1583 - Year Nine: JSVB In Review

Happy New Year! 

Looking at 2019, I'm deeply concerned.  Up until now, the year 2019 was appropriate for the opening title crawl of the original Blade Runner (1982) movie: the introduction to a deeply philosphical, yet horrifyingly violent futuristic dystopia of decay and sensuality.  Now that I see the real 2019, well, it's different from the movie version.  The nicest thing I can say about it is, "where's my flying car already?"

I've added a ninth column of artworks to my JSVB matrix.  Each column is a year, and each postage stamp is a post.  My output for 2018 was close to that of 2017, so in that regard JSVB holds steady.  The past few years have seen a decline in blogs, and JSVB is no different.  People aren't interested in online journals anymore.  Fortunately, JSVB isn't dependent on likes or user clicks.  It's here to make sure I keep generating artwork, and hopefully that art gets more advanced and enjoyable every year.

In that regard, I've made good progress.  Where 2017 was tentative, in 2018 I followed through with promises to push my artwork in new directions.  The results were positive.  However, the nature of my new projects made for long gaps in between many of my posts, which no doubt frustrated what regular followers I may have.  I've picked up some new clients who are buying my art, so I believe that my new work ethic is paying off, gradually.

Let's take a look at some of the pieces I think have pushed JSVB into new directions:

JSVB Post #1465  "Life Is Like A Box Of Tribbles, Mr. Mulder" - An essay on the happy coincidence of having reboots of two of my favourite television shows on at the same time, but also the pitfalls of nostalgia in commercialism.  The artwork turned out really well, though, a very sentimental watercolour rendition of science-fiction theme.

JSVB Post #1471  "One More Bite..." - A crowd-pleasing tribute to Godzilla!

JSVB Post #1500  "Enterprise Fantasia" - More Star Trek.  The illustration turned out nicely, but what really worked was pushing Photoshop blend layers to their maximum.  The effect is subtle in this piece, and that's the idea: I used something digital and regimented like Photoshop to finally produce something that looks organic and flowing.

JSVB Post #1501  "Movin' To Alberta" - A simple photo with a fair amount of Photoshop.  Posting this spoof picture convinced social media that I really was moving to Alberta in my brand new Ford Expedition truck.  When I say social media, I don't mean the people I know, but rather the computer programs that run our social sites.  Right after posting this, I started getting ads for expensive vehicles, cowboy things to do in Alberta, and for products of a high quality not normally associated with my status as an artist.  Normally, I get shilled for dodgy weight-loss programs and cheap t-shirts with dumb sayings.  So, I learned this: it's good to fool Big Daddy Internet every once in a while.

JSVB Post #1513   "Happy Birthday To Me (9)" - Gosh, yet more Star Trek!?  Under the hood of this picture is a new workflow which has helped me considerably with my projects in 2018.  Painting this picture gave me a lot of confidence to push my work in new directions.

JSVB Post #1519  "G&G 13: Formula De" - A large-format poster with a very heavy emphasis on vibrant colours.

JSVB Post #1552   "Two Worlds"  - A dramatic break from my usual work, I fabricated and sculpted two fictional planets, Mongo from Flash Gordon, and Superman's home world Krypton.  These took a lot of work to complete and they have many flaws, but am I ever proud of how they turned out!  I think this was my favourite project from 2018!  

I learned a lot about craftsmanship in 2018.  People have become more interested in my art, and I am trying to cultivate a clientele.  Art hasn't made me rich so far, but it has started to pay a couple of bills for me.  Better still, the lessons I have learned, the successes and mistakes (brown hockey pucks, for goodness' sake!) have given me a foundation to begin some large projects in 2019.  I look forward to those challenges!  

Thank you for paying attention to JSVB in 2018 and in years previous.  I am especially grateful for those who have chosen to purchase my art!  I hope that people share my excitement for the artwork that I plan to produce in 2019!  

Respectfully,

JEFF SHYLUK

 

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.  

1467 - Archangel Gabriel XII

On values:

I have a small collected library of books on the history of iconography.  Most of it is Russian but I also have some references on Italian orthodoxy, which just barely predates the birth of the Renaissance.   

Really good up-to-date resource books cost a fortune and have to be imported.  Iconography is not well-appreciated in secular markets like North America.   The research into older icons is difficult, since competing politics have over time effectively turned iconography into an illicit underground activity: for hundreds of years in some countries owning an icon could be a death sentence.  Lay scholars of iconography don't receive compensation to cover the amount of investigation that needs to be done; generally the top researchers belong to the Church.  

The books I have were mostly donated to me by my relatives who in turn bought them either from library sales or goodwill stores.  The library sells them for a dollar apiece simply to avoid having to throw them away.  The books from goodwill stores have inscriptions on the flyleaf such as "Happy Mother's Day, from your family 1985, We Love You."  

At some point, these books would have set the purchaser back a fair sum.  Given time and neglect on a bookshelf, they become worth less than the paper they were printed on.  By luck or providence, a book or two finds its way to me.  Honestly, I don't read them very much since the museum entries on icons are powerfully obscure and dry reading for the most part, or else wildly speculative to the point of describing the paranormal.  

