The value of art

I’m talking about art today, so I’m using my own work for colour.

I saw a series of gifs the other day from an interview with Kevin Conroy, who died on November 30. Conroy was the voice of Batman, in Batman: The Animated Series, and he was recounting his experience of meeting a fan at a convention.

The fan wept and embraced him, and he did his best to reassure her. But she was aware of how strange it must seem. She said: ‘You don’t understand what you did for me,’ and she explained.

She’d grown up in an impoverished area, and every kid she’d known had died or ended up in jail or on drugs. Her parents had worked hard and couldn’t watch her after school, but when her school mates had been outside, getting into trouble, she had been at home watching Batman. It gave her a safe space in which to learn and grow

That time with a guardian-like figure who seemed to genuinely care saved her life. And she was meeting her saviour.

It is such a wonderful thing to have done for someone else. And yet, as Conroy reflected, we so rarely get a chance to know of the deep impact our art can have on others.

I am so very glad he got to know.

It made me reflect on the value of art, and how easy it is for us to not know how important even small and rough works of art can be to others.

I thought about a piece of GCSE art that was displayed in my school’s assembly room. All GCSE art was displayed there for a week after it had been submitted, and I always LOVED that part of the year. Those works of art made my heart soar in a way I’ve rarely felt in adult life.

I remember one tiny work very clearly. Most GCSE students (myself included) take the opportunity to produce art on giant canvases – or at my school, pieces of wood. We see what ‘the greats’ do in galleries and think that bigger is better; although many of us lack the skill to fill that space. Not this artist, though.

It was small – smaller than A4. A painting with a frame cut from lino. The image continued out, carved into the frame. We’d all had a go at making prints out of lino in Art, so I shouldn’t have been surprising that someone used it, but this was pure genius. To make a print with lino – fine. But actually seeing beauty in the form – making the lino itself a work of art – that was another level. And then they had used that to extend the work of art beyond the painting and into a 3D form – sheer brilliance!

The painting itself also caught my attention. It was a little fantasy landscape. Villages stood, implausibly, on top of great spikes of rock that rose up from a green valley. I knew enough at 13 or 14 to suspect that physics would not support this and it would be a very impractical place for a village, but I didn’t care. I was transfixed. Even now I feel my own inadequacy when it comes to describing this with words.

I wish I could recall the artist’s name or that of the painting, but it’s gone. I wish I could have spoken to that artist, to tell them how looking at their tiny work, in a room full of gigantic pieces, had made me feel. Perhaps they already understood the power of art. Perhaps the lino frame was a metaphor for how art can empower the fantastic to escape its frame and impact the real world.

At the time, all I could do was vainly wish I could talk to them and ask them what it meant. What else they might have imagined in the world they showed me through the lino frame.

They may not even think of that piece at all anymore. Maybe they threw it out. My art teacher threw out one of my paintings before I could rescue it. I was horrified. I still am, to be honest, but I now realise that was common. Part of the reason they let us create those gigantic pieces was because often they were not collected, and those works would be painted over with white emulsion, ready for next year’s students.

It’s something I struggle to get my head around. I never throw out old art or old writing. And yet I never wondered if any of my GCSE artwork had moved anyone the way that small piece moved me. Which is strange, given how I poured myself into it with complete and unabashed confidence. I was a different person at 16.

This was one of my first times with oil paints. The complete lack of face is, uh, deliberate.

We often hope to create a Great Work that moves others the way we have been moved ourselves. I think that’s fair to say. I suspect most of us do not think our current project to be that work.

If you did anything creative at school, would you ever imagine that a stranger might still think about your project twenty-five years later? That they still regard it as one of the most powerful pieces of art they’ve ever seen, even though they are beginning to forget the details? That whenever they’re reminded of it, their heart still soars?

I doubt that unknown artist imagines such a thing about their piece. They may have affection for it, but I’m sure they can see childish flaws in it the same way I see the flaws in my own old schoolwork.

The point is that art does not have to be recognised as a Great Work to have value. To make someone’s heart soar. To save someone’s life.

