Above is a quick comic I did for N+1′s #ows gazette, Occupy! It’s edited by my friend Astra, and she asked me to do a comic, about pretty much anything. Life here in New York as the Occupy madness gets bigger and badder is surreal; suddenly, idealistic rhetoric is plastered on telephones and on the front of tabloids. It’s a heady time, and I tried to reflect that.

You can see a bigger one here.

Check out this sweet review on Forbes.com of Crazy Boat. The money quote:

“But Crazy Boat: The Curse of the Trash Vortex is different. It’s witty, weird and compelling: It’s like Farmville if you could grow peyote.”

Game, set, and match.

I’m very very proud to finally announce the launch of the secret project I was being coy about for so long: the official launch of the social Facebook game Crazyboat that I was the art and narrative director of.

From the press release:

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It is the near future and the Pacific Trash Vortex has reached critical mass.  A new age of sea entrepreneurship has arisen. Take your rusty rig and explore a changed Pacific Ocean…

ECHO TEAM is proud to present the official launch of the new social game, CRAZYBOAT. CRAZYBOAT aims to use the Facebook platform for its true strengths: the representation and hosting of existing social dynamics and groups in the rich game world. CRAZYBOAT uses Facebook profile data to give players in-game bonuses for their real-world skills and strengths. In addition, in a first for Facebook games, players share their adventures with groups of up to four – and what happens to one affects all four.

ECHO TEAM has also called upon some of the greatest mid-century American action serials to make a game that both harkens back to the adventures of yore and puts a new face on the idea of exploration, with an emphasis on the environmental impact of what reckless exploration means to the planet at large.

ECHO TEAM has drawn on years of game and narrative experience to make a story that feels more socially immersive than most Facebook games. By breaking down the barriers between the real world and users’ social gaming experience, CRAZYBOAT is in line with the ultimate direction of current game design – the integration of the real world and the virtual world. With real people and their data as playable avatars, CRAZYBOAT is a step in that heady new direction. ECHO TEAM views what they present to you today as a proposal of sort. A demo of what is possible.

Download a PDF of what CRAZYBOAT is all about here.

Then, take a quick tour and check the game out.

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On a more personal level, I think I did some great artwork for the promo side of it. Check out the posters and videos we made!

Tell your friends!

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.

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!

I’m super jazzed to announce that I just got word that I’ll be co-hosting a panel at South by Southwest this year, with Tim Lillis, from Make Magazine. Indirect Collaboration: Collective Creativity on the Web will be a panel discussing the potential of creative people and their audience coming together to create work that is maybe stronger, or at least more interesting, than either creator-directed or audience-directed work alone. I owe everyone a lot of thanks for your votes and support! See you in Austin!

I’m very excited to announce that I’ve been invited to participate in the “Landscapes of Quarantine” salon, cohosted by BLDGBLOG and Edible Geography. From the description:

“…an eight-week, intensive, independent design studio to be hosted this autumn in New York City; its brief is to create original and thought-provoking design projects that explore the spatial implications of quarantine. The results of the studio will then be the subject of an exhibition at Storefront for Art and Architecture in spring 2010.”

Of the many things I love about Geoff Manaugh’s BLDGBLOG, his healthy respect for intellectualized science-fiction is at the top of the list. Too often disregarded as nerd-stuff by the low culture and child’s play by the high-brows, (though it’s neither,) science fiction is exactly what we will be examining in this workshop – what the future will bring to us from prevalent current trends, and how we will adapt. I can’t think of anything less akin to child’s play. But okay, maybe it’s a little nerdy.

The list of participants is both amazing and a little intimidating: I hope I can keep up! I look forward to seeing what we all come up with, and thanks tons to Geoff for the invite.

However, not having a completely and totally dissected political view was a boon to me in at least one regard: I was able to see the broad swath of the media narrative in much cleaner sense (er…not “cleaner” in the Joe Biden way.) As with any long, involved subject, being close to it sometimes allows the serrated edges to get in the way, and you lose track of the general direction. And the direction I saw was pretty obvious.

Let me state for the record, for whatever it’s worth, that I’m a Barack Obama supporter: but I found it fascinating how the media turned off Clinton’s chances like a light switch. For all intents and purposes, Hillary’s chances pretty much tanked in early March: even after Pennsylvania, the math just wasn’t there for her. The media allowed the horse race to play out because it was good news filler for the 24-hour stations and blog heads, and because, well, that’s the way the nominating process works. But something weird happened after North Carolina and Indiana. They just sort of…shut off the switch. Even after Obama took a drubbing in W. Virginia, the NYTimes gave it a blurb below the fold at the bottom of the page: no picture, even.

