1582 - One Fine Day In Gotham

For some time, I've been doing extensive research on Superman.  This started with my bespoke globe of the planet Krypton (for example, please click here to see JSVB Post #1544), but now I have a broader interest in The Man Of Steel.

The weather has been great lately, so I decided to leave Metropolis and journey across the Bay to sprawling Gotham.  Normally it's stormy and dour over there,  but sometimes you can luck into a crisp, brilliant fall day before thick grey snow chokes the city.  

I took this photo of a statue of Batman brooding atop a cenotaph, which I thought was a little strange since I don't recall ever reading that their City Hall ever laid out funds for such a thing.  I turned away to mention this to my wife, but when I looked back the statue was gone.   

1552 - "Two Worlds"

The finished bespoke globes of the fictional planets Mongo (Flash Gordon) and Krypton (Superman).  It's time for me to pack these up and send them to my clients.

Generally, I'm not sentimental over my own artwork.  A lot of it has been archived digitally so I can revisit it at any time.  However, there's only one Mongo and one Krypton.

 I'm wistful about sending them away.

They are flawed, since they are prototypes. I learned a fair bit about globe-making, though.  And while for a few days I catalogued my errors and self-made promises to do better next time, I ended up simply staring at these worlds and wondering at the adventures a brave pioneer would experience soaring their many-coloured skies, swimming the depths of their cobalt oceans, or setting foot on their alien soils.  

The volcanoes of Kira smoulder.  The forests of Lurvan beckon.  The pull of the Magnetic Mountain is real!  (No, it isn't.  I decided against putting a magnet in Magnetic Mountain.  But it does look like that, so incredibly corny, but that's what I get for using a comic book as an atlas, alas.) 

Strange to me, the feeling that these pieces are not just the result of my artistic intent and skill, but that these planets really do echo the supersonic exploits of those great Golden Age superhero comics.   What great fun it was to manufacture these token worlds!  At night, I look up into the galaxy and gaze in giddy wonderment.  Which blazing stars possess these worlds for real?

 

1549 - Bespoke Worlds: Krypton IV

Krypton, labelled.  Just as with Mongo, applying the labels was a huge pain in the rear end.  At least I learned my lesson about using dark pigments. 

The Dandahu Ocean was crossed by Superman's long-lost ancestor Val-El who voyaged from the ancient city of Erkol to discover the new world continent of Lurvan via the Red Ocean.  Along the way, Val-El encountered Vathlo, the island of highly-advanced black citizens of Krypton. 

The final step is to varnish the globe, which will make the whole world glossy and vivid, and also balance out the not-so-shiny areas.

1545 - Continental Context

So this is basically just a text file, but it took a long time to produce so I decided to use it as an entry for JSVB.  These are all of the labels for the fictional geographic names on the globes I made for both the planets Mongo (top) and Krypton (bottom).  

The names were culled from various stories and hand-drawn onto maps for comic books.  A few of the names are simply exotic and alien.  Some of the names are similar to names of places on Earth, but with different spellings.  After these come quite a number of names that are simply descriptive of the location they are attached to, like Fiery Desert and Glass Forest.  Either the writers grew tired of alien-like names, or else they wanted to keep things basic for easy comprehension.  

I began wondering how Earth landmarks would be named, if comic book writers were in charge of things (like they are now, at least in films and on television).  Mount Everest would be Giant Mountain.  The Mississippi could be Meander River.  The populated east coast of the United States has already been likened to Metropolis or Megacity One.  The Russian steppes?  Fro-Zen Plains.  The South American jungle?  Ver'Dant Forest.  Australia equals Island Land - I like that one.   

 

1544 - Bespoke Worlds: Krypton III

Since the Planet Krypton explodes in the very first panel of the first Superman comic, Superman himself remains ignorant of his own heritage.  As Superman comics mature, they do add some backstory for The Man Of Steel.  Literal bits and pieces of Superman's home planet reach Earth, providing plot developments and exotic Kryptonian characters, some who are villains and some who remain allies.  

