Hello, I’m Jim MacQuarrie. I’m an old fart, and like many old farts, I’ve been reading comics a long time; again, like many old farts, I picked up the habit as a result of watching the BATMAN TV show on ABC when I was a tot. And like many old farts, I’m a cranky old fart. Unlike many of my peers, I’m not particularly cranky about the content of the comics, unless the old version was empirically better. (I’m looking at you, Green Arrow; please go back to what Mike Grell was doing.) No, the thing I’m cranky about is fandom. Being a cranky old fart, I decided I should have a page on the web where I describe a particular type of fan, usually in general terms so as not to shame any individual, and describe what it is this type of person does that bothers me, and why you the reader should strive to avoid acting like this type. As we all know, there are certain traits and patterns that crop up again and again in fan circles; there is a reason for the popularity of the Our Valued Customers webcomic, a reason demonstrated by the cliches portrayed on The Big Bang Theory. Some of these behaviors are embarrassing, such as the guy who stood up at a panel in 1981 and demanded that Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch, Theodore Sturgeon, DC Fontana and Arthur Byron Cover explain to him why Superman II didn’t win the Best Picture Oscar since it was obviously a better movie than Chariots of Fire; Ellison’s response: “You are witnessing a physical manifestation of the word nonplussed.” Others are irritating; we all know a great many comics fans who remind us of Sheldon, Howard, Raj or Leonard, only without the laugh-track. I’m sure your local comic shop has a regular customer who smells like a catbox and spits when he talks. Still others are infuriating, and that’s the guy we’re going to talk about today.
For the last week or so, internet comic fan circles have been in an uproar over an “artist” named Rob Granito who has for the last several years made a circuit of comic conventions peddling his “paintings” of superhero and horror characters, every single one of which is lifted from another, better artist. He gets his prime spot on the convention floor through the simple expedient of lying his ass off. His resume is a work of fiction so fantastic (in the old sense of the word: a work of fantasy) that people have believed it for the simple reason that they assume nobody would be stupid enough to lie so blatantly. People who knew at a glance that the guy was a fraud tended to just shake their heads and be appalled at the audacity of his act, knowing that it was only a matter of time before somebody knocked him down. Finally people caught on, a Facebook page went up, and this past weekend at MegaCon, Ethan Van Sciver and Mark Waid let him know in no uncertain terms that his career as a plagiarist was over.
If you haven’t been following the story, you can catch up at one of the links in the previous paragraph. Let’s get on to the more entertaining portion, the armchair analysis of this cautionary tale, the first of many, which I have titled “Don’t Be That Guy!”
Obviously, nobody, not even Rob Granito, sits down one day and says “I think I’ll become a fraud, a phony, a thief and plagiarist; that’s the way to cash in!” No, this sort of thing is a gradual process, one that starts with lying and bragging in preschool (“my dad is an astronaut!”) and continues onward simply by virtue of getting away with it. I’ve known liars who lie all the time about everything big and small, and their friends smile and nod and, when the guy’s back is turned, roll their eyes. They are quite charming and endearing people, as long as you know better than to ever involve them in your money. They get away with it because they dare to try it. The defining trait is audacity. Boldness. Shamelessness. Not courage, really, because courage tends to be altruistic, where audacity is inherently selfish; the thinking is “I will do whatever it takes to get what I want, and I don’t care who gets hurt and the potential embarrassment of getting caught is not sufficient to deter me, because I know that most people lack the determination to pursue the case beyond a certain point.” They know they can almost always get away with it, because they know, as the saying goes, “all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”
Which brings us to the next point: evil people don’t think they are evil. People have an enormous capacity to rationalize anything; even Hitler could make himself the hero of his own story. Rob Granito honestly thinks he’s an artist; he deserves the applause and money due him because he is an artist. If he takes a few shortcuts and fudges a few details, who cares? Part of this is Kruger-Dunning Effect, the phenomenon whereby incompetent people can’t tell they’re incompetent, because the skills needed for assessing competence are the same ones needed in order to be competent. Rob thinks he’s an artist because he honestly can’t see the difference between his own drawings and the ones he traced. He lacks the ability to assess what makes a drawing good or bad, and assumes the traced ones sell better only because people are familiar with them, so he simply claims to have been the “ghost” artist who “really drew them.”
