Decades ago, DC Licensing contacted us for Mike Deodato to draw a superhero lithograph to be sold exclusively through the Warner Bros. Studio Store. At the time he spoke no English, so I worked with a coordinator in Brazil to handle the jobs. Deodato gladly accepted the assignment.
DC Licensing was clear about the SIZE. They didn’t want the standard 11″ x 17″ original art proportions. They wanted two 11″ x 17″ sheets taped together for a more squarish 17″ x 22″ proportion and more room for detail. My coordinators in Brazil, translating and handling the job, said it wasn’t a problem.
When the finished line art file reached the client, they contacted me. “We need Deodato to scan the rest of it. We’re missing both sides of the artwork.” For close to a week I kept bugging my coordinators to rescan it, and each time they assured me the art was two 11″ x 17″ pages taped together, and they were scanning both pieces in their entirety.
In the end, DC Licensing never received the image in the proportions they wanted. They ran out of time, and used the art as-is. They published it but weren’t happy that it wasn’t the format they’d planned. That meant we never got another assignment for Deodato from them; they never even sent us one of the lithographs, so to this date I’ve not seen the printed product in person.
Years later, after I no longer worked with the coordinators, I visited Deodato at his home. I learned that a.) Deodato had never been told to draw the poster in any size other than standard 11″ x 17″; b.) the coordinators never contacted him to draw additional imagery to fill out the size Warner Bros. required; c.) Deodato never even heard about the proportions struggle until we sat together in person to talk about it.
Sure enough, he pulled out the original art to show me – 11″ x 17″, the size which they’d repeatedly assured me it was NOT.
