A blogger who goes by the name of Patrick Power has discovered the existence of The Damned Highway (which is 40 percent off at that link, by the way) and writes:
I can only guess the writers Brian Keene and Nick Mamatas might have gotten sight of my cover artwork that I put out for the graphic novel I've been working on for three. fucking. years.
And they took the idea from there.
I wanted it well written, that was the only thing that took some time. Too long I suppose. I love drawing tentacle demons, hunter s thompson Cthulhu, shaggoths because I've been storyboarding, writing and planning this damn comic since 2009.
That's a bad guess, Patrick. In days of old, I would have been very annoyed at you, but instead I just clicked through to some of your blogposts at random and saw a guy trying to do stuff and never having much money and having some medical issues and always feeling very put out. For eight years. Of course, many people blog as a pressure valve, so perhaps things are brighter for you than you reveal. I hope so.
Anyway, I'll just make this brief: I first decided to cross Lovecraft with another voice, that of Jack Kerouac, in 2002-the end result was my first novel Move Under Ground, published in 2004. (Guess what? A few years later Alan Moore had an amazingly similar notion and put it in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier.)
What can be done once can be done twice; Brian and I originally conceived of crossing Thompson and Lovecraft in late 2006. We started writing it in the summer of 2007, and continued, on and off, little by little, submitting the first 5000 words to Dark Horse in August 2009, signing a contract in 2010, and then I finished the book on Christmas Day 2010, in a cold apartment alone with my dog and some Trader Joe's lasagna. A bit later Brian rewrote the epilogue on editorial request. The Damned Highway came out in 2011.
That is, we were working on our HST/Lovecraft idea for years before any art of yours—which I've never seen, and still haven't—may have been made public. Incidentally, I was editor of the magazine Clarkesworld in 2007, and in August of that year someone submitted a story that also combined Lovecraft and Hunter S. Thompson. I rejected it for reasons unrelated to its theme, and made a mention in the rejection letter that Brian and I were working on something broadly similar. I don't know if the story ever got published, but the writer of the short story took the coincidence in stride. As did Brian and I. It's no surprise that people like HST and Lovecraft both—cult writers tend to have overlapping cults after all, and then there was this popular phantasmagorical visual experience back in 1998:
I'm sure more than one person walked out of that film with the idea that supernaturalizing Hunter S. Thompson somehow would be great fun. I also remember, in the world of role-playing games, Clanbook: Gangrel, which featured flavor text by a Thompsonesque character inhabiting a world of vampires. Published in 1993. Then there's Ian Miller's cover art-which was originally drawn in the early 1970s, and which is heavily reminiscent of the work of Thompson illustrator Ralph Steadman, which is why I asked if Dark Horse could acquire it for the book.
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Mixing Lovecraft (or any other supernaturalism) and Hunter S. Thompson isn't the most intuitive notion in the world, but it's hardly unique. We're all living in the same ideosphere—even unusual ideas can emerge independently of one another. Or, to put it another way, had I seen your cover art in 2009, I wouldn't have simply assumed that you read an interview with Brian Keene, or myself, in which we talked about the book, then rushed off to your art table to start drawing a similar comic.
You seem like an okay guy, Patrick. Maybe misunderstood by your friends and family, certainly frustrated with the way life is going. But it's a very bad idea to assume that people are just running around stealing your ideas. The plain fact is that nobody cares about ideas unless the ideas have already made some money. Thus, sure, every book for the next eighteen months will be about D/s and have silver-gray covers, and already parody titles like Fifty Shades of Louisa May are being pumped out, quickly, by ten-thousand-words-a-day hacks. But an idea someone kinda sorta has and mentions on the blog before developing it? Those are worth nothing—a dime a million, and that's at the high end of the marketplace.
Think of something else. Hell, don't. Maybe your version of the same broad-strokes idea will kick all sorts of ass and will be visually amazing. Nobody can own an idea. So don't use this as an excuse. Just get back to work, doing something you're passionate about. Good luck to you in your future endeavors.