There are books I’ve read and TV I’ve watched that saved my life too. I escaped into Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series as a teenager, and Menolly’s story of success and escaping through her music helped me hang on through my own experience of bullying. Those books are not without flaws, but they made my heart soar and made me believe there was a way out. That life could get better.

When I first got sick with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but had no diagnosis, I ran into trouble at work. My anxiety about the situation was so bad my heart never stopped racing. At that time, my escape was Fringe. I watched it for hours and hours, and when Peter Bishop was taking care of his father, it felt like, finally, someone was taking care of me.

Fringe is a great show, but it’s not without it’s flaws. The first season is uneven, and I found the last season unwatchable. It doesn’t matter. Those middle three seasons still saved me.

I could go on a long time about the invaluable impact on my life of imperfect art, but I fear I’d just be entertaining myself. Instead I want to spend a few minutes thinking about a comic that’s often passed around among creatives.

Original comic, by stuffman

The comic, in its original iteration, has only two panels. Both show a person looking at two cakes. One cake has tiers and lots of detailed icing work. The other has only two layers and sloppy frosting. The first panel is captioned ‘The Artist’ and the figure in it looks glum because their cake isn’t as good as the other cake. The second panel is captioned ‘The Audience’ and shows an excited person saying Holy shit! Two cakes!’

This comic is well-liked for good reason. It shows that even if your work isn’t perfect, it can still delight someone. But I think (in this version anyway) it misses some of what’s disappointing for an artist when they compare their work to someone more skilled.

Because I think we’re all secretly hoping to produce that Great Work that really moves someone. And one of the two cakes is visibly better than the other, at least by some standards. An audience that just wants something sugary will be pleased, but will they really be moved? Which cake will they remember 25 years later? Which cake could save a life and inspire someone to become a baker themselves? Which cake will make them feel like there is love and beauty in a hopeless world?

I may be stretching this metaphor, but that’s sort of the point.

The ‘Holy shit! two cakes!’ response suggests that the audience has no deep appreciation of, or response to, either cake. So a creator can easily look at the comic and secretly think to themselves, ‘Yes, this is an important message for others. But MY problem is that I want my audience to get more from my work than that. Maybe it is foolish of me, but I do want to move someone and to satisfy more than a momentary craving for sugar.’

What the comic – and discourse generally – fails to celebrate, is that our imperfect works can also save lives. Offer comfort and escapism. Encapsulate beautiful, moving, and original ideas. Make someone’s heart soar.

Kevin Conroy was surprised by his fan’s reaction to what was, for him, just a job. You can never know the impact your work has on others. Or when you created the right thing for someone else to find at just the right time.

It does not have to be your best work. Not because the audience doesn’t care about the content, but because imperfect works can still be of incredible, priceless value.

At the moment, it feels like the work of creators has never been so undervalued.

Even for Great Works that have an estimated value in the millions, that value seems utterly divorced from their ability to move their audience. They are trading cards for the super rich. A Van Gogh painting does have value, but does it have really so very much more value than the work of millions of artists around the world who cannot earn a living?

This Van Gogh self-portrait is in the public domain. Nice.

Let us all remember, Van Gogh’s work was not valued that way in his lifetime. How is it a recognition of greatness to overvalue a work of someone who will never profit from it, and undervalue the work of a living artist who needs to heat their home this winter?

In the last month, creative industries have been under attack like never before. It’s been part of a steady, longterm devaluation of art by those with a vested interest in framing art as ‘unproductive’. (Often the same people who can afford to own Van Goghs.)

But if that were the case, why would so much money have been poured into creating AIs like DALL-E 2, which automate art creation?

I’m not actually against artistic AIs as such. I think some of the works that have been produced that way are haunting and beautiful. I also think there could be skill in selecting which works to train an AI with and the teaching methods employed. In this sense, developers can be artists. Moreover, as a philosopher of mind, I have long been fascinated by AI – what it tells us about our how we think and what it could do for us in the future.

What’s alarming is the reports that both art and writing AIs have been trained using databases for which the owners of the AI did not have any rights. Art not in the public domain, not licenced for commercial use. Art to which the companies that created the AI did not have any right.

