More WPA-inspired art for a still-under-wraps interactive project I’ve been hired for. I’ll have more at the end of October, but for now, here’s something to wet your whistle.
Today, my good buddy and esteemed illustrative colleague Alex Eben Meyer got hit with the reality stick of what it’s like to be an illustrator in new media today.
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.
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.
One of the great ironies of influence is that one can’t necessarily pull apart what has caused you to be what you are, artistically, without removing a few of the key bolts that keep the whole structure in place. Asked to remove a specific influence from an artist’s work is a massive game of Jenga, and just because the artist is rooted in their field by the various flotsam and jetsam that they have been exposed to, it often doesn’t make the artist the sum of the parts. It is thus that, when my good friend Matt Rebholz approached me and offered for me to spend to a day make a silkscreen print with the infinitely generous and patient Greg Nanny of Drive-By Press that I jumped at the chance and told him to his shock I had never done one before.
Clearly, my work is heavily influenced by the analog printing process; my parents, founding members of the Graphic Workshop at Mass. Art, were old hands at the process, and our household was filled to the brim with incredible prints, from lithography to woodcuts to silkscreens. However, I also happened to come of age when the first Apple computer, the Mac IISE, entered into our house. Photoshop 1.0 was a revolution, and I totally taken with it. And so it went, me recreating the influences of my life (analog) with the tools of the future (digital). And last Thursday was my first dip back into the cool waters of influence. It feels good.
The above print is the first of a series of prints I’m planning on creating, based upon the lesser known tales of Phaedrus (Aesop), as translated by the amazing, amusingly old-school Christopher Smart . If you can’t read it, the text is below:
The Dog, Treasure, and Vulture.
A Dog, while scratching up the ground,
‘Mongst human bones a treasure found;
But as his sacrilege was great,
To covet riches was his fate,
And punishment of his offence;
He therefore never stirr’d from thence,
But both in hunger and the cold,
With anxious care he watch’d the gold,
Till wholly negligent of food,
A ling’ring death at length ensued.
Upon his corse a Vulture stood,
And thus descanted :-” It is good,
O Dog, that there thou liest bereaved
Who in the highway wast conceived,
And on a scurvy dunghill bred,
Hadst royal riches in thy head.”
You can see a larger version of the print on my Flickr page. The few still remaining will go on sale soon. Stay tuned.