In September of 1981, DC Comics published The Krypton Chronicles, which was an attempt to codify history of life on Krypton from the point of view of Superman and his ancestors.  From a very practical standpoint, The Krypton Chronicles represented a change in DC's comic book format, adding a single sheet of paper into the comics, which when folded allowed for two more pages of artwork and two more pages of advertising as well as the excuse to bump up the retail price of the book by 20%.  Since a page of artwork takes around a day to produce, the deadlines for the comic books became that much tighter.  At least in the Krypton Chronicles, the art for the two new pages was as cheap as anything I've ever seen, and must have been rushed at top speed to completion. 

Still, what readers got was interesting lore, even if it was somewhat unformed: brief glossary terms for the Kryptonian language and a sketch map of the planet drawn by Albert de Guzman.  This map seems to have been the basis for other maps and comics that followed.

The Krypton Chronicles are available to read online, which helped me greatly in my research for this globe.  The story is a batty mix of science, history, mysticism, and prophecy that seem to borrow heavily from Christian Bible stories and Robert Louis Stevenson.  The de Guzman map shows all of the places mentioned in the Chronicles.  However, the map itself is drawn very simply onto two circles to represent the planetary hemispheres.  As a result of this haphazard projection, much is made later on of the split between Krypton's Old World and New World hemispheres.  

The progress of the El family, (Jor-El, Kal-El, Val-El, etc.) charts the progress of Superman's ancestors as they discovered new scientific and theological advances in the Old World. They migrated to the New World to populate an unexplored continent after a catastrophe appears to destroy the old one.  Since the El family are among the most honorable of the Kryptonians, several splinter colonies are created by dissidents who do not agree with the Els, including The Island Of Thieves which split from the main expedition.  Those who reject Kryptonian  orthodoxy tend to remain on the Old World hemisphere while the right-thinkers congregate on the New World hemisphere as close to Kryptonopolis as possible.  Renegades who no longer serve the plotline are doomed to explore the Valley of Juru, where no-one who visits it escapes with their lives.  

Creating a globe eliminates the hemispheric divide of the de Guzman map.  Correcting the faults in the map projection shows that the Old World and New World continents are not far apart, and that Val-El's eastward journey across the Dandahu Ocean would have been much shorter had he not detoured to see Vathlo, the island sanctuary of Krypton's highly-advanced black people, and then subesquently sailed into a vortex storm.  

As far as my artwork is concerned, I've coloured in the oceans and the continents.  In the picture above, you can see the Red Ocean.  To the east are the large mountain ranges: The Jewel Mountains, the Gold Volcano, and the strikingly obvious Magnetic Mountain.  I was tempted to put a real magnet in there.   

1543 - Bespoke Worlds: Krypton II

The Planet Krypton I think has more water than the Planet Mongo.  It's a wetter world.  Practically speaking, Krypton is very much wetter.  Since I've taken care to put extra gesso on this globe, it also takes longer to dry and for it to be workable.  

Learning from the lessons of Mongo, I've decided to make Krypton's colour palette considerably lighter.  This will make for a more cartoony-loking world, which will please my client.  However the lighter pigments I use cover the white gesso poorly, so I have to use more coats of paint, and you guessed it: drying time is thus multiplied.  Lots of opportunity to snap pictures of my progress while I wait for the next layer of paint to dry - this is what you see in today's JSVB post.

Why is there red paint in my palette while the water is all blue?  Because Krypton has a Red Ocean.  Krypton and Mongo both have features that are a lot like Earth, but are somehow dialled up a bit to make them more exotic or romantic.  We have a Red Sea, the Kryptonians had a Red Ocean.  The Red Ocean is on the New World Continent Lurvan, on the far side of the planet, whereas we are looking at the Old World Continent, Urrika. The water in Urrika is The Boiling Ocean, which as far as I know is the only inland body of water on either Krypton or Mongo.  Not many lakeshore condos on either world. 

1538 - Bespoke Worlds: Mongo IV

Pushing hard, I filled in most of the continental detail in one day.  I feel I still have to blend and balance the colours a little before I add the final details.  Also, I had a good colour for the ocean but now I am unsatisfied with it, so I will work on that was well.  

