Heidi McDonald of The Beat, a blog about comics culture, has more about Shia LaBeouf’s propensity to lift creative people’s work and pass it off as his own. It turns out LaBeouf’s brazen rip-off of a Daniel Clowes comic book story is just the tip of an iceberg of shameless swiping.
As David posted yesterday, when LaBeouf was called out for claiming authorship of Clowes’ story in a short film LaBeouf directed, He went on Twitter to apologize. It turns out his apology was plagiarized from another website. After he was called out on it, he followed up with a series of insincere apologies previously uttered by Tiger Woods, Robert McNamara, and Kanya Woods. (See, everyone, I was being ironic!)
Now that LaBeouf’s habit of swiping is on the radar, people are looking into earlier works by the actor, and discovering a pattern of behavior.
McDonald reports:
When LaBeouf broke in to the comics scene in 2012 as an indie cartoonist set up in Artist Alley at C2E2, most observers couldn’t help but be charmed by his seeming enthusiasm and sincerity, even as his weird, self-printed comics were labeled more “outsider art.” In other words, he got a pass. Now, however, a little googling has revealed that most of those comics are also plagiarized from folks like Bukowski and a little known French language comic.
“Finally, on a personal note,” write McDonald, “I’ve learned how to spell LaBeouf.”
Troubles and plagiarism charges grow for LaBeouf as Clowes contemplates legal action