It started when Alex was hired to do an illustration for Slate, for an article by Farhad Manjoo titled, “How Black People Use Twitter”, that appeared last week in the web magazine of note. I’ll leave the racial and other techno-sociological points for others to debate; Alex’s main goal was to create an image for the article that keyed into it, and for better or ill, he created this peppy little fella, his interpretation of the Twitter bird, but colored brown, and with a large oversized baseball cap, askew, with a hashtag on it.

We can debate honestly as to whether Alex’s drawing was appropriate (I hold that it’s fine), but the story takes a twist. NPR, upholding their long, noble tradition of being about 3 to 7 days behind the rest of the planet when it comes to everything important, then published a piece on their All Tech Considered blog by Sam Sanders; it was accompanied a short audio piece on the phenomenon cited in Manjoo’s piece, and the subsequent fall out.

Notice anything about that piece?

Alex’s name is mentioned nowhere in it.

One could debate the merit of including a discussion of the graphic element of it at all (blogger Alicia Nassardeen photoshopped Alex’s illustrations into a series of different ‘black stereotypes’). The issue brings up so many varied ideas wrapped up around race and technology that had the article ignored that graphic ground completely, it would be a fine piece. This is NPR, after all! Sober discussion! Rational thought! No time for cartoons!

But Sanders dives into that part headfirst, making sure he DOES mention all that stuff, and more: he features the parodies as an illustration for the post, he interviewes Alicia Nassardeen… shoot, he even interviewes a blogger about her opinion about the drawing that Alex did! But… nary a credit in sight.

I find this all incredibly weird, and I’m sure Sanders is a nice enough guy, suffering the time and work constraints that all us in the media world feel. But to consciously leave out such an essential part of the issue that he himself brought up in the first place isn’t some kind of bold journalistic statement. I dare say it’s just bad journalism, and what’s more, just kind of lazy. Would Sanders take a chunk of text, unattributed, and just hope no one noticed? I think not.

At the heart of it, of course, is my personal view that illustrators still don’t get the propers deserved to us (I see a bunch of ink stained fists rising behind me, now), and this is just one in a long line of slights. This is an issue that people who make things easily transferable to the web need to sit down and think about deeply; sometimes, I think we’ve already ceded the ground that we can make money doing it.

I have newspapers – real, live newspapers, that have print runs and stuff, emailing me every week to see if they can use an image they found of mine for free. Every week, no joke. And that’s just the ones who decide to call me. The age of solid rights usage as passed.

What we still have a line in the sand for is credits. Illustrators, it is our last stand. Demand credit, always. Follow up, heckle editors, harangue journalists who take you for granted. Make sure it always links back to you. Sometimes, I fear, it’s all we have left.

Just a quick post to let y’all now the first Phaedrus silkscreen is on sale at Etsy, and there’s only 6 left! I’m also very interested in working up a trade, if anyone is into it; email me for more info so we can trade ideas.

Click the poster for full size options via Flickr.

Back in November 2009, I was contacted by a friend who wanted to know if I was interested in helping create a few posters for the Institute of Physics in the UK. The problem – one that the US shares – was that the hard sciences in general and physics in particular were seeing declining interest in the population of school children. Part of the problem, it was postulated, was that UK kids were not exposed to the interesting side of what physics is at a young enough age; by the time physics becomes a school course option, most kids have already relegated physics to the ‘boring’ category, and go on to pursue their degree in macrame interpretive dance. But even as an artist, I can say, this is not so! Physics is without a doubt one of the most far-thinking, philosophical fields out there; I’ve been a dilettante about the subject in general for years, and while I can’t claim to speak about it with anything approaching coherence, the fact that I could do anything for The Cause made me kinda pumped, something akin to what the Ghost Army must have felt when landing in France. (Was that too arrogant?)

Click the poster for full size options via Flickr.

Additionally, I had the great fortune to be able to work with Rich Seymour for the initial conception part of the project, which was great fun, and was inspiring to say the least. Meeting someone who has made a career for themselves by brooking no infringement on their creative vision and ideas, and sticking to their guns, even when it meant losing a job – that’s a kind of hard-assery that you can’t buy, you can just learn by spending years figuring out you’re the smartest mother-effer in the room.

Click the poster for full size options via Flickr.

As per Rich’s idea, we waded into some of the more far-out printing processes, ending up with two photo-luminescent posters, and one printed with thermal inks, that reveal ink underneath when one applies heat, with your hand or a flame-thrower or whatever. The design implications, challenges, and opportunities brought about using their rather esoteric printing techniques were eye-opening for me, and terrific fun.

The posters will be placed in classrooms all across the UK. In a few months, the impressional young eyes of UK youth will all be transfixed by this weirdness, which I feel pretty good about. I’m still in talks with the IOP people, trying to convince them to set up a purchase option for these posters, because I think a lot of nerds might be into these, but we’ll see. Don’t forget to click through the posters to see them full-size, via Flickr options.

