Sneak peak at the VERY early pencil/ink stages of an X-Men collage. There’s lots more room to fill, gonna be only slightly smaller than the Avengers collage. Enjoy, and as always STAY TOONED!

The final cut of the Avengers collage has been digitally finalized and posted in the Original Art gallery. A fan has offered to color a copy of the image to which I will be sending to them very soon to see how it turns out.

In the meantime, check out the gallery and enjoy. There’s much more to come in the near future so stay tooned!

Those of you who know me know that I have no love for the RIAA, MPAA, and how they use copyright law as a way legally steal money from individuals as well as other companies. Yesterday, my prejudices were further justified when I went to a FedEx Office to have some of my completed works scanned so that they can be uploaded here to the website for everyone to view or so that I can put the finishing touches on them digitally. Now keep in mind I have used this same FedEx Office to scan numerous other works previously.

As I’m waiting for my scans to be completed the employee doing the scans comes up to me and tells me he can’t scan my Avengers picture due to copyright. I had to do a double take and the words, “Wait, what?!” actually came out of my mouth. I asked him if he was serious or if he was just screwing with me, and he said that they are not allowed to make copies of copyrighted materials of any kind.

I proceeded to ask him about my other pieces which he said he would scan, “What about these pictures? How do you know they don’t have a copyright on them?” Do you know what his response to me was?

He asked me, “Are they copyrighted?”  o.0

Trying to hold back my laughter I told him they might be, they might not be. How can he make a determination based just on what he “thinks” is or is not under copyright. The Avengers is an easy one, everyone knows those characters, there’s a f@#king movie out right now. However the other pieces which may or may not contain copyrighted material aren’t popular enough to be easily recognized as something that is under copyright so who is he, or FedEx, to judge what they can or cannot scan? For that matter if they are so concerned with copyright infringement then why do they offer scanning services to begin with? They can’t possibly know every piece of material that is under copyright so at some point they are going to run afoul of that law.

I didn’t tell the guy but in fact they already have on 2 separate occasions. The first was when I had the Marvel project scanned which contains pictures of Colossus, Kitty Pride, and Omega Red. The second was when I had the Wonder Woman picture scanned which contains images of all the Justice League members.  All of those pieces had easily recognizable and copyrighted characters. At this point in the conversation the guy behind the counter is going into ‘deer-in-headlights’ mode so I tell him to just scan my other images and put them on the flash drive so I can go about my business. He finishes up and I run the rest of my errands for the day then go home. It’s late afternoon at this point and I hadn’t eaten all day so I fired up the grill, stuffed my face, and ended up watching documentaries the rest of the night.

I got up this morning with the intent of getting the editing process started on the two images I was able to get scanned. So I sit down and get my digital workspace in order, pop the flash drive in to get my pictures off, and what do I find?

NOTHING.

The idiot didn’t even save the files to my flash drive. So there’s a wasted $3.00 for scans that I didn’t get, plus the waste of time and gas to drive down there. I’m not going back for a refund as I expect they will just give me some bullshit excuse, and further more I’m not going back for anything else, ever. I’ll take my works into work and scan them there since they have machines large enough to accommodate my pictures.

You suck FedEx. I just want you to know that. And for those of you out there who may wish to avoid this situation or one similar, here’s the address and contact info for the FedEx Office location I went to:

FedEx Office Print & Ship Center
941 Bell Rd., Antioch, TN 37013
Phone: (615) 731-2965
Fax: (615) 731-5174
E-mail: USA4084@FEDEX.COM