Most notably, DeviantArt – one of the oldest and larget art archives on the web – launched an AI art tool called DreamUp. As part of the announcement, they noted that DreamUp was based on Stable Diffusion, which scraped the web for art to create its database, and many have reported that it’s likely to have used artworks on DeviantArt itself. DeviantArt paired their launch with an announcement of a way for users to opt their work out of being used in the future, but the opt out system was impractical for artists and relied on developers voluntarily respecting the marker that the opt out added to the code for works.

Even artists who had been pro AI art before reacted to this with horror.

Then, this week, evidence was found that Open AI, which is a writing AI, may have been trained on Archive of Our Own – the largest and most well-known fanfiction archive. That’s not currently been confirmed, to my knowledge, but the evidence is striking. For example, this prompt:

Steve had to admit that he had some reservations about how the New Century handled the social balance between alphas and omegas.

This one’s public domain, too. From Pixabay.

creates a story in which Steve is roommates with someone called Tony, with pretty detailed reference to omegaverse dynamics. Steve (Captain America) and Tony (Iron Man) form one of the most popular ships in the Marvel fandom. Being roommates (Oh my GOD they were roommates!) is an extremely well-loved fanfic scenario for setting up romance. And if you don’t know what omegaverse is, don’t click that link if unless you’re prepared for it to awaken something in you. Suffice it to say it’s a set of very specific, usually erotic, highly kinky tropes that arose from fandom and is unlikely to be referenced outside of recent erotic romance stories.

This is especially concerning as fanfic writers produce their work entirely for free. As fanfic usually uses copyrighted characters, its legal defence lies in the fact that the writers do not seek to profit from their work in any way. Archive of Our Own has no adverts and is a charity. But a for-profit AI does not and should not have the same protections. Stealing from work offered for free is immoral, but if the AI produces works that involve copyrighted characters, that seems open to legal challenge by intellectual property (IP) owners. Especially as it’s clear that the works produced are likely to involve situations that the IP owners would not approve for their characters.

There’s a risk that large, litigeous companies (such as Disney), that have been turning a blind eye to fanfiction (because no one profits from it) target fanfic writers again if AI writers use fanfic to endanger their IP. While the last 15 years have seen a swing towards fanfiction being generally accepted, many still remember attempts by the likes of Anne Rice and Lucasfilm to suppress fanfiction – especially erotic fanfiction.

And beyond these specific troubling developments, there’s the more general concern that the recognised value of art is disappearing as AI seeks to replace it. AI art is already being used in posters and on book covers by companies and individuals who do not want to pay artists. Many now worry: could the future see AI making all our art and telling all our stories?

My thoughts on this: in the near future? No. Not all of it. The stories in particular are not good enough. But some of the art is very good. And AI could easily replace a lot of formulaic writing, such as clickbait articles.

In the abstract, this shouldn’t have to be a bad thing. Automation should make all our lives better. If AI could take over the kind of work that’s often uninteresting and uninspiring and generate profit more easily, in a just world, that extra profit would go back into society to enable more funding for arts and humanities. Artists and writers who have made a living churning out low-value work to uninspiring briefs could be freed up to make the art and novels that would really fill our lives with purpose and meaning.

But this is not a just world. We have seen that automation has not been used to make the lives of the people whose labour it has replaced better. Instead, the people at the top of the pile, who are furthest away from production (let alone creativity) earn ever more, and the people are the bottom of the pile can no longer earn a living wage – let alone pursue a career in something they enjoy.

Don’t despair yet, though. Just as artists have apparently used big company’s like Disney to take down T-shirt bots that steal their designs by tricking them into stealing Disney’s IP, it may be that Open AI scraping from AO3 will be its undoing. The Organization for Transformative Works (of which AO3 is just one project) also has its own legal team, which has been defending fanworks from the outset. They have been alerted to the matter.

Similarly, there’s already a lawsuit against Github’s Copilot for stealing code that was shared for free and using it for profit. Which is to say: AIs that are using databases they have no right to are probably going to land themselves in hot water, and there is reason to hope that some kind of sensible regulation will result.

Moreover… I don’t know. I’m not especially interested in reading stories written by a robot. Unless that robot has reached true artificial intelligence, and has ideas of its own, in which case, it’s not a robot anymore. But that is a very long way off. Part of what I get out of reading is a sense of connection and recognition from other human beings.

