There’s a controversy on Twitter about the Netflix series 1899 inflamed, the most expensive German series ever. Brazilian comic book author Mary Cagnin claimed there over the weekend that several parts of the series were plagiarized. These allegations have already been liked hundreds of thousands of times and retweeted tens of thousands of times.
“I’m shocked,” writes Cagnin, “that the series 1899 is just identical to my comic ‘Black Silence’ which was published in 2016.”
As evidence, the author places scenes from 1899 next to parts of her comic. “It’s all there: The Black Pyramid. The deaths in the ship. The multinational crew. The seemingly strange and inexplicable things. The symbols in the eyes and when they appear,” writes Cagnin. She thinks it’s quite possible that the makers of the series know their work. After all, she presented the comic to an international audience at the Gothenburg Book Fair in 2017 and distributed it to numerous publishers – also in English translation.
Cagnin herself describes her comic as “a short work, almost a short story”: “It’s very easy to dilute all these ‘references’ in twelve hours of projection of the series, but the essence of what I’ve created is there,” claims you. So far, however, it is unclear whether she might want to take legal action against the Netflix series. “I’ll see what action I should take,” it said in a tweet. Netflix and the makers of 1899 have not yet commented on this.