I could and I should offer those art credits — but I didn’t — and since it’s a slow Sunday night, I’ll give you more answer than you bargained for in telling you why.

(This is something I wrestle with quite a bit when it comes to blogging and social media in general).

It is my every intention to credit the creators of the wonderful comics that I feature here at Longbox Graveyard, as well as on Instagram, my Twitter feed, Pinterest, and sundry other Internet outposts. In many cases I think you will see I have done just that. In general, you’ll find my best attribution batting average here at the blog (though I am far from perfect in this regard), and then the credits get a little more sloppy as you radiate outward through my online footprint.

Why is this?

Laziness. And lazy metadata!

Relatively few of the images I post here are from my own collection of physical comic books. I usually do screen-grabs of digital books I own, or I hunt up relevant images using Google Image Search. If I end up running those images at this blog, I will usually add a caption or adjust the embedded metadata to include proper credits …

… but …

… if I am trolling my RSS feed, which throws dozens (hundreds?) of different blogs, Tumblrs, and etc. at me in an endless stream, and if I quickly grab and image out of that stream to post to my Pinterest pages (as was the case with the Ultron images you mention), then more often than not I stick with the metadata my source attaches to that image. I will confess that I “gill-net” a lot of stuff from my feeds, and that it is easier to collect the image than to go in and edit source metadata (which is usually awful). The result is that a lot of my images have junky metadata, such as the bulk of this Ultron Gallery which mentions Marvel’s copyright but omits artist credit.

In this case (and in nearly all other similar cases among the 6000+ images I’ve squirreled away at Pinterest), if the credits are crummy, it’s because that’s what was attached to the image when I grabbed it.

I do sometimes correct credits when I see the error, and I sometimes even go through Pinterest and adjust metadata by hand … but, we are talking 6K images here, and trying to get that all sorted out is pushing water uphill.

So this has been my semi-official-but-unannounced image credit policy at Longbox Graveyard.

1) I try to properly credit everything that runs at the blog (though I don’t always do so).
2) I sometimes adjust metadata when grabbing images from other sources.
3) I always happily (and gratefully) adjust, correct, or add credits when a reader helpfully provides the proper attribution.

The above seems the best compromise, given that the alternatives are that I spend several additional hours each week trying to edit the Internet (not going to happen), or that I vastly reduce the number of images that I post (which I think would make all of us poorer, in the long run, but I am willing to entertain arguments to the contrary).

Thanks for the comment! I should probably put this statement on my About page, or something, but I’m even more lazy about writing policies than I am in washing metadata.

(And if you’d like to provide the correct attribution for those Ultron images by commenting over at Pinterest, I will update them to properly credit the artists!)

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