Stephen King has called writing a kind of telepathy. It’s one thought transmitted from one person to another. I cry at some books not simply because I imagine something painful, but because reading those books makes me feel seen. I see a pain I recognise on the page and I know that somewhere out there is another person who understood.

Reading lets me know I’m not alone. It can’t do that if it wasn’t created by a person. If it was made instead by something that knows nothing at all in itself.

And I think the same is true of art. For artistic work that isn’t meant to make you feel anything particularly profound or interesting… yes. AI might take over that. The artistic equivalent of clickbait. It’s not great. Because society is injust, it will hurt the livelihoods of artists. But it won’t end art.

You might get a few gallery displays out of AI art, but it will be a novelty. A curiosity. I very much doubt any of us will still be thinking of a work created by AI twenty-five years later.

A mindless robot isn’t going to save many lives. It’s not going to make people feel less alone. It’s never going to make anyone wonder what it was thinking when it made the piece (not if it is mindless, and the audience knows enough about AI to know that this kind of AI is extremely simplistic and could not possibly think).

Your works matter. Even your student works and your fanfics and the little things you did and only shared on social media and got a handful of likes. Because art can stay with the viewer for decades after, even if they never spoke to the artist.

Art – creativity – has a value that is dismissed because it is hard to squeeze capital from. That doesn’t mean it’s not there. It’s so valuable it can make someone weep in a stranger’s arms. It can make you stay up all night reading. Fill hours of anxiety with love. Provide hope that humanity can be better than it often is. It helps us hang on when we feel like there’s nothing else to live for, and it helps us dream of everything wonderful that life could be.

Art can do all that, without ever being perfect.

We should pay creatives more, because their work is already so very valuable, to all of us.

Speaking of which, if you got something out of these thoughts, you can always buy me a ko-fi…

Chairs in Space: a comparison between Escape Vehicle no.6, Space Chair, and the internet legend of a chair in space

@SpacePorn’s garbled description of a chair in space.

I think I found it, my favourite thing in all of space: Escape Vehicle no.6.

Or maybe simply the idea of Escape Vehicle no.6.

I was thrilled to see the above tweet retweeted into my Twitter feed earlier today. ‘Wow!’ I thought. ‘That’s amazing and surreal and glorious – oh please let it be true!’

It was. Sort of.

@SpacePorn’s tweet reads:

There’s a kitchen chair floating in space. It’s referred to as “Escape Vehicle No. 6” by astronauts

And below that is an image of a browny-orange armchair hovering above the Earth. But SpacePorn’s account isn’t quite right.

The picture used in the tweet is actually of Toshiba’s Space Chair, which was based on, but not the same as, Escape Vehicle no.6. Neither chair actually achieved orbit and the name, Escape Vehicle No. 6, was not assigned by astronauts. But the chairs are real.

In 2004, artist Simon Faithfull launched a kitchen chair to the edge of space via weather balloon. The chair was part of a series, titled Gravity Sucks, in which Faithfull sought to defy gravity via various ‘escape vehicles’. The name, Escape Vehicle no.6, is not a cute nickname given by astronauts, it’s the name of a work of art. The artwork consists not simply in the chair, but rather existed as a live video relay which was watched by an audience at the Artists’ Airshow 2004, and exists now as a non-live work that you can watch online.

Space Chair is by Toshiba and is based on Faithfull’s work (although more on the exact nature of the ‘collaboration’ below). They recreated it in high-definition to advertise their technology. In contrast to Faithfull’s more scrappy concept, Toshiba’s work cost £3,000,000 and set the rather specific record of ‘Highest High-Definition Television Commercial’. Both chairs reached approximately 30km, and you can watch the advert, entitled The Toshiba Space Chair Project, online.

What I find interesting is how each work differs, and how SpacePorn’s garbled reframing of Escape Vehicle no.6 presents a new work that is different again.

