Warning to My Fellow Collaborators

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creepsville
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Warning to My Fellow Collaborators

Post by creepsville »

Hello all. I want to warn the community that artist Dan Sant is unprofessional, personally insulting, and will take your money and run.

I’ve never had an artist take my money and not turn in a finished product. I’ve never had an artist raise their fees mid-project. I’ve never had an artist strong arm me into paying him up front to get my last pages. I’ve never had to redraw entire panels on pages for my artist. I’ve never had an artist charge me a fee, and when I agreed to pay it, decide the fee was insulting to him. I’ve never had an artist forget what the main character looks like. I’ve never had an artist randomly attack me personally. I’ve never had an artist disregard my requested edits. I’ve never had an artist tell me that our project is not a priority and move on to another project before finishing ours. I’ve never had an artist accuse me of disrespecting his work while I gave him nothing but praise. I’ve never had an artist intentionally sabotage a project we both could have benefited from finishing. I never had any of this until I worked with Dan Sant.

So be warned. My book is now unfinished because his outlandish behavior. I put thousands of dollars into it and now I have an artist who stole from me and don’t get to finish it.
noonecomics
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Re: Warning to My Fellow Collaborators

Post by noonecomics »

creepsville wrote:Hello all. I want to warn the community that artist Dan Sant is unprofessional, personally insulting, and will take your money and run.

I’ve never had an artist take my money and not turn in a finished product. I’ve never had an artist raise their fees mid-project. I’ve never had an artist strong arm me into paying him up front to get my last pages. I’ve never had to redraw entire panels on pages for my artist. I’ve never had an artist charge me a fee, and when I agreed to pay it, decide the fee was insulting to him. I’ve never had an artist forget what the main character looks like. I’ve never had an artist randomly attack me personally. I’ve never had an artist disregard my requested edits. I’ve never had an artist tell me that our project is not a priority and move on to another project before finishing ours. I’ve never had an artist accuse me of disrespecting his work while I gave him nothing but praise. I’ve never had an artist intentionally sabotage a project we both could have benefited from finishing. I never had any of this until I worked with Dan Sant.

So be warned. My book is now unfinished because his outlandish behavior. I put thousands of dollars into it and now I have an artist who stole from me and don’t get to finish it.
This is really fucked up , I'm sorry to hear that friend.
if you paid him using PayPal you might have a chance to recover your money, if you did it through bank transfer or something it would be almost impossible to do that, but you might file a case and see what happens, try to fight back.
for future reference try to have a non-disclosure agreement, you can find a model of that contract somewhere online (I've only used it a couple of times)
and always.
send me an email with what you have so far and maybe I can help you with something.

and Zwol community, how if we unite and help a brother out?
WillEd
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Re: Warning to My Fellow Collaborators

Post by WillEd »

noonecomics wrote:
This is really fucked up , I'm sorry to hear that friend.
if you paid him using PayPal you might have a chance to recover your money, if you did it through bank transfer or something it would be almost impossible to do that, but you might file a case and see what happens, try to fight back.
for future reference try to have a non-disclosure agreement, you can find a model of that contract somewhere online (I've only used it a couple of times)
and always.
send me an email with what you have so far and maybe I can help you with something.

and Zwol community, how if we unite and help a brother out?
He put this on Reddit Comic Book Collaborations and they just deleted the thread. I almost hired that artist early last year for a four pager. I could tell right off the bat he was bad news.
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diegogue
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Post by diegogue »

I'm not going to defend this Dan Sant guy, I've just seen his portfolio and for me is totally clear that just an imbecile without criteria could hire him for anything. Making comics is a sophisticated career, even if you can't draw, you need criteria, education, good taste. If you don't have those values, you can work as a janitor, but you cannot making comics, at least good comics.


This guy Creepsville is some kind of Homophobic fanatic, and they deleted the thread on reddit because he started denouncing Dan Sant, but then the conversation took a detour to white supremacism, racism, Donald Trump, xenophobia and other things (Dan Sant is Brazilian, but not all Brazilian artist are like him). I think they deleted the thread because my comments against racism, not for the denounce as itself.

What Dan Sant did was totally unprofessional, but I'm totally sure that working for a freak like Creepsville must be awful. Anyone gets what he deserves, and I'm 100% sure that both of them NEVER is going to get a successful career in comics.
creepsville
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Post by creepsville »

diegogue wrote:I'm not going to defend this Dan Sant guy, I've just seen his portfolio and for me is totally clear that just an imbecile without criteria could hire him for anything. Making comics is a sophisticated career, even if you can't draw, you need criteria, education, good taste. If you don't have those values, you can work as a janitor, but you cannot making comics, at least good comics.


