Francis Manapul creates an online stir
Lately DC Comics has having some trouble with their writers and artists posting material on the Internet. In our digital age, it's become even harder for comic companies to keep spoilers under wraps. This becomes even harder when the Internet posters are your very own writers and artists.
We already spoke about the controversy surrounding the Red Robin cover. That saga has taken another interesting turn. Francis Manapul, the artist who drew the cover, saw that it was being previewed in the DC Nation page. He must have figured that since it was already released, there would be no harm in posting some of his sketches for it online. He posted the images on his DeviantArt page saying "I saw this on the back of the DC books today so I figured it's ok to post it".
The artwork he posted showed the genesis of the comic cover. We saw some sketches, rejected cover ideas and finally the finished full colored cover. When I say "we", I mean the people who saw the full colored cover before it was taken offline. One fan posted a link on the DC Comics official message board, but the link was broken.
My theory is this; the full colored cover takes away the ambiguity that the sketch has. DC Comics released the sketch because it was ambiguous and kept us confused and guessing. Manapul saw the sketch released, and decided there was no harm in posting the full covers then. Someone at DC informed him of what was going on, and he took the full colored cover down.
As of this article's publication, no version of the cover is online. It seems to have been taken down before fans could download it. One message board poster who saw it reports "Left side day/noon with the sun in the middle and the right was dark/midnight".
This seems to support the theory that the cover is symbolic of Tim's past and future. The other sketches appear that way as well. I may be wrong, but DC probably had him take it off of the DeviantArt page so that wouldn't be made obvious.
If this situation is familiar to anyone else, it's because we recently had the same drama a few weeks ago with Tony Daniel's blog. He posted some artwork that had spoilers on who the new Batman would be, and took it down. Unlike the Red Robin cover, fans actually had time to download this one so we do have copies of it all over the Internet. In reaction to what happened, Tony took down his blog. Yesterday, he had a change of heart and brought it back.
So remember Bat-Fans, download any images you see! They might not be there the next time you log on!
You can e-mail them to me at batmanexaminer@yahoo.com or follow me on twitter.
Comments