From here you can see the blood red westerly coastline of Mingo Bay, future home of Mingo City, nestled between the two mountain ranges.  To the east are the lands ruled by Flash Gordon, the city of Syk and the endless tunnels of the cave badlands.  To the far east, you can see the dreaded Fire Plains and the glow of Mongo's fearsome volcanoes.  




 

1535 - Colour-gram For Mongo

I made a very basic colour palette for the Planet Mongo. I'll use this as a guide for painting the globe. 

 

1533 - Cities On The Edge Of My Finger

I had some grandiose ideas for manufacturing The City Of The Hawkmen, which is a flying city on the fictional Planet Mongo of the Flash Gordon universe.  (Argo City on the planet Krypton also flies).  

I had some glitter buttons that I thought I could shape into a miniature domed city.  Unfortunately, the buttons were far too big and my efforts to whittle them down just made them ugly.  If you peer inside the largest "dome", you can maybe see my efforts to create buildings inside.   I thought of injecting a little pigment to make the buildings stand out. I stopped myself, since the button was too big anyways.

I'm settling on using a simple pinhead to depict the glory of the City Of The Hawkmen. i doubt Brian Blessed would approve if the size of Vultan's kingdom, but then does Brian Blessed have a bespoke globe of the Planet Mongo?

1527 - Jor-El's Final Day On The Job

See, this is funny if you realize that Jor-El, Superman's father, is giving the weather report for the planet Krypton just before it falls into its own sun.  Jor-El would totally do this since he's the head of the Krypton Science Council, the body that governs the entire planet.  He was also the only one to warn against the wobbly orbit of Krypton, at least in some of the comic books anyways.  In desperation, he rebels by sending his son Kal-El on a spaceship to Earth just before Krypton is incinerated, and Kal-El becomes Superman.  

Funny!

When I drew yesterday's illustration of the black side of Krypton being destroyed along with the white, I had intended Samu-El Jack-Zon (name courtesy of my friend Earl who is wise in all things related to The Man Of Steel) to be watching television, and Marlon Brando with his utterly dispassionate performance from the 1979 Superman movie would signal the end of civilization.  I couldn't figure out how to stage that, so I split up the two ideas.  I just worked this one out as a sort of sketch since ironically it's so hot out right now I'm thinking our own planet is falling into the sun.  I am sleeping days and working nights, or trying to. 




 

1526 - Krypton's Blackest Day

My friend Earl and I had running a commentary about the fate of the planet Krypton, Superman's birthplace.  Going by the maps of the planet intended for Silver Age comic books, Kryptonian society was split between "Old World" and "New World" populations.  Not only did the Old World and New World thinkers remain philosophically distant, each civilization remained physically distant: each society occupied separate continents on opposite hemispheres of the planet.  Tucked into the corner of the Old World Hemisphere was Vathlo Island, which no word of a lie was a reserve intended for all of Krypton's black people.  At least the mapmakers conceded that Vathlo Islanders were considered to be highly advanced.  

All of this information came as an uncomfortable surprise to my friend Earl, who is the biggest fan of Superman.  Earl surveyed his massive collection of Superman comics and found very few references to any black citizens of Krypton, let alone any who would have been powerful enough to influence cut-throat Kryptonian politics.  Now Earl is suffering from white guilt, and given the starkness of the Krypton map I agree with him. 

I can't say if Superman's artists were being racist.  Likely, they were used to dealing with a roster of white characters that had been established for decades, and simply tacked on Vathlo as a means of being complete with their maps.  Comic books of that age were entertaining, but not particularly enlightened.  The focus would be on cranking out as many original stories as possible while remaining on time and under budget for publication. 

Looking at Vathlo Island another way, Kryptonian civilization would have become so advanced that heterogeny - a mixing of cultures - would give way to a reverse feudalism, in that people would naturally cluster together in mutually-supportive groups of super-scholars.  Krypton's science and politics seems to be composed of powerful yet isolated special-interest groups.  