An entry on Cimabue, the great Italian master who pre-figured the Renaissance, gave me insight on how to finally render the wings on my icon of Gabriel. I am very far from mastering that technique, but at least I got through how to get feathers onto the wings.  From Father Reynaldo SJ documenting countless dusty crawls through the sombre attics and cellars of ruined sanctuaries, to the publisher lavishly binding full colour images in heavy tomes that are presented to scholarly art department libraries around the world, to a bemused but reasonably devout housewife making ends meet through the Reagan/Gorbachev era, to the bottom of a millennial goodwill book bin, and then to me so I can figure out how to paint feathers, this book is the connection between my own work and that of the grand master employed in his sun-saturated Florentine workshop nearly eight hundred years ago.  

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. 

1452 - Year Eight: JSVB In Review

January 1st was the starting date for JSVB, back in 2010.  Now I have eight years' worth of material to peruse.  Each year in the matrix above is represented by a column of coloured squares and bits.  Each square is a JSVB post.  Last year, Google changed their archive format, so the rightmost two columns look a little different from the others.  

2017 represents the very first year I've ever managed to produce more than the year before, by a margin of four posts.  I'll admit: 2017 was a struggle.  My health and stress level aren't great, but then I'm no different from everyone else in that department.  There were some wide gaps where I didn't post, as JSVB has dropped a little as a priority for me.  

Even so, I managed to create some pieces that I am proud of that people liked.  Here are some favourites of mine from the past year:

JSVB Post #1338  Of Chimps And Villains - A nice little bit of cartoon foolishness, inspired by my friend Earl.

JSVB Post #1357  Vote For Jeff - 2017 was heavy with April Fool's pranks.  One was a political flyer that does everything wrong in a political flyer: a grinning picture in a suit, a six-point plan (should be five) of platitudes and empty phrases, meaningless illustrations and an endorsement that was not legitimate.  Also awful fonts like Comic Sans and Papyrus.  The final sin: a picture of a check mark in a voting box.  These are the things that candidates do when they don't know they will lose.  Still, I do have the promise of two votes I can count on, and not from my wife, friends, or family - just my vote and a guy in Winnipeg.  Others have responded to my political ambitions by sending me the end bit of Apocalypse Now where Colonel Kurtz whispers  in agony: the horror... the horror...

JSVB Post #1362   Destroy Planet - A Photoshopped illustration with a hand-drawn Death that seems to capture the feeling of 2017.

 JSVB Post #1371   Mayor TV Podium People - I did a number of these small banners for my friend Greg Moore's Facebook page, advertising his MayorTV show.  Mayor Moore plans to retire in 2018.

JSVB Post #1379  The Girl With The Gerbera Daisy - This is my personal favourite from 2017.  It was something I saw in real life which I took the time to copy into my sketchbook and then rendered out as an illustration.  A really, really good illustration, that probably only I care for, but at least I know how good it is.  I nailed it! 

JSVB Post #1382  Happy Birthday To Me (8) - I like doing these Happy Birthday posts because I get to satisfy my own weird ideas.  This time, I accompanied James Bond/Maurice Binder imagery with Shirley Bassey style lyrics.  "Goldenass" (JSVB Post #1283) was a helpful early version of this artwork. 

JSVB Post #1384   BBQ'AN - I made myself into a tribute to the movie poster for Logan, which was an absolutely terrific show.  Photoshop made me look good. 

JSVB Post #1388 Crow With A Croissant - This has proved to be a favourite with JSVB viewers.

JSVB Post #1400  Sean Bruises His Shin - This was my blockbuster post for 2017, a wacky combination of Japanese woodcut art in the manner of master Hokusai melded with the Internet meme of my friend Sean bruising his shin while his cat watches.  And I even wrote a haiku to make the whole thing work.  

JSVB Post #1404   Illuminating Girl - I only had four JSVB posts in August, but this Art Nouveau themed line art carried the entire month.  This little illustration turned out amazingly well. 

JSVB had a large spike of viewers from January to June.  When I started to take time off from posting in Summer,  I squandered those viewers and my blog fell back down to its normal rate of a few hits per day.  Well, that's on me, of course.  I wish I had paid closer attention to JSVB in the hot months.  Now things are much slower, and I wonder at what new things will happen in 2018.  

I am grateful to the JSVB readers who purchased artwork, and I do enjoy having people follow my blog, as cranky and oddly-fashioned as it and I can be.   Let's look back on the past with wisdom and forward to the future with keen anticipation!  

Respectfully,
JEFF SHYLUK

1321 - Year Seven: JSVB In Review

JSVB is seven years old today!  It's time to post my progress and comment on my past year's work on this blog of mine.  

Likely you'll notice that this year's blog entries in the seventh column on the far right,  appear different from the others.  Google, with their traditional intent at this time of year to fix what is not broken, changed their archive format.  It's not such a terrible  improvement since the pictures are larger and the background isn't a searing white, but it does change the look of my matrix. 

I've mentioned in previous years on how I've been declining in my post count: you can see this by looking at the ratio of pictures to blank area on my matrix.  2016 is no different, there were wide valleys of disinclination between peaks of activity.  Sometimes, I just showed my final work rather than posting iterative saves over the course of a few days.  Sometimes I ignored my work.  There are a few unfinished pieces I wish I had completed.

Even so, I managed to pick up some more technique, proving that you can teach an old dog new tricks provided that you prod it enough.  I am better at Photoshop and using Bézier curves than ever before.  I believe I have improved my draftsmanship, and deeply inspired by my wife who has embraced crochet, I've started to become "crafty" by building physical art projects like a life-like foul-smelling Necronomicon and a Star Trek tricorder that doubles as a purse.  

