Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Cartoon Plagiarism Over at Wikipedia



I found this to be interesting -- a bit of political cartoon plagiarism over at Wikipedia -- now don't get me wrong...I love Wikipedia. But I hate plagiarizers. I was looking for the defintion of "Satire" and this is what I found as an example. The color version of the cartoon purports to be the original, according to Wikipdeia, "Published 1984 as a poster by Finnreklama Oy, a printer/publisher of Finland." Here is this Finnish publishing website "Finnreklama Oy - Book Maker", located in Sulkava, Finland.

However, the second black and white cartoon is the original, or a copy of the original, drawn by American Pulitzer-Prize winning political cartoonist David Horsey for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1984. I have my copy from the cartoon compilation ReaganComics, published in 1984 by Carew Papritz and Russ Tremayne, Khyber Press. This illustration is on the back cover.

As often happens with plagiarizers and second-handers, the copied version isn't nearly as good at the original artwork, and the plagiarizer feels free to make a series of inferior changes to some of the text and humorous details. Two notable omissions are the knife-shaped island of Cuba "(The Dagger at our Loins)" and the Reagan Portrait -- the copier also seems to be a rotten artist, see the crude looking bird in the compass that replaced Mom with Apple Pie. Amongst various retitling on the map, the plagiarizer wrote "Lake of Our Tribes" subtitle for the Indian Ocean. Is that the best you can do?

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