Just to let you guys all know, it has brought it to our attention that a WordPress Blog by the name of Sunburst Comics and it's owner Andrew Burke has been stealing a lot of peoples Heromachine characters for his character profile images.
I would advise going to the blog, looking through as much as you can and flagging everything that is yours if you don't want it used. I've so far found three of my works in only one section and we've also found art by djuby, Trekkie, Funkmachine7, DiCicatriz & Madjack, so that should give you an idea of how bad this is. The guy has changed the names of all the characters (appart from the DC ones he's included) so it's not easy to find everything.
If you find something of yours and want to take it down there is a little ... symbol that appears in the bottom right of the screen that brings up a pop up menu of actions, the report this content option is in there. Make sure you have links to both the offending page on Sunburst and your original posting. So far, it seems he's only using characters posted on Deviantart, so if you're on Deviantart DEFINATELY CHECK IT. If you're not, it may be worth checking just in case, because we don't know if he's going to other sites as well.
Credit to Blastermasterism for discovering this, his original journal can be found here
You know what really pisses me off about this is that one of the stolen characters is literally just a mortal kombat character. Not a fan-made character and it’s not even from heromachine it’s just a straight-up character form the games!
Glad I could help.
Not sure if I should be relieved to not find any of mine there (yet)….
Or offended!
What? My stuff isn’t good enough to steal??
Haha I thought the same way.
Also, if anyone’s character is stolen, be nice to share so here, so I can report it as well for you.
HEROMACHINERS UNITE!!!!
I think to prevent this from happening, somewhere in the design you put your initials and date/time? Might be extra work, but better that than some fool trying this again. For some reason, I started doing that with my more “enhanced” characters I made. I just used windows paint, those I would not enter since it will not meet the contest rules. 🙂 But, I make my initials look like part of the design so only I know where they are. There are several others still on the site, that I Know he did not create, unless he got Really good at shading, positioning, skin color..etc. Most were gone when I went to look.
Ah, I just remembered something. If he took the images, what are the chances he also stole the bios for those characters? That’s what happened with me. I hate to bring this up so late, especially for people who consider this matter over with, but definitely check for any bios that seem TOO similar to what you originally wrote (If you can; I know he’s changed a lot).
Thank you.