Kryptonian  technology is well advanced from ours.  In their ancient past, Kryptonians were spacefaring explorers, discovering and colonizing distant planets.  Deciding that imperialism demeaned their values, and after the inadvertent obliteration of their moon, the people of Krypton decided to remain exclusively on their home world.  Still, it should be no problem for any citizen to travel from any of the major cities on the New World Continent to the wilderness of the Old Continent in moments.  Despite the physical distance between them, the New World and Old World peoples should have been able to communicate easily.  I figure they chose not to, however.

Since Vathlo was so advanced, they could have provided early warnings that Kryptonian industry was out of control, that the core of their planet was poisoned, and that an erratic orbit would vault Krypton into the sun.  Superman's father, Jor-El, was a leading member of the Science Council on the New World side of the planet, and nobody listened to him either.  All that would be left for the people of Vathlo would be to ride Krypton into oblivion.  Even then, it seems to have been the New World side of the planet that led the way into the afterlife.  

1523 - Sim Bleak House

Cleaning out his office space, my friend Earl discovered a twenty-year-old disk labelled "Bleak House" with texture files that I had made for customized characters in the old Sims videogame.  Each picture is a flat image designed to wrap around a specific three dimensional digital model.  He sent me this file out of nostalgia. 

The Sims was a virtual dollhouse that allowed you to create or re-create people and move them into buildings of your own design.  In his younger days, Earl lived in a ramshackle old house with his room-mates and friends Ron, Allan, and Carrie.  Earl nicknamed the place "The Bleak House Of Blahs."

One rule of The Sims was that efficiency made the little virtual people happy and inefficiency did not, since their time was very limited and travel across the house to get from the bedroom to the bathroom, and then across the house again to get to the kitchen and so on, would cause them to squander their day's opportunities.  One of the rules of the Bleak House was that you had to traverse the house across multiple floors to get to a bathroom, or around several corners to get into the kitchen, and that the bedrooms were set out as far away from each other as possible. It even had a wildly improbable "Pittsburgh Potty", a freestanding toilet at the end of an open hallway - upstairs. The place had an interesting architecture, that was for sure.  And it was incredibly inefficient, so it had earned the name "Bleak House" by makings its residents miserable with having to navigate its corkscrew corridors and dead-end lavatories.  

Naturally, making a virtual Bleak House for myself was a priority, and I spent many dishonourable hours  running Sim Earl, Allan, Ron, and Carrie through the wringer of destiny.  As karma would have it, I lost all of my files maybe twenty years ago.  And then the other day Earl rediscovered them, hooray!

Sim Earl wore jeans and a Star Trek shirt.  His face was frozen with angry perplexity.  Sim Ron had immaculate groomed hair and never removed his cherry-red supermarket bag-boy uniform.  Blond Sim Allan was forever immortalized wearing nothing but a laundry-greyed towel and fuzzy maroon slippers (one day I had to run an errand out to the Bleak House, and Allan answered the door in this get-up: he would have had to run down switchbacked stairs, sail across the kitchen, dodge past the phone cubby, and accelerate along the main hallway and through the portico to get to the door to see me.)  At least back then he had his hair.  Beautiful Sim Carrie was a strong fitness enthusiast.  In fact, she was simply strong.  I elected to have her wear her electric pink and blue leotard.

As a bonus, we have mildly ambitious me in my 1990's suit, and my svelte wife in tights and a Mickey Mouse shirt.  Why my wife and I have no heads, I am not sure and I don't recall.  

The Sims (and their original character templates) are the intellectual property of Electronic Arts, while Star Trek imagery belongs to Paramount Pictures (a subsidiary of Viacom) and Mickey Mouse of course is beholden to Disney. 

1513 - "Happy Birthday To Me! (9)"

Well, another year, another birthday, another present to myself.  This time it's the sexy Lieutenant Marla McGivers from the Star Trek Episode "Space Seed".

Over the past couple of years for personal reasons that are not easy to explain on JSVB, I've developed a strong attachment to this character.  Certainly it's enough for me to try for a well-rendered portrait.