ETA: Brian also has some remarks.
I can only guess the writers Brian Keene and Nick Mamatas might have gotten sight of my cover artwork that I put out for the graphic novel I've been working on for three. fucking. years.
And they took the idea from there.
I wanted it well written, that was the only thing that took some time. Too long I suppose. I love drawing tentacle demons, hunter s thompson Cthulhu, shaggoths because I've been storyboarding, writing and planning this damn comic since 2009.
That's a bad guess, Patrick. In days of old, I would have been very annoyed at you, but instead I just clicked through to some of your blogposts at random and saw a guy trying to do stuff and never having much money and having some medical issues and always feeling very put out. For eight years. Of course, many people blog as a pressure valve, so perhaps things are brighter for you than you reveal. I hope so.
Anyway, I'll just make this brief: I first decided to cross Lovecraft with another voice, that of Jack Kerouac, in 2002-the end result was my first novel Move Under Ground, published in 2004. (Guess what? A few years later Alan Moore had an amazingly similar notion and put it in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier.)
What can be done once can be done twice; Brian and I originally conceived of crossing Thompson and Lovecraft in late 2006. We started writing it in the summer of 2007, and continued, on and off, little by little, submitting the first 5000 words to Dark Horse in August 2009, signing a contract in 2010, and then I finished the book on Christmas Day 2010, in a cold apartment alone with my dog and some Trader Joe's lasagna. A bit later Brian rewrote the epilogue on editorial request. The Damned Highway came out in 2011.
That is, we were working on our HST/Lovecraft idea for years before any art of yours—which I've never seen, and still haven't—may have been made public. Incidentally, I was editor of the magazine Clarkesworld in 2007, and in August of that year someone submitted a story that also combined Lovecraft and Hunter S. Thompson. I rejected it for reasons unrelated to its theme, and made a mention in the rejection letter that Brian and I were working on something broadly similar. I don't know if the story ever got published, but the writer of the short story took the coincidence in stride. As did Brian and I. It's no surprise that people like HST and Lovecraft both—cult writers tend to have overlapping cults after all, and then there was this popular phantasmagorical visual experience back in 1998:
I'm sure more than one person walked out of that film with the idea that supernaturalizing Hunter S. Thompson somehow would be great fun. I also remember, in the world of role-playing games, Clanbook: Gangrel, which featured flavor text by a Thompsonesque character inhabiting a world of vampires. Published in 1993. Then there's Ian Miller's cover art-which was originally drawn in the early 1970s, and which is heavily reminiscent of the work of Thompson illustrator Ralph Steadman, which is why I asked if Dark Horse could acquire it for the book.
Mixing Lovecraft (or any other supernaturalism) and Hunter S. Thompson isn't the most intuitive notion in the world, but it's hardly unique. We're all living in the same ideosphere—even unusual ideas can emerge independently of one another. Or, to put it another way, had I seen your cover art in 2009, I wouldn't have simply assumed that you read an interview with Brian Keene, or myself, in which we talked about the book, then rushed off to your art table to start drawing a similar comic.
You seem like an okay guy, Patrick. Maybe misunderstood by your friends and family, certainly frustrated with the way life is going. But it's a very bad idea to assume that people are just running around stealing your ideas. The plain fact is that nobody cares about ideas unless the ideas have already made some money. Thus, sure, every book for the next eighteen months will be about D/s and have silver-gray covers, and already parody titles like Fifty Shades of Louisa May are being pumped out, quickly, by ten-thousand-words-a-day hacks. But an idea someone kinda sorta has and mentions on the blog before developing it? Those are worth nothing—a dime a million, and that's at the high end of the marketplace.
Think of something else. Hell, don't. Maybe your version of the same broad-strokes idea will kick all sorts of ass and will be visually amazing. Nobody can own an idea. So don't use this as an excuse. Just get back to work, doing something you're passionate about. Good luck to you in your future endeavors.
ETA: Brian also has some remarks.