This isn’t a political blog, and I’m not to about blame vast media conspiracy for anything for than following the dog the richest smelling shit. But the fact that it took a bit of distance for me to see the full scope of a media arc was informative, and it began me thinking on a subject that dominates a lot of my mind: who is the taste maker, and where does the influence come from?

Narrative arc, be it for someone’s career, political fortunes, or a cause, is a fickle and powerful tool, and is often times disturbingly close to innuendo, rumor, and hearsay. Going green is cool. Bill Clinton ruined his political fortunes. Lindsey Lohan is a drunk, Gary Busey is insane, George Clooney is a cool guy. The Iraq War was the right thing to do until about 2005, and now it was totally the wrong thing to do.
The conventional wisdom, and it’s accompanying narrative arc, confuses and titillates me, because it seems such a ridiculous and arbitrary thing, that if harnessed, results in awesome power and riches; I ‘spose it’s kind of like the Cool Stock Market. The Tao Jones. Heh.

The tastemakers these days, much to the MSM’s chargin, now lie firmly in the blogs and netroots, and for that, I’m glad: as someone who’s tasted the brief power of a few BoingBoing links, I can attest to the new market’s force. I’m not a political expert, and as I said, I didn’t follow the web rumble up to the moment that the MSM turned out the light’s on Hillary’s campaign. But I wonder: what happens when the two don’t work in concert?

This gets back to a more germane concept in regards this blog’s theme, which is design and art and cartoons and everything in between, and wonder out loud whether there is a push or pull in design and identity, and how that works: does a preconceived notion of Obama as winner cause photographers to photograph him more heroically? Does the prevalence of zombie movies influence our scares about viral diseases, or do the disease scares cause the movies popularity? It’s all a very tricky and interconnected labirynth of influence and confusion that I’m not about to pin down definitively. I don’t pretend to have the answers. But it sure has been rattling around in brain a lot.

However, not having a completely and totally dissected political view was a boon to me in at least one regard: I was able to see the broad swath of the media narrative in much cleaner sense (er…not “cleaner” in the Joe Biden way.) As with any long, involved subject, being close to it sometimes allows the serrated edges to get in the way, and you lose track of the general direction. And the direction I saw was pretty obvious.

Let me state for the record, for whatever it’s worth, that I’m a Barack Obama supporter: but I found it fascinating how the media turned off Clinton’s chances like a light switch. For all intents and purposes, Hillary’s chances pretty much tanked in early March: even after Pennsylvania, the math just wasn’t there for her. The media allowed the horse race to play out because it was good news filler for the 24-hour stations and blog heads, and because, well, that’s the way the nominating process works. But something weird happened after North Carolina and Indiana. They just sort of…shut off the switch. Even after Obama took a drubbing in W. Virginia, the NYTimes gave it a blurb below the fold at the bottom of the page: no picture, even.

This isn’t a political blog, and I’m not to about blame vast media conspiracy for anything for than following the dog the richest smelling shit. But the fact that it took a bit of distance for me to see the full scope of a media arc was informative, and it began me thinking on a subject that dominates a lot of my mind: who is the taste maker, and where does the influence come from?

Narrative arc, be it for someone’s career, political fortunes, or a cause, is a fickle and powerful tool, and is often times disturbingly close to innuendo, rumor, and hearsay. Going green is cool. Bill Clinton ruined his political fortunes. Lindsey Lohan is a drunk, Gary Busey is insane, George Clooney is a cool guy. The Iraq War was the right thing to do until about 2005, and now it was totally the wrong thing to do.
The conventional wisdom, and it’s accompanying narrative arc, confuses and titillates me, because it seems such a ridiculous and arbitrary thing, that if harnessed, results in awesome power and riches; I ‘spose it’s kind of like the Cool Stock Market. The Tao Jones. Heh.

The tastemakers these days, much to the MSM’s chargin, now lie firmly in the blogs and netroots, and for that, I’m glad: as someone who’s tasted the brief power of a few BoingBoing links, I can attest to the new market’s force. I’m not a political expert, and as I said, I didn’t follow the web rumble up to the moment that the MSM turned out the light’s on Hillary’s campaign. But I wonder: what happens when the two don’t work in concert?

This gets back to a more germane concept in regards this blog’s theme, which is design and art and cartoons and everything in between, and wonder out loud whether there is a push or pull in design and identity, and how that works: does a preconceived notion of Obama as winner cause photographers to photograph him more heroically? Does the prevalence of zombie movies influence our scares about viral diseases, or do the disease scares cause the movies popularity? It’s all a very tricky and interconnected labirynth of influence and confusion that I’m not about to pin down definitively. I don’t pretend to have the answers. But it sure has been rattling around in brain a lot.