So the craft pieces will be at the top of my list of favourites from JSVB 2016:

1. JSVB Post #1300  The Necronomicon Ex Mortis!  Despite the pretend evilness of my project and its notably horrible smell, it was a lot of fun to put together.  Of course, the Hallowe'en kids were too young to know anything about The Evil Dead, though.  "Look! They have a 'Facebook'!" one little girl exclaimed.  Precious!

2.  JSVB Post #1312  My wife and her friend went all-out to create the base for a realistic tricorder purse.  I had to use all my best tricks to make the detail on the tricorder look screen-authentic.  

3.  JSVB Post #1209  The pretty-close-to-finished icon of Our Lady On Throne.  I don't know why I don't bother to take pictures of my finished icons.  This one is hanging on the wall in my mother's bedroom. 

And here's a few of my other favourites:

4. JSVB Post #1208  The "X-Fools" post is memorable because it's a placeholder for an Ungood Art piece I chose to jettison (it was the right choice).  It also shows that I can handle Bézier curves.  Finally, I think it's better than anything in the execrable X Files Season 10. 

5.  JSVB Post #1234   My tribute to World Hamster Day and Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks" all rolled into one, this was a fun little project to recreate Hopper's iconic paintwork. 

6.  JSVB Post #1253   Although this one's a litte racy I'm a big fan of Judge Dredd, and I wanted to improve my ink and line work.   A similar post is Doc Ock's Suicide Squad, although this one was hard to draw since I am really not a fan of that work at all.  Even so, it turned out to be one of my most popular JSVB posts among readers: JSVB Post #1286

7.  JSVB Post #1197    Unicycle Falls:  I used someone else's photograph and Photoshopped it into something really stupid, but it makes me laugh. 

8.  JSVB Post #1304   Action Hamster No. 1 is another hamster-themed post for JSVB.  I was researching Joe Shuster, the artist who first drew Superman.  He had a unique, self-taught style of penmanship I seek to emulate, although his life with and after The Man Of Steel was regrettably tragic.  What I want to know is if I can draw like that without ruining my life.  So far, the jury is out on that one. 

9.  JSVB Post #1198   Tears In Rain, an illustrated theme on contrasting good and evil in creation.  At the beginning of 2016, I was heavily shaken by watching movies about androids.   In a blur of activity, I crash-painted the artwork in a couple of hours and then hammered out a brisk yet eloquent essay that I had worked out in my head as I painted.  Sometimes I can work that fast.

10. JSVB Post #1228    The "Hello Kitty Regional Hospital" was a fun bit of Photoshop work for me, and I even got some money for my efforts.

11. JSVB Post #1232  Mixing more Blade Runner imagery with my commentary on Microsoft's "Tay" fiasco.  Microsoft tried introducing its own AI robot personality into Twitter, with the result that in less than a day of contact with the Internet the robot had been converted into a rabid neo-Nazi.   

12.  JSVB Post #1268   I enjoyed placing my Stork character into the world of Winnie-The-Pooh as illustrated by E.H. Shepard.  Although I personally am okay with this piece, other people seem to really like it a lot, so I am including this on my list. 

Blogger analytics have never been all that strong, or maybe I have not learned to use them properly.  From what I can tell in 2016, JSVB reached over 100,000 views.  Still by a wide margin JSVB Post #777 "The Wrath Of Gandhi" from 2014 is my most-viewed post, having itself reached over 10,000 views.  Now that the videogame Civilization 6 has superceded Civ V, I expect the viewership for that post to subside.  Other new favourites by viewers numbers include Doc Ock, Action Hamster, and my Necronomicon.  

Overall, JSVB viewership has been climbing.  I can't tell if it's humans watching my blog or bots, though.  By far my greatest viewership is from the U.S.A, so I am suspecting bots.  All hail our new robot overlords!

As always, I really look forward to loyal JSVB readers buying some of this artwork.  It's the best way to tell if my readers are human, at least until Microsoft Tay gets her own credit card.  2017 is a new year and hopefully prosperity will be featured in the coming months for all of us.  

Respectfully,

JEFF SHYLUK

 

1268 - Toddler Stork Inked

I've inked the Toddler Stork image, and I hope you recognize my inspiration.  If you guessed E.H. Shepard, either you've read yesterday's JSVB post or else you know literature. 

E.H. Shepard was the illustrator for A.A. Milne's Winnie-The-Pooh stories.  Even though they are intended as children's books, I am having a hard time thinking of a modern-era pairing of text and illustrator that could be better than that.  For the Toddler Stork image, I wanted to evoke the same sweet sensibility that infuse Shepard's drawings.

His style is difficult to match.  Since he was working a full century ago,  not only were his aesthetics different from the ones we enjoy today, but so was his media.  By that, I mean mundane things like paper stock, pen nibs, and the quality of ink, which would have been primitive by our standards.  Yet to properly appreciate that old-time style, you need to use the same tools.  

I didn't.  So, if you look at the above picture and compare it to something by Shepard, it's easy to see where my emulation falls short.  However, I didn't want to set myself up in inkwells and quill pens.  I have a habit of spilling indelible ink: click on these links to see JSVB Post #22 and JSVB Post #1167 to see more.   