This guy Creepsville is some kind of Homophobic fanatic, and they deleted the thread on reddit because he started denouncing Dan Sant, but then the conversation took a detour to white supremacism, racism, Donald Trump, xenophobia and other things (Dan Sant is Brazilian, but not all Brazilian artist are like him). I think they deleted the thread because my comments against racism, not for the denounce as itself.

What Dan Sant did was totally unprofessional, but I'm totally sure that working for a freak like Creepsville must be awful. Anyone gets what he deserves, and I'm 100% sure that both of them NEVER is going to get a successful career in comics.
Hello pleasant person,

The mods removed your personal attack on me on reddit because you broke the rules and ranted like a lunatic just as you did in the post you made here. So now you've come here to cause more trouble. Take your meds and stop trolling me because you're butt hurt over an election. They locked the thread to talk to me about it in more detail. We're talking as I type this.

I'm really happy to see all these supportive messages though. Thank you all for that! What a great community! I just don't want what happened to me to happen to anyone else.
morbid
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Post by morbid »

I've been kind of amazed at how useless some self-proclaimed artists are -- based not on me hiring anybody, but rather on me taking over and completely redoing a couple of pitch projects now where the writers got screwed. I've heard this story before with other players.

I can't pass judgment on this Dan Sant person, or even on creepsville as I wasn't there, and there are two sides to every story. On creepsville's side, I think that anybody would agree that raising fees or negotiating fees in any way right in the middle of a project is ridiculous. That shouldn't happen. However, the statement "...had to redraw entire panels on pages for my artist" makes me cringe and would really wreck any relationship I had with a writer -- though I don't have context, so don't know why creepsville did this.
Last edited by morbid on Fri Feb 02, 2018 4:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.
WillEd
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Post by WillEd »

[quote="diegogue"]I'm not going to defend this Dan Sant guy, I've just seen his portfolio and for me is totally clear that just an imbecile without criteria could hire him for anything. Making comics is a sophisticated career, even if you can't draw, you need criteria, education, good taste. If you don't have those values, you can work as a janitor, but you cannot making comics, at least good comics.


This guy Creepsville is some kind of Homophobic fanatic, and they deleted the thread on reddit because he started denouncing Dan Sant, but then the conversation took a detour to white supremacism, racism, Donald Trump, xenophobia and other things (Dan Sant is Brazilian, but not all Brazilian artist are like him). I think they deleted the thread because my comments against racism, not for the denounce as itself.

What Dan Sant did was totally unprofessional, but I'm totally sure that working for a freak like Creepsville must be awful. Anyone gets what he deserves, and I'm 100% sure that both of them NEVER is going to get a successful career in comics.[/quote

You're out to lunch. I am the one you accused of racism. I replied. You can still find it. The thread was deleted, but it still exists in comments over there under your profile. What I said was he posted on DA he wanted to do short stories for his portfolio in a style he was experimenting with, but needed an incentive to do it so he would charge a cut rate. But it turned out he wanted the money upfront. He has no track record on DA. He is in South America. I have no legal recourse if he stiffs me. How is that racism? I would have had the same problem if he was from Canada . I also said I recently had art done from another artist from South America (different project). I had no problem working with him. PM me and I'll give you his Email and you can ask him.

I see on Tapas Creeps got over thirty pages from him before he quit. Amazing. Art is not bad, compared to the awful stuff currently on his DA page. He has pulled a lot of pages off it for some reason and replaced it with amateur stuff. It looked better a year ago.
creepsville
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Post by creepsville »

Hey Will - Mind linking me to his Deviant Art? I couldn't find it. I'm curious about the work.
WillEd
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Post by WillEd »

creepsville wrote:Hey Will - Mind linking me to his Deviant Art? I couldn't find it. I'm curious about the work.
He deactivated his account. It was there yesterday. But this item from his gallery is still there. Pretty bad.

https://dansant1.deviantart.com/art/Journey-582594854
creepsville
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Post by creepsville »

WillEd wrote: He deactivated his account. It was there yesterday. But this item from his gallery is still there. Pretty bad.

https://dansant1.deviantart.com/art/Journey-582594854
Whoa. That's bad stuff and completely different than what I hired him for. So if he just deactivated then he's starting over with a new name because he knows that I've put the word out on him. He told me to go ahead and report him. He didn't care. He doesn't take this seriously at all.

