Week of Shame

I need a short break from sticking to nightly posts (yes, I post in real time), so I'm going to dump a week's worth of stuff right now. Only there's a catch... and a story!

These drawings were all done over a year ago, June 2020. I was out of work in March and took on a whole lot of commissions. I was back to work in a limited capacity in late May, and just adjusting to working full time once again in June. I was relieved to have a steady check again, but I was still in a groove of drawing stuff.

Here's a weakness of mine: flattery in the form of drawing my characters. So when a dude I had never heard of before proposed a short collab, I unwisely dove in head first. The story would involve Angela and two of his characters: an evil witch whose name I've already forgotten, and some overly colorful anthro named Emerald, whom I should have instantly clocked as a Sonic fan character. The evil witch would turn Angela evil, and Angela would turn Emerald into a frog. Corruption and TF? How could I say no?

I whipped up a few reference sheets of regular Angela as well as Evil Angela, a modified version of an unused costume that readers of Underburbs Vol 1 might recognize. He showed me a sample page of his work that looked like a professional manga. Maybe too much like a professional manga. But I had no solid reason to disbelieve him yet. I sent him some very detailed reference for Angela. The first red flag soon followed. When I asked for reference of the evil witch, I was sent a render of a Final Fantasy character. I later got another page of the manga with the actual witch. (I reverse image searched these right away with no results.)

At this point, I knew I was never getting anything on my end. Anyone who draws anything wouldn't be confused when I ask them why they'd send reference from two entirely different media, let alone art styles. But I was still hooked on the corruption angle, so I sketched four pages. I asked if he'd worked on anything yet, knowing the answer would be no. After a week of no contact, I politely asked if he'd actually drawn the manga pages he sent.

He got very, very defensive. He asked if I was calling him a liar, why didn't I trust him, etc etc. I very plainly told him that if he wanted to clear his name, all I needed was a sketch of Angela or anything at all. I never heard from him again, and he will never see all the free shit I did for him.

Why did I do it? I'd like to say it's because I wanted to help who I thought was a budding artist, but a good chunk of it is ego. Seeing other people's takes on my characters is a big deal to me. So being led on under the false premise of getting just a crumb of fan art is an equally high level of betrayal. Also, shit's just embarrassing. I got grifted by someone likely half my age.