I recall reading an in-depth article years ago about the extent of Dan Adkins swiping other artists. An example amongst many was this page from De Strange # 169.



The original operation scene illustration came from an EC comic called MD. It was an exact swipe-no doubt about it. About a dozen other examples were printed

Dan Adkins is an excellant artist in his own right. But the hardest thing when you're up against a deadline (and he was certainly no speed demon to put it mildly) is to look at a blank piece of paper and stage the scene. The actual rendering for some artists can be the easy part. Also, Dan Adkins was an apprentice to Wally Wood who was known to keep an enormous swipe file- swiping from his own previously published work.
Adkins sheepishly admitted to these practices in the fan press when interviewed and vowed to curtail it. However he was never able to be prolific without resorting to it

Big difference between just using reference and outright swiping. Alex Ross works from photos but he takes the photos himself so thats not swiping. Greg Land blatantly traces porn and magazines. Thats swiping. And I don't think theres any excuse for swiping from another comic artist except as homage, in which case it needs to be very clear that it is homage.

I must have seen this event swiped a dozen times.

I actually see the same poses during flashbacks as a positive, as it reinforces continuity on a micro level.

I think that would be awesome.

I image searched the EC comic Ish mentioned:





Certainly he swiped the main figures and composition of the surgery scene, the shadows and lighting, etc. I like the way he used it though, juxtaposing it as background to Strange's head in the adjoining panel, bringing out its nature as a mental flashback. So for me, yeah, I suppose I'd be even more impressed if that panel wasn't a swipe, but it was used intelligently and within a new context, so the overall effect is more important to me.

Also, the original cover is a well-done, quietly dramatic picture of a somewhat generic - in the sense of representative - surgical scene, not a strikingly new re-imagining of such a scene. The kind of swipes I dislike is where someone takes another artist's cool, original idea and tries to pass it off as his own. Here, I'd say that Adkins took a very good surgical scene - nice use of lighting - but almost any such scene would have worked almost as well for his purposes.