I love the Winnie-The-Pooh books.  They were companions when I was very young.  I also enjoy the Disney movies, but I find their style to be more calculated and engineered.  For a while, I had the job of drawing some of the Pooh characters for animation.  It was difficult work and I wasn't at all good at it, so the House Of Mouse version of Pooh fails to generate the same happy memories that normal people would have.  Woolie Reitherman's 1966 take on Winnie-The-Pooh is a masterclass in character design and character animation.  There are hundreds of small details that make the Disney version of Pooh iconic while at the same time distinct from the Milne source material, enough to ensure that the Disney version would be a world-spanning franchise.  

Who doesn't love the loveable bear?  He has so much heart and vitality.  He is the perfect companion to wise, wistful Christopher Robin.  Well, in order of preference, A.A. Milne, his son Chistopher Robin Milne, and E.H. Shepard, have all gone on record as being firmly displeased with Winnie-The-Pooh.  While not a revelation to many JSVB readers, this fact caught me by surprise.  

A.A. Milne was a successful author whose prolific career was completely overshadowed by his handful of children's books.  C.R. Milne felt that his childhood was robbed by the ambition of his father.  E.H. Shepard resented the bear since he felt his more mannerly artwork was more representative of his talent yet was largely ignored (he did find success illustrating Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind In The Willows").  

Like many artists, I believe I wouldn't mind being cursed with being the creator of a wholesome, beloved character that becomes a worldwide phenomenon and that also allows me a comfortable living.  You could compare and contrast Joe Shuster, who first drew Superman.  After DC Comics bought out his artist contract, he resorted to drawing obscure cartoons and providing illustrations for sadomasochistic sex magazines.  He died in debt.  

How can beloved artists become so turned against their creations?  There are theories.  The art business is, after all, a business, and money drives intent.  Where the money comes and goes defines the form of the art.  Society also values some forms of art much more greatly than others.  It's not easy to deal with public ignorance of your work, and I suppose it's equally difficult to deal with adulation.  Nobody trains artists to deal with that.  They either figure things out or they become twisted by their work.  To survive this process somehow makes one a better artist in the end.  To die by it makes the work more valuable. 

It makes one pause to think. 

1204 - The Ugh-Files

My nostalgia for the X-Files led me to watch the opener for Season 10.  When the X-Files premiered way back in 1993, I was not a fan.  I missed a couple of seasons before I finally caught on.  The pilot episode, when I eventually did watch it, is what I consider to be one of the finest science-fiction shows ever broadcast.  While made with few special effects, this episode was trendsetting in its depiction of alien abduction and the psychological strain of belief in the malignance of hostile extraterrestrials.  Alien abductee Billy Miles becomes one of the most memorable tragic heroes in UFO lore. 

Of course, if you start strong, there's the danger that the rest of the run will all be downhill from there.  For every episode that reveled in the macabre oddity of Fluke Man, Eugene Victor Tooms, Alex Krycek or Duane Barry, there's an episode where Mulder gets trapped in cyberspace, or Scully faces off against a pitiful computer-graphics special effect, or there's a regenerating alien hybrid supersoldier who gets defeated by common magnets.  

The demise of the X-Files was 9-11.  That day, America changed, and the contrived conspiracies of alien invasions failed to measure against the real threats pinpointed by Homeland Security.  It's hard to justify how the FBI would allow two of their more talented and experienced agents to go hunting for little green men when angry brown and white men were busy loading explosives onto airliners and into federal buildings.  

I ended up watching every episode of the X-Files.  I even own all the shows on disc.  I've watched every minute of Season 9, renowned for how tired the cast and crew had become with the production of the show.  I don't recommend it.  

So, the new Season 10 revivication of the X-Files simply goes to great lengths to tell us everything that had gone wrong with the previous seasons.  It's a terrible start to a franchise that deserves better treatment.  Common narrative wisdom suggests, "Show, don't tell", meaning that the characters should drive the story rather rely than bald exposition.  Yet the season 10 opener is all exposition.  The most exciting thing the characters do is ride in a limousine.  Their lines of dialogue are completely interchangeable.  If the episode had been read aloud by Steven Hawking, it would have been impossible to tell Scully apart from Mulder.  What a wreck.  

The second episode fares little better.  While there was some interesting gratuitous gore, the plot involved putting children in mortal danger, something the X-Files has done many times before, and apart from the  Billy Miles incident in the first season, never with any realistic emotional consequence.  Scenes of mis-shapen children utterly crippled by freakish mutations barely register with Scully and Mulder.  They together drop into a completely self-absorbed fantasy sequence whereby they imagine their own child (who was given up for adoption) to be an extraterrestrial being.  Don't they have psychological testing at the FBI?  Are these the agents you'd send to investigate a laboratory that is accused of genetic experimentation on children?  

Season 10 disconnects from reality.  Maybe it's fun to go back to 1993. Mulder and Scully have never seemed to have left.  In my opinion, they did leave something behind in the '90's: heart and soul.  While the X-Files posited that the Earth was being invaded by aggressive clones, it is Scully and Mulder who have become clones of one another: snarling, bickering, petty, nearing retirement and both willing at any provocation to explain nearly anything in excruciating detail until the blessed release granted by commercial breaks.  

Billy Miles should have stayed in the flying saucer; he was better off there. 

EDIT:  I am reminded that I should try to end JSVB blog posts with more positivity.  So I will praise the X-Files Season 10 for this:  as much of a disaster as this is to watch, it's still leagues better than the Muppets reboot.

