.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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