I'm unfamiliar with this, regale me.
I assume you mean how my wife designed Minotaur’s helmet and was never credited (if you mean how they’re always stealing art I got examples of THAT too but I’m telling this story first)… well sit back and let me tell you a tale a tale set back in ye olden days of the FanTastic Exclusive Forums!
www.sourcehorsemen.com
Here’s the Horsemen’s “official” history of Minotaur the Duck, but here’s the relevant part of the story:
“You can see *some* initial *fan-created concept art*”
Notice the official story diminishes my wife’s work in designing THE FIGURE’S ACTUAL HEAD
“Fan Concept Art” that is the exact head the figure would end up having. The Horsemen’s history somehow has Minotaur’s head just appearing fully formed in the world, no one fan created it, it was “fans”, they were all drawing this Minotaur fella! Even though we only have one image to show for “fans created works”
Mr. Yak used to have a cartoon rubber duck as wearing a straight up “kill the rabbit” style viking helmet to represent the joke version of Minotaur. When the Horsemen started a forum based contest “you guys help us pick one of the birds heads and it’ll be sold exclusively to forum members!” My wife drew this version for him as a gift (they were forum buddies) so he could enter Minotaur.
I actually remember Minotaur as the variant being a fairly unpopular idea, I remember when we had lunch with Banea and Iz at Comic Con (oh yeah, we weren’t just forum randos! I’ll get to that) the two of scoffed at the idea he could win. I kind of think it won because, and I’m sorry everyone who posted one of these… it was the only one that a unique idea. Every other idea was “how about this birb?!”, Minotaur had a hat which at least made him unique and the exclusive wasn’t “Pelican” (a lot of those “how bout this birb?!” ended up being in wave 2, along with an owl wearing a battle helm very similar to one my wife submitted, albeit with the helm being a lot less ornate, but I’m sure it’s just a coincidence *eye roll*, also although not in birbs wave 2 Iz submitted a photoshop of Eric Powell’s the Buzzard’s head on the Bird body, and I think the “zombie” head they’ve been heavily reusing that originated with green glow Haggan sure looks a lot like the Buzzard, so ripping off Darkhorse Comic art is just a thing baked into the 4H’s blood!)
At the time it was kind of assumed “oh well surely they’ll contact us if our variant is picked” but no, the forums crashed, the domains got scalped, everyone assumed that was that… Until they announced the Birds Kickstarter at (a hotel near) Toy Fair a few years later. My wife found out Minotaur was getting made when I sent her a photo from a toy news site covering the event (apparently Mr. Yak found out the same way even though it’s HIS FUCKING CHARACTER!)
It’s not even a case of “well maybe they didn’t know how to contact her is all…” No dude, we were in deep, remember when I said we had lunch with Baena and Iz?! We spent the Comic Con the Seventh Kingdom Cat Warrior Women were released hanging out with Cornboy at their booth. My wife had drawn a poster of Xetheus, Ramathorr, and Akuli and presented one to the Horsemen (and one to Iz) and Cornboy lit up recognizing it as being from the forum. The Horsemen even emailed her about doing a Seventh Kingdom comic with Baena after their first attempt at comic flamed out (unlike every other potential collaborator that works with the Horsemen, my wife if aware how much work art actually takes and declined because it was more than she could take on.)
They knew her, they just for whatever reason decided not to contact her or credit her. Since Mr.Yak was also not contacted I’m going to assume it started as an “opps! Yeah we should have done that huh!” mistake since the Horsemen routinely prove they are bad at this but usually fail upwards, but as Minotaur seems to over shadow even the Raven when it comes to popular variants from the Kickstarter (Dan Larsen and David Silva still use Minotaur in photos from time to time, the variant Father Christmas has a toy duck homaging him) it became a “well we can’t just say we didn’t design the most popular figure in our first Kickstarter” so “fans” as a whole created Minotaur and the Horsemen breathed life into him, no one person truly responsible for this team effort they made possible, them, the Horsemen they did!
Anyway, would have been a big deal for an artist just starting out to be able to claim the Four Horsemen based a sculpt off her art, but that time is long gone, and I guess now she’s in the company of Red Sonya of “people with a paper trail the Horsemen have stolen from”