Marla is peculiar.  She only appeared in the one episode, and her treachery nearly kills the entire crew of the Enterprise.  Or perhaps a better way to phrase her actions would be as misplaced loyalty.  

The Star Trek Guide points out that although she is lieutenant by rank, her uniform doesn't have that stripe.  Her duty on the Enterprise was as the ship's historian: she could interpret what the ship found on her five year voyage of discovery in terms of Earth history, which seems to me a remarkably useless skill given the wide variety of strange and alien worlds Captain Kirk discovers.  Mind you, kirk also encounters a few "parallel Earths", but Marla McGivers is never seen to help with those.

She does find critical use when the Enterprise locates the marooned spacecraft Botany Bay: it's a sleeper ship sent from Earth in our time, and it's loaded with genetically-enhanced supercriminals entombed in hypersleep.  Through Marla, we come to understand how Khan Singh and his team came to be jettisoned into deep space.  She sides with Khan in a mutiny that nearly costs the lives of all the crew.  

Marla McGivers is one of the first crewmembers on the Enterprise shown to actively pursue the arts.  She seems to prefer painting rather than doing her regular duties, something I appreciate.   

1477 - The Trio Of Sierra Hoth

Previous JSVB Post, I mentioned how my wife was becoming a champ at crochet.  Following the Star Wars pattern, she put together these three amazing Imperial Stormtroopers.  With snow on the ground, I made my own Hoth and home for them. 

 

1472 - Godzilla! Godzilla Lives!

I had my Godzilla print made up and framed.  My wife holds it for me to take the picture.

I rushed to get the image to the printer, since it takes maybe a week to get it back.  "I'll have it done in an hour," the printer says.  There are 320 shopping days until Christmas, but for my printer holiday spirit seems to be all year 'round!   

1465 - "Life Is Like A Box Of Tribbles"

Please click to embiggen.

Fan artwork for television shows, especially ones that mix together different franchises, are always so uncool to me.  Unless I'm the one making the artwork, then it's brilliant.  

With that out of the way, this month I find myself in the happy confluence between two of my all-time favourite shows, Star Trek and The X Files.  The context of each program excites my imagination: both are smart, inclusive shows with a lot of nostalgic appeal.  

Emphasis on "nostalgic".  Certainly aware that there is a large built-in audience who has watched decades of this programming, television producers also seek to give the viewers something new.  The trouble is most everything new has already been done, and Star Trek and the X-Files have attempted to pursue new frontiers while remaining tethered to the concept that launched them in the first place. 

Star Trek: Discovery has been entertaining, but it's not the Star Trek I want to see.  Violent, often gory, definitely not a show I choose to share with my family, Discovery charts a dark, mean-spirited and morally ambiguous course through yet another interminable space war.  The production values are far above any other Star Trek show, the look and sound of the series makes all the older Trek shows seem like stage plays by comparison.  The acting is normally sharp and the writing makes frequent smart call-backs to various interesting and surprising story beats, so that later episodes for the most part seem to stand on the careful foundation laid down by earlier adventures.  But: it's not Star Trek to me.  It's some kind of militaristic soap opera where the characters find themselves trapped in relationship minefields as often as they are ensnared by science fiction munitions.  And the characters themselves for me range from annoying to loathesome almost without exception.  Yes, it's amusing to see what will happen next to the Discovery, but I also feel that Star Trek would be better off if the ship remained lost in space.  I want to see a Star Trek episode where the ship and crew genuinely trek.  I'm tired of fictional war stories, especially when I know the outcome. 