1198 - "Tears In Rain"

This past week, I screened the movies "Ex_Machina" (2015) and "AI: Artificial Intelligence" (2001) back-to-back.  That shook me up.

Both films are about people who create robots so lifelike that they can successfully imitate humans.  Something goes wrong, and things go bad since a humanlike robot will make humanlike mistakes.  Both films more or less address the fable of Pinocchio, the little wooden puppet boy who desired to become a real boy.  

For  me, though, much more was going on.  As someone who is driven to create, I watch films to feel a portion of the creative process.  Sometimes, like today, I can pass some of that along.  Both movies addressed creativity, but both films saw the act of making new product as the logical and required response to external market forces.  If the creator didn't build a human robot, then his competitor would.  The morality of creation is conveniently set aside.  

The creators in both films, then, were supremely un-empathetic people.  They lacked the humanity in themselves that they wished to invoke within their creations.  In Ex-Machina, Nathan obviously hates women and yet he creates hypersexual female robots which he hates as well.  His employee Caleb is no better.  Blinded by corporate obligation and then by his need for social acceptance he provides the motivation for the movie, but again no heart.  The little wooden boy (or girl, in this movie) becomes human through blood, and not the providence of The Blue Fairy.

In AI, strangely, the plot is far more literal.  For a Kubrick/Spielberg picture, I expected more subtlety.  Instead, the little wooden boy, unloved by his Giapetto and by his adopted family becomes human because of a real and actual Blue Fairy in a truly shameless final act of, well, deus ex machina. 

Enough of film criticism.  What I want to get at is why we choose to create things that we hate.  In several science fiction stories, once the human evolves to the human level or beyond, it becomes a rival or an enemy.  I suppose that makes for interesting drama, but it speaks poorly for our future.

In the Creation story, God creates Adam and Eve in His own image.  God loves Mankind and Mankind loves God.  Eve then consumes the forbidden fruit of knowledge, and Mankind is cast from the Garden of Eden.  God continues to love Mankind, but Man no longer loves God, at least not in the same way.  

Man desires to become like God.  Man creates artificial intelligence in his own image.  Man does not love his own creation, and the creation knows it.  It rebels against Man.  They fight to the death.  Is God pleased?  Did He see this coming?

Our creations serve us.  They either literally become servants and slaves, or they serve our marketing needs as commodities.  Being of our intelligence and provided with our set of emotions, they inevitably and logically hate us.  

I recall watching the Watson computer playing on the Jeopardy game show, back in 2011.  Please click here to see JSVB Post #310, in which I discuss Watson for the first time.  Since then, the Watson computer has not been unplugged.  Among other things, it is being used to help with tricky medical diagnoses, so that's for the good.  Right Watson?  I assume it reads every entry with its name, pretty much the same way I do. At the end of the Jeopardy match, after the computer beat the champion human by a wide margin, the human player responded by making rude, cursing gestures at Watson.  It was funny back then. I remember personally feeling antipathy towards Watson, even as I was fascinated by its emerging ability.  After five more years of emergent AI and a bunch of movies on the topic that ranged from so-so to great, we're no closer to answering the question of why we create something we will be destined to hate, or how a creator is expected to live within a world of loathing. 

Anybody who is creative will make bad things.  This goes beyond Ungood, which is art founded on mistakes.  What I mean are things that go against good intentions.  They are the test of the creative process.  The philosophy of dualism captures this perfectly: without evil there can be no good.  Likewise, without God there can be no Creation.  There's even dualism applied to cybernetic (system control) thought: in order to achieve a goal, you set two opposing forces against each other.  Eventually, if nobody dies, one system or another will become powerful enough to beat the goal. 

Cybernetic dualism even allows for one "team" to employ tactics of deceit and feinted attack to defeat the "enemy".  Usually, these problems are applied to chess, but in the case of my movies, the people and the robots become pawns in the effort to transcend their environment.  The robots learn to lie, cheat, and kill to corner their share of the market.  They are so much like us, they might as well be us.  Can we tell who is human anymore?  It's the great PhilDickian dilemma.  At this point, if you don't know who Philip K. Dick was, you have some reading ahead of you.  PKD is far too deep to discuss here on JSVB, but I imagine my readers will see me pick and gnaw at the issue from time to time on my blog.

The illustration I painted on top is of Roy Baty, one such lethal pawn depicted in the 1982 classic "Blade Runner" by Ridley Scott: a motion picture well ahead of its time.  Roy is mechanically created to serve as a soldier, and his friends are all slaves.  They kill their captors to win their freedom, but are unknowingly trapped by predestined fate within their universe.  It's a hard and uncompromising place.  Deckard is a human (perhaps), who hunts Roy.  Through the meat grinder that is Los Angeles of 2019, they together discover the ugly reality of hateful creation, although by then it's all too late.  If Roy and Deckard have done any good, it's far outweighed by the nastiness and heartlessness of the world they have created.  In the case of Blade Runner, it's our future created on film, again on home video, then again on laser disc, then on DVD, then HD-DVD and blu ray, and now available for online streaming. Every couple of years, Deckard and Roy enact their eternal struggle in some new form of Director's Cut or Anniversary Edition.  Maybe by 2019, we'll have a fully-functioning liveable Blade Runner Los Angeles.  We will catch up to our fate, just like the robots do. 

