Yesterday, Floyd Norman –a legend within the animation and comic industry, and the first African-American animator to work for Disney on a long-term basis– posted on Facebook a sneak peak of his most recent –yet unpublished– work, which was immediately criticized by Francesco Artibani himself as the art noticeably plagiarized Monster Allergy issue #1.

[ Source ]

After deleting his first post due to the amount of hate comments he was receiving, he wrote a public apology, which was deleted as well not much later.

As you can see, he admits having been “inspired” by the “amazing art” of these “Italian stories”, but he avoids mentioning the name of the comic book.

He also states that “this is not a published piece, simply an experiment” i.e. he was not planning to sell it or make any profit out of it. Nevertheless, we highly doubt it because:

A lot of time –and maybe even money– has obviously been invested in this project –as we will see in the following images–.

It has been printed and bound with quality materials, which make it look more like a first issue of a comic book given to the author before the actual serialization than just a “personal project” or an “experiment”. He called the book “proof” –proof of concept–, which is what you call an initial test print of a book.

That being said, I will proceed to enumerate the evidences.

1) One of the characters resembles Elena

Both the character design and face expressions are observably similar. Plus, the way she is drawn is slightly different from the other characters that appear in the image.

2) Very similar panel composition

It is in this last image where we can fully appreciate the magnitude of the project. It does not look like a “small experiment”.

3) The “references” folder

Apparently, Mr. Norman didn’t even buy the comic books, as these are probably the scans you can find online.

Sadly, I can not give you a source for the last two images because they have been deleted. But here you have the screenshots, just so you can see they have been taken from Floyd Norman’s Facebook profile:

With this post I am not trying to add fuel to the fire. I just thought that the fandom has to stay together in a moment like this and being informed is the best way to defend ourselves from possible haters, even though I doubt this issue will have further consequences, at least on the Internet.

Please, do not use the evidences given here to harass or hate on Mr. Norman. This is only an informative post.