I’m extremely pleased to announce that my comic story We Wuz Robbed is in the newest German comic anthology, Mogo Mobo. The latest anthology is titled ‘Nacktscanner’, which, in the words of editor Thomas Gronle-Legron,

loosely translates into “Moga Mobos Body Scanner” (Body Scanners are the “Nude” scanners at airports). The theme of the book is the safety of our personal data, especially, but not only, on the internet.

I met Thomas when we were both invited to speak at the Seoul International Comics and Animation Festival, and he’s an incredible artist, animator, and game designer. You can see some of his rad stuff here, here, and at his website (be sure to check out his microfiche game in the animation section.) He also knows a bunch of amazing European, Japanese, and yes, American artists that make up the Mogo Mobo crew. I’m really proud to be a part of it now.

Moga Mobo’s Nacktscanner will be released at the German Comic Book Fair, the “Comicsalon Erlangen” , 3-6. June 2010. After that, it’s available all over Germany. Go! Pick one up! Now! I’ll wait.

]]> http://joealterio.com/2010/06/moga-mobo-mojo/feed/ 0 http://joealterio.com/2010/06/weegee-illustration/ http://joealterio.com/2010/06/weegee-illustration/#comments Mon, 14 Jun 2010 22:46:49 +0000 Joe http://joealterio.com/?p=662

Just a quick post to draw attention to my most recent illustration for Hilobrow, in which I illustrated Luc Sante’s small piece on one of my favorite photographers, Weegee. Not only was I totally honored to be able to accompany Luc’s terrific writing, it took me back to when I did my BA sophomore-year photography project on Weegee; the assignment was to find a favorite photographer, and then recreate the style ourselves. In retrospect, it’s a totally regressive and vigorously uninspired assignment, but my contact sheets, with my friends lying in pools of blood on the sidewalk, riddled with bullets in a bathtub, do exist. Somewhere.

For the past year and a half, I’ve been lucky enough to a contributor to the terrific cultural website, HiLoBrow. Edited by Josh Glenn and Matthew Battles, it’s an online journal that attempts, usually very successfully, to parse out the genuine cultural gems in our rapidly accelerating cultural from so much chaff. Glenn and Battles are experts at not only figuring out the real deal from what is an increasingly confusing brew of humor, advertising, self-promotion, art, and commerce, but presenting it in a way that reengages the audience in something they may have been trained to ignore. We all accept the precepts of Highbrow, Lowbrow, and Middlebrow, but Glenn and Battles take it a step further, finding the sliver of real deal in the grand Venn diagram. From it’s manifesto, HiLoBrow is

…a manifestation of engaged irony. (When the cast of John Waters’s 1998 movie Pecker toast the “death of irony,” they’re toasting the death of middlebrow sarcastic hipsterism.) The engaged ironist is a hilobrow.

It’s a great experiment in cultural semiotics, and I’m very glad to be a part. Over the past year or so, they have been running a series called “Hilo Heroes”, in which every day they celebrate the birthday of a Hilo Hero. I have have done quite a few by now, and I have now also collected some of my more favorite illustrations that accompany my text into a HiLoBrow Flickr group. I’ll be adding more as I do them. Follow along!

So I thought I’d give a quick run down of March, now that it’s gone, because it was SO FREAKING crazy.

My show, the aforementioned Landscapes of Quarantine show, was a rousing success, I would say almost too much so; the place was so rammed with tight-clothed young people that the art was definitely secondary to the scene. Which isn’t to say that’s a totally bad thing; I suspect the copious amount of FREE BEER might have had something to do with it, but all in all, a fantastic time was had. You can check out the photos of the event here. The rest of night after the opening was a blur, but I do know at once point, we closed down a Cuban restaurant in Soho, after which the very nice waitress flicked the lights on and off so we would leave. Sorry, mystery waitress! I had like 37 whiskeys, my bad.

You can see the full 8 pieces, generously published on HiLoBrow here.

In other totally amazing news, the show actually got written up as a Critic Pick in Art Forum, with yours truly being name dropped. Oh, dang!

I awoke the next morning after the show, hangover in tow, to find that I had a bunch of work to do for a freelance job, in between which I packed, spent some time with my lovely and patient wife, and then HIT THE ROAD to Austin the next morning.

South by Southwest was a blast, and the panel was a raging success, judging by the tweet feed that was the result.

Best comment: “Best panel ever.”
Worst comment: “Disappointed by #incol panel – too unfocussed! ”

Make what you will of that.

You can see images of the panel and SXSW here, which is kind of a condensed version of the full photo album I have. Friends and relatives, check out my personal blog for whole shebang.

The SXSW trip was amazing and fun, I saw all sorts of cool stuff, as expected, and there’s plenty of great places to check it all out. It was also rather watershed for me, though, and for something that concerns SXSW – or the trip at all – only tangentally. After the end of the panel, halfway into my second beer, I started to feel very ill; unnamed, nice bizdev woman taking to me, I apologize for abruptly leaving midway through our conversation, I had to run and upchuck in the bathroom. The rest of the afternoon was a blur, and it was only through the generosity of my friends and fellow panelists that I got home to where I was staying. and promptly passed out for the rest of the day and evening.