The odd thing is that he's a member of multiple comic book communities on facebook and they are all run by the same group of mods. Why do they run multiple communities all with different names that all do the same thing? Anyway, I reported him and the mods went haywire and deleted my posts and banned me so that Dan Sant can keep ripping people off. When I asked to show them evidence of what he did to me and explained I wanted to warn the community they banned me from every single group. They all run: I LOVE COMIC BOOK ART! Comic Book Companies and Artists. Comic Book Artists Group.

They are run by Harold Mccormick and Christopher Gonzalez who are covering for Dan and his actions within their own communities so that Dan can do it again. I don't mean to stir up drama but this shit is straight up a cover up at this point so that Dan can get away with taking my money and ruining my project. If anything you'd think they would ban him so that he doesn't get to keep hurting people.
WillEd
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Post by WillEd »

I found he has an Art Station website. A lot of the art there is real good and isn't anything like what I saw on DA even a year ago. The style looks different in different drawings. I think it's tracing. You can't be that different. He came across to me like a big con artist. That is why I didn't deal with him. It may have come to his attention we were bad mouthing (not just me) his DA art on Reddit and that is why he deactivated It.
morbid
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Post by morbid »

Oh, man, I dropped by here again a little while ago and started thinking about this thread and spent a couple of minutes and -- WHAM! -- this thing's turning into a Trump Russian collusion story from my persepective! You know how that whole thing has completely whipsawed on the MSM and the Democrats? Well...

I thought that I had read the name Dan Sant before, saw a reference to Tapas in this thread and there it was... Monster MD https://tapas.io/series/MonsterMD creepsville of this thread was the writer and Dan Sant the artist. I am not going to the defense of Dan Sant. However, here's what happened with me...

Back in the end of Sept / beginning of October, I put out some posts looking for something fun to do and got a response from the writer-creator (creepsville who started this thread) of Monster MD, a serial appearing on the Tapas site. I liked the overall concept of it and agreed to draw up a splash page as a Halloween special. I did one up and sent it to him and he seemed to like it and said

10/9/17:

This came out beyond amazing, Trevor! Can't thank you enough. I'll gladly pay you for this but as my new job doesnt start until next week it won't be as much as I'd prefer. In the future I'd like to hire you for my work where I can pay you as well. Are these the final versions or do you have a PSD to send over?
Thanks again and have a happy halloween ahead!
- B


I haven't gotten paid anything for it by creepsville. But I'm not upset about it as I didn't do it with any written agreement and I only suggested once it was done: "...should you feel the urge... Pay whatever you feel the drawing is worth or whatever the going low rate is for indie comics on this stuff." Also he never ended up putting it up -- but I was somewhat disappointed come October 31st as he never said anything about that, either.

Anyhow, here's the piece I drew up for it https://cdna.artstation.com/p/assets/im ... 1513787490

Again, I didn't have any actual agreement for payment and he never actually used it -- maybe even because he was having problems with Dan Sant at this point? I have no legit beef with creepsville, other than disappointment, as it's not like he ripped me off or anything. But in a way there seems to be a lesson to be learned about putting out threads like this. But mainly I just put this out here because I am amazed by the coincidence of this thread appearing, my connection to it, the bizarre references to Trump by some random nutcase, and the current situation of American politics all coming together![/url]
morbid
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Post by morbid »

I have my doubts about there being any moderators here, but if there were, this is the thread to lock and then pin right to the top of the board for reference for the next year or two. Everybody can learn a lot about what to do and what not to do in the field that ZWOL is all about.
WillEd
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Post by WillEd »

There is certainly a moderator here and we are grateful.There was a time there wasn't and the forum was awash with spam. If he wants to lock it that is his business. If you don't like how the forum is managed nobody is forcing you to stay.
morbid
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Post by morbid »

Never said anything about not liking it. Actually I have rarely shown up here and haven't been here for months until the other day as I'm too busy working on comics (and real life, of course). But you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to show up once a week or more and bump this thread up to the top sort of like my own sticky. I'll do it for a year or two or until I get bored with it. It will be like one of those silly threads where some artist has bumped himself up for 12 or 20 pages.

Everybody can learn a lot about what to do and what not to do in the field that ZWOL is all about from the above posts.
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