The original piece evokes a sense of loneliness and fragility, as the cheap and insubstantial-looking kitchen chair is hoisted jerkily and at unnerving speed towards its fate, before finally being torn apart on the edge of space. Simon Faithfull’s website provides the following interpretation:

The chilling nature of the film is that the empty chair invites the audience to imagine taking a journey to an uninhabitable realm where it is impossible to breathe, the temperature is minus 60 below and the sky now resembles the blackness of space.

 – from the Simon Faithfull website page ‘Escape Vehicle no.6‘

The overall thematic purpose of the series, Gravity Sucks, is a confrontation with human limitation, failure, and a sense that our dreams and ambitions overreach our capacities:

Gravity Sucks is a body of work that mourns the human condition of being a three-dimensional object that is stuck to a two-dimensional surface.

– from the Simon Faithful website page ‘Gravity Sucks‘

By contrast, the lux, high-defintion Toshiba project with its comfortable looking armchair is not an admission of limitation or failure, but a boast – this is what humans can achieve! And in particular: this is what Toshiba has achieved!

Both films end with the destruction of the chair at the edge of space, but the take away from the Toshiba film  is certainly not one of human limitation. I feel like they loved the idea of sending a chair to space, and of being patrons of the arts, but I don’t feel like they quite understood this artwork. We can look at it as a reinterpretation, straightforwardly rejecting the pessimism of the original piece, but then one has to wonder why they didn’t simply end on the image of the chair hanging in space. You can also look at it as them helping an artist realise his dream… but Simon Faithfull had already done that, and done it with funding from Arts Catalyst, and it’s clear that his original piece is more cohesive with his broader work.

It’s a perplexing and interesting tension, but one that I feel ultimately reflects a corporate body not really understanding the artwork they are celebrating. What’s more, although Simon Faithfull did meet with Toshiba once to discuss the project, this article suggests he was not aware the film had been made until it was on YouTube, suggesting he may not have had much creative input and very likely was not paid for the use of his idea. So any notion of celebrating creative innovators falls even flatter.

Then there’s what SpacePorn has done. Which is perplexing in its own way.

Given that correct information about both Space Chair and Escape Vehicle no.6 is very easy to find, one can’t help but wonder just how little research SpacePorn did before they posted that tweet. Or were they deliberately obfuscating the issue to create a new myth, one that was more captivating and humourous?

And it is, you know – captivating and humourous. I love the idea that a chair is up in space right now for reasons of pure sureality. Although, as responding tweets were quick to point out, the sheer cost of putting anything in orbit made it highly unlikely that any space organisation had shot the chair up there just to amuse the astronauts.

I’m even more intrigued by how the meaning of the name changes in SpacePorn’s version. An escape vehicle named by someone shooting it up into the sky is obviously expressive of a wish to escape the Earth. But a whole different light is cast on the matter if it’s an object that‘s already in space that the astronauts have decided to dub ‘Escape Vehicle No. 6’ – like if something went wrong on the ISS an astronaut might attempt to escape by scooting along through space in an armchair.

On the one hand, I love this image. On the other, I’m irritated that yet another internet denizen is presenting lies as facts, and that they are obscuring the work of artists in order to create their own content. At the same time I’m fascinated by the philosophical issues raised by these cases: of the importance of originality, of what it is for something to be fake, of duality and duplication.

I’d say that all three represent works of art.

Toshiba’s is not very good art. It’s such a cliché to say a large corporation took something with originality and spark and smothered it with branding, but I think it’s hard to deny that that’s what’s happened here. It’s not a ‘fake’ per se, but they have copied the idea and, because they didn’t understand it to begin with, they managed to spend £3,000,000 on making an inferior version.

Part of me really wants to go against the obvious and encourage you to consider this not as a copy, but as a work in its own right, trying to do something different to the original. We can evaluate it as an advert: is it memorable? Does it demonstrate the product’s features? Does it create positive connotations for the brand?

Well, it’s fairly memorable and it does demonstrate the technology positively, but I don’t know that that makes it good, even as an advert. By sticking so closely to the original without understanding its themes the advert they’ve created ends oddly, uncomfortable with itself.