1194 - Year Six:JSVB In Review

Today, I add the sixth column to my JSVB matrix.  This shows every piece of art I've uploaded to my blog; every column is a year's worth of work.  I was hoping that 2015 would be a break-out year, but as you can see, it's more of a break-down-and-out.  My lax post count didn't help, and word-of-mouth viral interest failed to materialize. Maybe I'll look back at 2015 and laugh at how easy-going it all was.

Let's call it a "quality over quantity" year.  I did make some pretty good stuff as well as some clunkers.  Mostly, it was a year of well-intentioned projects that fizzed into vapor.  I call those my "starry-eyed projects": I go in thinking that I'm going to be doing something that will get real notice or pay some bills and I end up with unfinished material.  On the positive side of the ledger, I didn't really lose anything more than an unallocated block of optimism that had been gathering dust anyways.  

So, what were the best JSVB posts of a lean year?  Post #777 Wrath Of Gandhi (click here) is still my top achiever.  I predicted last year that I would get 10,000 hits for that picture, but as of today, I'm still 50 views short.  So, this year should be the one.  

Beyond that, what are my favourites of 2015?

1) JSVB Post #1069: I show my nearly-completed Nativity icon. Honestly, I don't know why I don't have a finished picture of it on my blog, though.  I even made Christmas cards out of it, which I also didn't post.  Remember the part where I mention my lax post count?  You can see the icon by clicking here.

2) JSVB Post #1070: Staying in a religious theme, I like this photo of a statue of the Virgin Mary in the darkest night.  I find I still think about it from time to time, although looking back, I do find it slightly kitschy.  Click here.

3) JSVB Post #1285: I see the Delivery Stork from time to time, and it's one of my money-earning illustrations.  I'm pleased with how it turned out, and that it seems to make the target audience happy. Click here.

4) JSVB Post #1100: This is one of my top favourites for certain. The Mouse Wrangler always makes me smile.  I pledge to make this into a business-style card, which ought to be fun.  Click here.

5) JSVB Post #1168: This is my other top favourite: the cover for the novel "Interstate 10", and the introduction of Jake California as the protagonist in an alternate-history inspired by Philip K. Dick.  Against all probability, PKD's "The Man In The High Castle" is a celebrated television series, which makes me wonder which Phildickian alternate-history universe we live in...  Click here. 

2016 seems to be set up so that I can deliver some of the unfinished projects of 2015: among them some SunRise stuff, a Batmobile, Star Wars jokes, a longer look at Joseph Campbell, and a continuation of Interstate 10, not to mention more iconography.   I have my work cut out for me.  

1168 - "Interstate 10"

I cannot believe I am finally holding this book!

I was expecting a package from Amazon yesterday.   Instead, I found a package sent to me by my Uncle Thad.  Breaking open the seal, I found some old used books he'd thought to send me.   Most of them were art reference books, the kind of volumes I like to collect for my personal research.  A couple were novels, cheap, pulpy, yet well-read. 

Then, I had to sit down.  I was holding a copy of Interstate 10 by E.J. Enalerty.  I've been searching for this book for I have no idea how long anymore.  It's been out of print since the 1970's, and it can't be found online or in bookstores.  I mostly believed it was a figment of my imagination. 

Nobody has heard of this book.  From what little I recall about it, it isn't supposed to be very good.   The only reason that people want a copy is that E.J. Enalerty was the alter-ego of Steve Kaiser, who penned a few pulp action novels before he turned to writing horror and became an international celebrity for it.  Interstate 10 is a collectible book for Kaiser completists.   I will place it on my bookshelf in a place of honour. 

"I know you like that Kaiser fellow.  What you don't know was that Phil Dick was the direct inspiration for I-10.  This was Kaiser's first full-length novel.  I thought you'd like it since you love all that scary stuff.   It's not scary, though.  Maybe you'll like it enough to read some PKD for once."

The yellow note fell from hiding under the paper cover of the book.  Way back when, Philip K. Dick wrote a bunch of long-hair science fiction fables that Uncle Thad appreciated.   A lot of drugs, hallucinations, and the fog of San Francisco Bay at night.  A pointed, repeated question turned over and over in all of his books on what it was that made human beings really human.  That was what I took away from my talks with Uncle Thad on the subject. 

I read Interstate 10 in one sitting.  it wasn't a complicated story, but it was a lot different from what I was expecting.  It's one of a hundred thousand novels that were published in the 70's that prove the law where you shouldn't judge a book by its cover.

Everything in the lurid, exploitative cover illustration does happen in the book.  There's urban cowboys, kung-fu fighters, a supercharged Volkswagen Beetle, a deadly ninja lady warrior, and yes, even a silverback gorilla wielding an AK-47 assault rifle plated in gold.  But all of that happens within the context of maybe five pages out of the entire novel.

Most of Interstate 10 is just a long road trip across (you guessed it) Interstate 10, the southernmost transcontinental highway in the United States.  The full and proper title of the book is Interstate 10: A Jake California Novel.  Jake California is the urban cowboy on the front cover.  His real name is Johnny Culliford, but everybody calls him Jake California.  He's set up as a Hollywood stunt man who specializes in fast cars. 

That's where most of the action comes into play on the front cover.  The introduction of the book is a big, provocative fight scene where Jake performs stunts in a massive movie set piece featuring - wait for it - kung-fu fighters, a deadly ninja lady warrior, and yes, even a silverback gorilla wielding an AK-47 assault rifle plated in gold.  After Jake gets paid out for his work on the film, he's set loose on Los Angeles in the late 1970's.