There’s a lot of prosaic explanations for this sort of thing – food poisoning, 24-hour-bug, or what have you. However, in my traditional fashion, I like to ascribe it to a more goof-ball reason: I think my body was telling me I was spread too thin and pursuing things in wrong fashion. Over the past nine months, I have been involved in a workshop with peer crit reviews every week, running Robots + Monsters, planning for the SXSW panel, acting as Creative Director for a small boutique web firm, and handling all of my big illustration projects. I think it’s time I pare down, and focus on the one big thing that I’ve been avoiding forever.

That’s right: building my Death Ray. Finally!

Page 3. Click for larger size.

I’m very excited to extend the invite to anyone in the area to the opening night of the group show I’m a part of, Landscapes of Quarantine. From the press release:

NEW YORK CITY – February 17, 2010 – On Tuesday, March 9, 2010, Landscapes of Quarantine, a group exhibition exploring the spatial implications of quarantine, will open at New York’s landmark Storefront for Art and Architecture. The exhibition consists of new works by a multi-disciplinary group of eighteen artists, designers, and architects, each of whom was inspired by one or more of the physical, biological, ethical, architectural, social, political, temporal, and even astronomical dimensions of quarantine. Curated by Nicola Twilley and Geoff Manaugh of Future Plural, the exhibition will be on view at Storefront until April 17, 2010. Entrance to the exhibition is free; the launch event on March 9 is open to the public and will showcase a one-night-only, inflatable quarantine prosthesis attached to Storefront’s façade, designed by architects Jeffrey Inaba and Joseph Grima, as well as a range of beers generously donated by Brooklyn Brewery.

This was a bit of an adventure for me, and, I suspect, several other participants, since we had 10 solid weeks of inspection of the subject matter, group idea sharing, peer crit, and a final group review with a stellar cast of all-star critics. As an illustrator by trade, and often a web-enabled artist by choice, I don’t usually have the luxury of ruminating on a project an entire season before putting it together. Often times when, late at night, I’m reading the working practices of famous artists I admire (as I’m wont to do, whiskey in hand), I’m envious of a time when artists were able to chin-scratch for years on one project, painting, or attempt. Maybe I’m romanticizing it, but from a pure economics point of view, unless you’re a really famous artist, what someone might get from selling a piece of work hasn’t kept up with cost of living increases, to say the least, so more work is demanded in a shorter amount of time. But maybe it’s also personal. I’m a type-A guy who’s also impatient. Regardless of the reason, the length of time was a breath of fresh air. To be able to share that with a select group of amazing artists who gave some un-sugar-coated honest critique almost felt like I was being greedy.

Detail from Page 1

My particular piece, titled Pages 179-187 is a result I came to after studying both the roots of quarantine in the modern age, as well as the plague epidemics of early times. As we were introduced to the historical material, I became fascinated with the power imbued in the  Powers That Be to make very real decisions of life and death, sometimes with very little real information at hand. The idea of The Word From On High, for the good of all, became, in my mind, inextricably linked with the power structure behind a quarantine, and the nearly-imperialist power that implies, on top of how that word was distributed to the masses. I quickly found a relation between what the elder times placed their faith in (God), and what our more modern forebearers trusted (technology), and came up with a kind of ‘lost fable’, told in a form that was a consciously reminiscent of both 19th century etchings and cartoons, and both Italian and Byzantine illuminated manuscripts. My hope is that the result is 8 pages that are nearly ahistorical, so universal are both the themes and the images.

My initial plan was to get these pages binded in a leather tome, but after some teeth gnashing and rending of clothes, I ended up abandoning the plan, due to both a logistical flaw: how do I get every page to be shown without asking the audience to touch the pages?), and a thematic one (isn’t that a little Epcot-y?). My final framing choice I think you’ll find both subtle and really cool and appropriate.

I’ll be posting all the pages, eventually, but if you’re in the area, please do come down and pull me aside to say hello at the opening on March 9th,  at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. It should be a blast, and not only can you see my pieces in person, you can see all the other fantastic stuff on display. See you there!

Download the original press release here.

New comic by yours truly, for no other reason than it seemed like a good idea at the time. I like probably more than I should. Click here for larger size.

Since being lucky enough to get a lot of work lately, I’ve been finding I actually have more time to spend on personal projects, which is strange. It turns out that a lot more time is spent hustling than I realize, I guess. Up next: long awaited Untitled Gallery Project finally goes into preproduction! W00t!

…according to TeeJunkie.com, anyway. Hooray! Thanks to everyone for voting and throwing me to the top of the list. Yay!

I would just like to thank Jesus, Mohammed, Vishnu, Yaweh, Santa, and the Noodle Monster for their infinite widsom in directing votes my way. The others guys were formidible competition, but at the end of the day, we just wanted it more than the other team. We stuck to the game plan, and our guys gave 110% out there. I’d also like to thank my Momma.

Anyway. You can buy a version of the teeshirt here. Thanks again, everyone!