Comic art drawn from screencaps

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

I meant if specific shows disallowed this for whatever reason.

 

[Stevil2001]

BTW, Byrne, by his own admission, is not great with likenesses, so the Photoshop methods he uses to produce New Visions have enabled him to tell a lot of TOS stories he likely wouldn't have been able to otherwise. In his drawn Trek comics, he traced the likenesses of Jon Colicos and William Campbell for panels where Kor and Koloth appeared. He worked out rough approximations of Robert Lansing's and DeForest Kelley's likenesses (a beard on a character can hide a multitude of sins), and his Roberta Lincoln was more of generic pretty girl face with a different hairstyle in each issue than an attempt at actually drawing a young Teri Garr.

Byrne is a good example of a great artist who is not great at likenesses. That said, he's good at capturing the feeling of a character even when he doesn't get their precise face; I've enjoyed all his Star Trek work. There are some artists who draw faces that actively contradict (not sure if that's the best word) the characters they're supposed to be depicting. The IDW Cardassian Alien Spotlight had a pretty dreadful Garak likeness, for example.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Nope. The illustration of young Carol Marcus on the cover of the novel Inception is from a photo of Bibi Besch in a '70s TV movie from the cover of some TV-guide magazine that came out the week it aired. And I think the cover art of Bashir on the last couple of Section 31 novels is based in part on recent photos of Alexander Siddig. But it depends on the actors' willingness to authorize the likenesses.

I know that on New Visions Byrne is only allowed to use pictures of the actors from Star Trek.

 

[ATimson]

I know that on New Visions Byrne is only allowed to use pictures of the actors from Star Trek.

That's because Byrne is using the pictures as actual content, versus references. If he used other photos that someone else held the copyright to, then they would need to be licensed from the owner before they could be published.