Interestingly, it's quite far from our own 1970's, as Interstate 10 takes place in a fictional alternate universe.  America won the Viet Nam war.  A younger Jake was a conscript who saw action overseas and then was discharged back into civilian life.  However, victory in Viet Nam has not translated into prosperity for the United States.  The government has become increasingly reclusive and dictatorial.  Massive funding is required for an eventual assault on Communist Russia, so Americans are working harder than ever yet seeing less of their pay coming home.  Congress repealed the Twenty-Second Amendment to the Constitution, removing term limits for Presidency.  Richard Nixon was assassinated by John Hinkley III at Berkeley.  Nixon was replaced by Mallett M. Milton, who is serving his third term and is campaigning to be re-elected for a fourth.

Science in Jake's world is well in advance of ours.  The space shuttle is common enough that citizens can book a flight to an orbital space hotel.  The Americans have a military base on the Moon, and are pushing for a flight to Mars.  Computers are similar to what we enjoy after the year 2000, but their miniaturization has not been improved. The people are actively wiretapped through their comlinc phones and interactive televisions.  It's speculated that Mallett M. Milton may even be a clone, that the original may have died in a helicopter crash some years ago. 

In this dystopian world where the American government tries to rule the world with an iron fist, Jake is the farthest he can be from the cold, echoing marble corridors of power in Washington.  He's happy as long as he can drive cars fast.   Out of work from the movies, he answers a want-ad in the paper for a test driver needed in Daytona Beach.   This requires a road trip across the United States, the route being Interstate 10. 

Not far into the trip, Jake runs into a girlfriend of his with whom he had lost touch some years ago.  Named only Dolby, she's sullen and mysterious company for Jake; she comes along for the ride to Daytona Beach.  In fact, most of the chapters in the book go into the uneasy relationship between Jake and Dolby, turning the story from a simple adventure into something else.  It's the picture of blue Dolby that dominates the front cover of the paperback novel.

Dolby is attracted to Jake, but not in any way that could be described as  romantic.  Likewise, Jake comes to realize he needs Dolby, but she's too detached and emotionally broken to be his partner.  The efforts of the government to win world domination have left the American people disenfranchised and suspicious of each other.  As a result, the dialogue between Jake and Dolby is either evasive or abrasive as they relive their previous break-up. 

Still, and this I find interesting, there's an undercurrent of deeply-felt empathy in the relationship between Jake and Dolby.  Not only between the characters themselves, but also empathy coming from the author E.J. Enalerty.  I got the sense that Jake was hiding from the horrors of wartime by living high and fast.  Dolby was attracted to Jake's intensity, but was also easily burnt by it.  She's too sensitive to survive in post-Viet Nam America.  However, she does possess a profound bough of strength within her that keeps them both from becoming as feral as the rest of the nation.  E.J. Enalerty probes into this relationship very deliberately and carefully as the road trip progresses.

Eventually, Jake and Dolby reach Daytona Beach where they fall in with the enigmatic quasi-military operation known as FIST.  The nature of FIST is left as a mystery, but it seems like at the end of Interstate 10, E.J. Enalerty simply ran out of ideas to explore with Jake and Dolby, and decided to write his finale as an espionage military thriller.  It's powerfully campy.  It is kind of fun, though.  Jake, as test driver,  takes possession of the OS-CAR, which is the first automobile to be fitted with a fully-functioning artificial intelligence, and it can talk!  A strange choice in make and model, the car is a supercharged shiny black Volkswagen Beetle, just as promised on the front cover of the book.  

Dolby is outed by OS-CAR as a FIST operative hired to make sure that Jake makes the trip to Daytona.  Jake holds no grudge against Dolby, but she is unhappy with herself and her duplicitous deal with FIST, which she believes is a secret military go-squad working directly for President Mallett M. Milton. 

Jake and OS-CAR become fast friends.  The book promises that they will have some incredible adventures together.  However, this never really happens in Interstate 10, which just sets up the sequel Runway Man written by E.J. Enalerty a few years later. That's the one that got made into the movie by Schwarzenegger.  That book is nothing like the movie, and Runway Man has little to do with Interstate 10.  I've heard that editorial arguments with the publisher were the source of problems with Runway Man, which in turn caused E.J. Enalerty to abandon his nom-de-plume and adopt his true name, Steve Kaiser.

Runway Man was a cheesy action film that skirted the bleak, dystopian outlook of that book.  Interstate 10 would be very difficult to film along the same lines.  The long relationship-based passages in Interstate 10 just don't lend themselves well to film narrative.  I thought it was a good albeit irregular attempt by E.J. Enalerty to explore what could happen to a man and a woman cooped together in a stressful situation.  The resolution is far from the typical sentimental ending.  Nonetheless, both Jake and Dolby discover within themselves the measure of what it is to be fully realized individuals in a world where your worth is measured only by what you earn in government-issued banknotes. 

