Remind you of anything? How about an old Atari video game:

That’s “Rescue on Fractulus”, also from 1984. Maybe in this case the comic artist just took his Atari and multiplied by 1.5 instead of 10.

The passing years don’t necessarily make tecnoprognostication any easier, either, as you can see from the impressive level of cyber security no lesser team than “The Avengers” managed to put together:

The graphics! The fonts! The complicated, intricate, and hack-proof interface! The jaundiced yellow, nausea-inducing background! We shouldn’t be surprised by the incredible sophistication of this 1990-era computer system, of course, given that The Avengers had the likes of Hank Pym and Tony Stark to build their IT department.

Comics: Imagining tomorrow as today since at least yesterday!

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The Dagons were the bad guys, if I recall, and representing the forces of humanity was Dyson Lee, Space Marine. Or Navy SEAL. Or something, we never figured out which. I do remember envisioning that humanity was controlled by a very powerful theocracy, founded on the notion that everyone in the military voluntarily enslaved themselves to the hierarchy for the duration of their service. Hence the chain links as rank insignia on his uniform there.

I also argued that men and women both who were in the military should be bald, since that made the most sense in a helmet-wearing zero-gee environment. Looking back on it that might have been pleasing from a story-telling standpoint, but likely would have been disastrous in terms of marketing.

Sometimes I step back a bit and marvel at the sheer creative energy that geeks like us put out. I mean, I would bet that every person who’s reading this has a hard drive full of the remnants of whole worlds they’ve imagined, whether in the form of a half-baked comic like this one or that great American novel that never quite came together. People describe today’s generation as passive consumers, but at least the gamer/geek subculture is anything but. What we love about comics and movies and gaming is that it helps us feel creative. It spurs us to create our own worlds, our own characters, and if, like the Dagons and Dyson Lee, they never make it to print, well that’s all right too. At least they live on in our imaginations.

Long live the geeks!

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Al Williamson worked with the likes of Burne Hogarth and Frank Frazetta, having been the artistic talent behind the newspaper serial “Flash Gordon”. Here’s his version of the scene where the hunting party sees their prey — the mighty Tyrannosaurus Rex — for the first time.

What jumps out at me immediately is the amount of text on the page, something you hardly ever see in a modern comic. Comics in the 50’s were still considered an inferior medium by society in general, and I can see how publishers of the time would have felt obliged to introduce more literary elements to increase their legitimacy in the eyes of the reader. Big blocks of text lifted directly from the original short story certainly accomplish that.

This particular adaptation was published in Collier’s magazine, known for forward-thinking explorations of the future and critical analysis of pressing social issues of the age. I think that contributed to the more literary treatment Williamson gave the adaptation. In any event, the weight of communicating the story and action definitely fall on the text, with the images mainly serving to highlight and dramatize what’s being described.

Fast forward 41 years to a different artist, Richard Corben. The producer of tons of work for “Heavy Metal”, numerous album covers, and much, much more, Corben is a major figure in the history of fantasy illustration. The evolution of comics as a medium, both in terms of how it was perceived by the general public and in its visual storytelling toolkit, meant that Corben had a much different set of tools with which to work. Here’s the same general section of the story as rendered by him:

The proportion of text to images is reversed here compared to Williamson’s version. While both are still necessary to convey the full impact of the story, the visual elements carry the bulk of the load. Furthermore the page layout is much more dynamic, featuring one enormous panel to show the size and majesty of the dinosaur, and a series of very narrow panels to communicate the human drama and fear. Whereas Williamson uses mostly mid-range shots, Corben isn’t afraid to zoom right in to the characters’ eyes.

More subtly, by having the dialog appear in unattributed word balloons in the middle set of panels, the reader is put into the shoes of the main character. The whole world has narrowed down to a series of disconnected slices of sound and vision. All of our attention is consumed by the beast, eliminating all other sensory input. The tight constriction of the panels themselves heightens that feeling of claustrophobia, the suffocating feeling of fear in the face of an almost unimaginable threat.

Comics is not just illustrated words, or pictures with captions. It is a medium which, at its best, has a unique power to impact the reader, playing games with our experience of time and space like nothing else can. I think these two pages are a wonderful illustration of exactly how far the medium has come, how mature it is getting, and how powerful it can be. It also shows how important the artist’s ability to lay out a page is; beyond just the draftsmanship required to make a dinosaur look like a dinosaur, the arrangement of the panels and the pacing of the story are hugely important to how successful an issue can be.

I don’t mean to disparage Williamson in any way here, his adaption is hugely satisfying in its own way. But it is very much a product of its time. Seeing these two stories back to back make me not only appreciate how far the medium has come, but also wonder where it will take us in forty more years. I can hardly wait!

(Both pages shown above are ©1993 Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc. “A Sound of Thunder” published by Collier’s, June 28, 1952, ©1952, 1990 Ray Bradbury. Illustrations ©1993, Richard Corben and Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc.)