Another trait of the narcissistic pathological liar is the ability to inflate and exaggerate a little story into a big one, usually via carefully-parsed words and phrases that include at least some “plausible deniability;” like the notorious Rick Olney and J-Bolt, I suspect that many of Granito’s claims have their genesis in some tiny sliver of truth, which he has tortured beyond all endurance. For example, he lists “Calvin & Hobbes” as a credit. The way he puts it, one would assume he did some uncredited work on the strip, perhaps as Bill Watterson’s assistant or intern. As most comic fans know, Watterson is famous for his reclusive nature and insistence on complete control over his work; he’s never had an assistant, so this suggestion is obviously wrong. When pressed on the matter, Granito will say he worked on the Calvin & Hobbes postage stamp; when pressed further, he claims that what he actually did was the special commemorative cancellation stamp which the USPS used on the day of release of the stamp. He actually used the word “drew” in making the claim.
I happen to be a graphic designer by trade, and I’ve done a lot of menial production art tasks on a lot of high-profile work for clients such as Disney (laying out the text for the back of a VHS tape box), Warner Brothers (setting the type that gets printed on the front of CDs), Lucasfilm/20th Century Fox (creating the shelf-signs to plug the 1995 re-release of the STAR WARS trilogy at Walmart), and so on. Not a one of these credits was anything special, nothing even worth putting on my resume. Odds are, every single credit on Granito’s resume is about on the same level as mine; he actually was in some trivial way indirectly connected to the properties named, at such a low level that nobody above his immediate supervisor would ever know he was involved. His claim or working on Calvin & Hobbes is analogous to the janitor at Warner Brothers claiming he worked on BATMAN BEGINS. Technically, yes, he did work on it, but in a way that literally anyone in the world could have done.
A quick examination of the stamp in question (it’s the little black & white thing at the bottom) would lead one to conclude that about the only thing Granito could possibly have “drawn” is the circle on the right. Which is probably what he did. It’s entirely likely that Granito was a low-level production artist at some agency or studio that contracted with the USPS to do such work; his job would have involved taking a few of Watterson’s drawings, arranging them in the composition as seen, adding the circle and text on the right, and calling it a day. Exactly the same sort of project I’ve worked on hundreds of times, and just about as important.
On his website, Granito states that “Some of Rob’s past work includes cel work on the Animated Batman Superman Adventures, X-Men and Spider-man to name a few.” As anyone in animation knows, for most cartoons these days (including the ones named here), the “cel work” is generally done in China, Korea, or some other country on the other side of the ocean. But there are a lot of production tasks that are done over here, such as photocopying storyboards, assembling style guides for licensees, creating other incidental items that most people never notice. One of these tasks would be the creation of collectible limited-edition “sericels”; recreations of animation cels to be sold to collectors. (Modern animation does not involve the use of real cels anymore; the art is scanned into the computer and the cartoons assembled digitally. Any “cels” you see for sale from after about 1995 are these; they were not actually used in the making of the animation.) It is entirely likely that Granito worked for one of the companies that produces these cels for WB and other studios; his job would have been basically to operate a Xerox machine. Again, technically true, but clearly not what he meant to imply.
The point of all this is, Rob Granito thinks he’s smart. He thinks he’s smarter than his customers, smarter than other artists, and smart enough to bluff or talk his way out of any trouble he gets into. He’s not. Again, Kruger-Dunning Effect is in place; when he goes to a forum and pretends to be a DC Editor/Art Director and declares that “Rob Granito is legitomite,” he really thinks it will fool people. Like a Nigerian scammer, his command of English is so limited that it all looks the same to him; since he can’t tell the difference between a fourth grader’s essay and a Hemingway story, he assumes nobody else can. He honestly can’t tell that his writing style is incredibly distinctive and unique in its borderline illiteracy.
The tragedy here, to me anyway, is that there are thousands of much better artists out there whose work will never be applauded, simply because they lack the boldness and audacity of the likes of Granito; if his sheer nerve were bound by ethics and put in service to actual talent, he could legitimately be a superstar. But a lot of really good artists compare themselves to the best and measure up short, so they lack the confidence to step out and say “HEY! LOOKIE HERE!” the way Rob could. It’s a pity, really. If I had his nerve I’d be a millionaire. And that’s what pisses me off most about him.
So, what have we learned?
1) Honesty really is the best policy.
2) Padding your resume is best done with subtlety. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
3) Self-awareness is a beautiful thing. Know your limitations.
4) When caught in a lie, don’t compound it with more.
5) People are smarter than you think they are.
6) A little humility will protect your from a lot of foolishness.
7) A little confidence will take you a long way if you have the talent to back it up.
And finally, Don’t Be That Guy!