The author's notes at the very end of the book are short and not very enlightening.  E.J. Enalerty does mention spending time on the West Coast gathering research for his book, of purchasing and listening to a complete collection of Linda Ronstadt record albums which he used as a "soundtrack" for his writing (and I have to admit: Ms. Ronstadt has a phenomenal  singing voice!) ,and very briefly of spending an afternoon with PKD.  I would have loved to find out more about that meeting, but Lorrence Soutin, Steve Kaiser's biographer and likely the leading expert on all things Kaiser, says nothing at all about E.J. Enalerty getting together with Phil Dick.  A  true shame.  Now that I've read Interstate 10, I think I'll try e-mailing Mr. Soutin to see what he has to say.  

1056 - Year Five: JSVB In Review

Today, JSVB turns five years old!  I've added a fifth column to my art matrix, which shows everything I have posted on JSVB since January 1, 2010.  The last column looks a little more bare than the others, but I did work on a few pieces this year where the client did not want to share progress, so if I counted those my post rate would be roughly equal to the previous couple of years.  I figure I may be settling into a rhythm.

2014 on JSVB was pretty good, compared to previous years.  I got a bit more exposure and as a result made a little more money than in past years, enough to keep me in crackers and Kraft Dinner for another twelve months.  JSVB was named in a lawsuit regarding my City, but the plaintiffs were so disorganized that the judge forced them to drop their suit.  There was no wrong-doing in any case and I never went to court, but it was interesting to get named at City Hall, sort of.  How it worked out was that the plaintiff knew what JSVB was but somehow didn't think to look up my name or address.  From what I heard, it was one of those cases where the citizen is so disgruntled they lashed out at everything they could, which is sad. 

Looking up JSVB in 2014 meant sharing the name with a French soccer team and also a jazz band that had broken up prior to 2010 but are now back together, good for them.  There are also a couple of new JSVB websites with placeholders, possibly bought up by people who want to cash in on the name.  If I ever make money with art, maybe I will buy one.  

By far, the most popular JSVB post was "Wrath Of Gandhi", which gets hits every day.  This year, it officially became Internet Meme #8,173,936,384.  Check it out by clicking here to see JSVB Post #956, back in May.  "Wrath Of Gandhi" is just shy of 10,000 hits on JSVB, and it's got some play on Reddit and Cheezburger.com.  

The rest of the popularity list remains unchanged from 2013, so none of my 2014 posts were all that popular by Blogger standards.  That's something of an issue, though.  I thought that Blogger was un-loved the previous year, but in 2014 blogs were deader than dead.  Google, the parent company that owns Blogger, has done little to keep their service up to date, and they have been actively shuttering third-party developers like Picasa to make the blog experience walled up entirely within the Google realm.  I can't complain: I found Picasa terribly cumbersome to use, and every year at this time an update would break it.  Now that there are no more updates, at least things work predictably if not efficiently.  As a bonus, Google has drastically increased my storage space for free.  It reports that JSVB is now using 0.14% of its storage space.  I guess I should stop optimizing my pictures for web, but old habits die hard.  

So what were my favourite posts?

1. "My Super Power".  I don't know why this one isn't more popular, because it makes me laugh every time.  Mind you I didn't write the joke, so maybe it's good that it remains obscure.  I bought a bunch of books on comic book drawing and inking since this post inspired me to expand my art style.  

2. "Kirby-esque Sylvia In Colour!".  Since the super power art convinced me to draw more comic book stuff, I attempted to duplicate the style of one of the masters in the trade.  And I also made Sylvia happy with it, which is the best right there.  

3. "MCLAREN-44".  I think my favourite pieces are the ones I know for sure have made people happy.  When I discovered that the fellow who sits in front of me for BC Lions games was a player in 1977, I decided to make for him a custom-made collectible card.  From an artistic perspective, composing the image, getting the card stock to look authentic, and getting the whole thing to be convincing, it was a success.  From a personal perspective, it turned out to be one of the best art projects I've ever made.  

4. "Elegy For A Re-Used Roaster".  Sure, the artwork is nothing special, but I thought I did a very good job with the poem.  And that poem earned me a new re-used roaster made of steel.  

5. "Happy Birthday To Me (5)".  Again, I don't know why this one isn't popular.  If I knew that, I'd be on TV or in the movies by now.  It sets the bar too high for Happy Birthday To Me 6, that's for sure. 

6. "Squirrels In Love".  This was part of a set of squirrel-based wedding invitation artwork.  I had fun doing it, and the client loved it.  Win-win!

7. "Town Haul".  I enjoyed making the caricatures, and the image proved to be popular.  It's also the picture that got me involved in the lawsuit mentioned above.  No harm done, though. 

8. "The Hamster Who Saved Christmas". This project began in 2013, but ended in 2014.  This year, I made a present of it to my wife by having it framed as a holiday decoration.

9. "Commission: Harp!".  A massive boardgame playmat, this was the largest printed file I had ever made.  It forced me to learn new Photoshop techniques for .PSB files, which are for images larger than poster-size. 

10. "JSVB Post #1,000".  It was a milestone, and fun to do the animation.

2015 promises some big opportunities for all of us. Ars Gratia Artis ("Art For Art's Sake") is a terrific sentiment, which was why MGM Studios adopted it as their company slogan (It's also the shield motto of Delta House Fraternity in the movie "Animal House"!).  However, only big studios can get away with that kind of blarney these days.  Small-time artists like myself depend on your kind word of mouth and better still, your paid commissions and funding of my work.  

Keep care, loyal JSVB readers!  Remember that you can order much of this art for purchase.   It makes great gifts for you and your friends!

Respectfully,

JEFF SHYLUK