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Oh it's ON, baby!!
Nah, it's mainly just a silly goof-con, in which case almost every sci-fi series one might possibly imagine has plainly borrowed from earlier ones in one way or another. At least, I THINK so.
That said, I seem to recall Mézières being pretty upset about this at some point. In any case, he passed on a couple years ago, so hmm...
EDIT: Whoops, pardon. This specifically appeared in the annex of the Cinebook edition of v2, The Empire of a Thousand Planets. There was a text accompaniment that I could post, if necessary. It was pretty rubbish, frankly.
Man, look at the line work in those original comic panels then compare them to pretty much any modern comic (book or gag), where almost all line work gets filtered through Apple or Adobe Corps. Real shame.
EDIT: I didn't mean to shame digital artists. Digital artists are amazing pioneers doing things artists fifty years ago could only dream of.
I've been thinking a lot lately about our modern idea of illustrative brush strokes being filtered through those two corporation's algorithms, how those algorithms were originally intended to imitate the real thing, and how artists actually use them in practice. That's what I was eluding to really poorly.
My bad for sounding like a rude dick.
You're cool with me, brother.
On the one hand, we've come so spectacularly far in terms of digital tools, while OTOH, AI is getting so good that it's even scary. For example, if you scroll down to "Girl by X" in this sub...