The X-Files is the opposite side of the coin.  Built into the X-Files is the greatest character duo on television since Kirk and Spock.  Again, yes I find the new X-Files episodes entertaining, but it's not the  X-Files I want to see.  Confusing, indirect, the X-Files has become a show impossible to share with anyone outside of the fan base.  Agents Mulder and Scully have become ciphers of themselves, having faced the same perils over and over again so many times.  The dangers are all iterative but hew to the same truth: the world is doomed, alien intelligence may or may not save us, and only Mulder and/or Scully have the key to unlock all of the clues, if only Mulder and/or Scully were not mortally wounded in hospital and/or being protected by extra-terrestrial shadow agencies.  Knowing that the narrative is hopelessly bound in knots, individual episodes often become flippant or experimental, sometimes with memorable results, sometimes not.  Then there are episodes devoted entirely to exposition, forty-four solid minutes of Mulder and Scully telling the audience what has happened to date.  X-Files hasn't really changed in that regard, not since the movies were released.  

So, I find myself wishing for Star Trek: Discovery's production values and writing, with the strong morality and conviction of Mulder and Scully.  I guess that's why I gave today's JSVB artwork the flavour from Forrest Gump:  sophisticated computerized visuals coupled with geek nostalgia.  The trouble is Forrest Gump for all of its virtues just isn't all that good of a film, at least not to me.  There is a reason why sentimentality and high-tech storytelling don't mix: the harder you work the recreate the past the more you squander your future.  

I certainly don't mind having good choices for entertainment on television, but I'm also ready to leave some of the shows I've loved in the past behind.  I want to be a patron and not a demographic. 

1463 - A Box Of Tribbles Line Art

Captain Lorca keeps two things on his office desk at all times: a bowl of fortune cookies and a tribble.  Riddle me this: I understand why the fortune cookies don't eat the tribble, but how come the tribble never eats the fortune cookies?  

1437 - "Ire Robot"

I discovered this angry robot drawing amongst my archives.  It's on ACME-punched paper, so I sort of recall drawing a bunch of these for animation.  The robot is definitely my own design, I remember going through a couple of dozen tries before it looked right.  Note the diesel engine backpack it uses for its power source.  There's gaps in the artwork since that's where the animation likely was supposed to go.  I recall that the hole rendered in the robot's side was because it had been shot in some automated war, and now that it was missing some of its critical internal components it had gone mad with rage.  

I think I may have drawn this somewhere around the year 2000 or so.  It's not new artwork, although if I need another angry robot I might use this one again.

 

1407 - "Science Bong 600"

   Among many of the things I had wanted to post to JSVB but didn't in time were some entries on the solar eclipse of August 21st, 2017.  Many of my friends went to great lengths to travel to the United States to view the full eclipse.  My wife and I had the day off, but we stayed home and watched the partial eclipse which maybe is less exciting and not much to post about. 

   Not willing to shell out money for proper eclipse glasses, but also unwilling to sear our retinas, we chose to view the eclipse indirectly.  The hole made by a pin through a piece of paper is a sufficient lens to project an image of the sun onto a screen.  This much I recalled from grade school science; I was half my height and a quarter of my current weight the last time there was a significant eclipse of the sun where I lived.  

 

   My wife found the materials we needed to make a pinhole lens viewer.  She took an old packing tube and poked a hole at one end and covered the other with paper.  She carved a viewing port in the side.  I christened it the Science Bong 600.  When you line the Bong up with the sun, you see the solar image image in the viewport. The lunar occlusion changes the apparent shape of the sun projected on the screen as you can see above.

   In retrospect, I should have painted and decorated the Science Bong 600, but all of the weather forecasts for the day called for clouds and rain.  My wife quickly built the Bong prototype when it turned out the forecasts were all wrong and we were blessed with a clear view.  

1384 - "BBQ'an"

I really enjoyed the Logan (2017) movie, enough to fashion myself into this tribute poster.  Well, mostly I did this because my barber was out of town on vacation for a month, and my hair and beard grew out long.  I am powerfully loyal to my barber (see JSVB Posts #343 by clicking here.), so I knew it was better for me to wait than find a replacement barber. With long scruffy hair,  I knew if I pranced around in my suit I could re-create the look of Logan.

The hands are a problem, though, since I don't have adamantium claws.  I do have barbecue utensils, though, so close enough.  The cruel irony is that the weather has been cold and gloomy for the past week, and something my wife and I ate has been upsetting our stomachs, so no BBQ.  Quel bummer.