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I’m thinking American Indian features without the American Indian accoutrement’s
dark weathered skin. bald or scalp lock like a Pawnee warrior or Yul Brynner in Taras Bulba see pics
for weapons : primitive but exotic- Egyptian style axe/mace, boar spear, big ass hunting knife, short bow
clothing hide armor. leather with steel refinements maybe parts taken from legionnaires armor. not too constricting though. sturdy belt for knife, pouch, hand axe, etc.
pose: maybe crouching as if following a trail. in hot pursuit.

And here’s the final illustration:

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The black and white drawing is done in Flash in layers as I’ve described elsewhere. I fill the inside bits with white, then export it as a high-resolution Adobe Illustrator file. Now I’ll import that Illustrator file into Photoshop for the color work, which I’ll post as soon as it’s approved. This is fun!

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(Image removed due to copyright issues.)

But sometimes using reference can go terribly, horribly wrong.

For example, I’ve been re-reading the “Honor Harrington” series (excellent military sci-fi by David Weber) lately, and while I can understand the cover artist for “Field of Dishonor” wanted to use reference for the female protagonist, I can’t figure out why he went with Michael Jackson:

And why does he — er, she — have Man-Hands? I feel lucky the uniform color covers up the Adam’s apple, although now that I think about it I bet Michael Jackson had his surgically removed anyway.

(Cover painting by Gary Ruddell, book ©1994 by David Weber, published by Baen Books.)

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I took that and redrew it to look like this:

This is the kind of thing I’d like to do in the upcoming “Custom Character Portrait” contest, or whatever we end up calling it (suggestions more than welcome!). I think the original HM version is nice, and could even be used for a camera-ready, print-quality production if he wanted, but there’s just nothing like an actual illustration done by a pro.

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In a nutshell, a virtual or robotic character is in the Uncanny Valley when it looks almost-but-not-quite-close-enough to real to be incredibly creepy. It’s the gap between iconic-enough-to-be-convincing realism on one edge, and completely convincing on the other. Drawings or animations or robots that are between those two points trigger very unpleasant reactions in the viewer, making you feel like something is horribly wrong with what you’re seeing.

Comics as a medium (and I’d include the visual style of HeroMachine in that generic visual set, even though it’s not actually comics per se) gets a lot of its power from presenting visuals that are generic enough that the reader can invest them with their own life, but not so real that we start to keenly notice where they fall short. Here’s an example of what I mean, inspired by Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics“:

Everyone in the world recognizes this as a human face, and accepts it readily as such. But why should this be? It lacks hair, a chin, jaw, nose, eyebrows, pupils, lips, features that most people would think are absolutely required to be a face. And yet, it’s absolutely effective in making you think “That’s a face” when you look at it.

Compare that to this still of a Robin Penn Wright’s “Wealthow” from Beowulf:

Again you know right away this is supposed to be a person. But it’s not a generic person, like the smiley face, it’s very much an individual, and so you evaluate it as such. All of those millions of neurons in the human brain that are built to detect human faces, to pick one individual out of a crowd of thousands, start firing, frenetically looking for the most minute clues as to this person’s identity.

And that’s where the trouble lies.

You can see a bit of it in the still, particularly the waxy skin. When the character is in motion, it’s much worse. I kept feeling that her jaw and lips were half-frozen, every time she spoke I got a little creeped out. It was like watching a mostly-revivified zombie moving around, which isn’t bad for a video game but not what you’re going for in a supposedly real woman. The hair bothered me too, it seemed too ropy and stiff, and the headband seemed like it was a molded part of the head instead of a separate item. These are all small things, but because the rest of the face is so close, the small things were that much more significant.

Filmmakers, animators, and illustrators all have to grapple with the fact that millions of years of evolution have adapted our brains to pick out differences in human faces. We can’t help but notice when things are off, even if we don’t think about it consciously; our social survival for eons has depended on it. Even when all you’re dealing with are very abstract images like the smiley, our massive face-imaging brains fill in the gaps to complete the picture, satisfying the biological imperative to see individuals. The lack of specificity triggers that face-recognition hardware enough to satisfy, but not so much as to frustrate.

But when most of those details are already filled in, the neurological machinery really hits its stride, drilling down to very small things. And when the total of all those small things don’t add up to equal “Real Human Face”, we’re bothered. Something’s not right. We feel a little uncomfortable because the parts that aren’t right stand out against the backdrop of all the stuff that is spot-on. This is the Uncanny Valley, that massive drop-off in believability between generic-but-convincing (like a smiley face or comic book drawing) and very-close-to-real-but-not like a bad digital animation.

Don’t get me wrong, the characters in Beowulf are really, really close. On the sharp incline of The Uncanny Valley, they’re definitely on the upslope of the far end; I don’t think it’s going to be long before we see digital actors that are indistinguishable from real ones to most people. In fact, for stretches of the movie, I think they’ve gotten there already, with Wiglaf in particular. But it’s not there yet, not all the way. I kept wishing throughout the movie that they’d just done away with the rotoscoping and instead used the actual characters, filling in with special effects where necessary. The story’s excellent, exactly what you’d expect from the incredibly talented Neil Gaimon, but ultimately animation has to serve the purpose of telling a story. And in Beowulf, too often it instead distracted from it.

Beowulf image copyright © Paramount Pictures, 2007.

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