I don’t think SpacePorn’s version was necessarily intended as art, and yet it was a crafted work that evoked an interesting and pleasing concept. A concept that makes me wish that SpacePorn’s version was the truth. I like the version where we do witty things in space more than the version where we shoot for the stars and are doomed to fail. I’m actually even amused by just how confused their account of Escape Vehicle no.6 was – to the extent that this is a work of art that works because it presents another work of art as though it were not a work of art. I have to admit that I am madly curious about how much of this was deliberate. But at the same time I’m narked by the fact that they present themselves as an authority and yet they spouted such nonsense. The truth was pretty awesome, but not awesome enough for this twitter account, apparently.

Mostly I’m just intrigued by how much one can be driven to think about when presented by the thought of a chair in space. I end on no resolute conclusions, as what has tickled me most are the questions and the uncertainly of their answers.

Also? Two chairs definitely went to the edge of space. Humans did that. Because art. Enjoy.

Review: Hyperbole and a Half (book)

You may have seen me talk about Allie Brosh before, especially if you also follow me on Tumblr or Twitter. Her work also inspired the post ‘[S]hitty drawings are funny‘ – title drawn from her FAQ page, explaining her choice of a childish style of art for her comics. She’s basically become a major hero for me, and for everyone else I know who suffers from depression. Her posts, ‘Adventures in Depression‘, ‘Depression Part Two‘, and ‘This is Why I’ll Never be an Adult‘ should be mandatory reading for anyone who has never had a mental illness trying to understand someone who has, and prescribed reading for those of us who suffer from depression.

She doesn’t solely write about her depression. Many of her stories are delightful tales of a mischievous childhood. Such as ‘Menace‘, the story of what happened when her parents gave her a dinosaur costume, or ‘The God of Cake‘, the story of the amazing cake her mother made, which Allie felt compelled to gain access to and consume. She also writes touching tales of the ‘Simple Dog‘ and the ‘Helper Dog‘ (Simple Dog pictured with her on the cover above), and her and her boyfriend’s kind, but often despairing efforts to look after them.

Allie speculates that the common spelling error ‘alot’ refers to a large, confused-looking beast.

In addition to her person life stories, she also makes comics that are just plain funny. You may recognise her work from such memes as the ‘Alot‘, ‘x ALL the ys’ (based on one of the drawings in ‘This is Why I’ll Never be an Adult’), and ‘Internet Forever’ (ditto). She also collaborated on a video for ‘Sueeve Shower Products for Men‘, based on her original post ‘How to make Showering Awesome Again‘. Which you should all watch, because it is hilarious.

An excerpt from one of Allies comics which is frequently adapted to substitute other things for ‘clean’ and ‘things’.

All of which is to say that I’m a fan, and, actually, half the Internet is a fan, they probably just don’t realise that they’re a fan of memes that were based on her artwork. I’ve been a fan for years, and had been eagerly anticipating the release of her book. Whilst she was writing her book, Allie’s blog went silent for quite a long time. I was aware that she struggled with depression, but I nevertheless assumed that at least part of it was that the book was requiring a lot of her attention. In 2010 she made 78 posts, in 2011 she made only 5. The last of which was ‘Adventures in Depression’, followed by ‘Depression Part Two’ in 2013. Allie had been depressed for a long time, and severely so – she had contemplated suicide.

What it’s like talking to non-depressed people about depression.

Nevertheless, Allie had completed her book, and she could see the light at the end of the depression tunnel again. You might have thought that a two year gap in posting might obliterate your fanbase, but not so, for Allie. The Internet exploded with outpourings of shared emotion in response to ‘Depression Part Two’. She talked about aspects of depression that nobody ever talked about – and there are a LOT of people talking about depression on the Internet, these days. I’m one of them. She talked about the things I was afraid to talk about. The things my friends who are also depressed had not mentioned as a part of the experience. And she expressed it just so. And with the wit, humour, and poignancy that has made her the type of blogger who can post nothing for two years and still command the attention of the Internet.

I have never wanted to buy a book based solely off what I’ve seen on the Internet so badly. I wanted to have the book, and I wanted to support Allie. I wanted her to be a success because she deserves it, but I also wanted her to know how important her words are to so many people. A friend of mine asked on Twitter a while back for recommendations of things to give to mentally healthy people to explain depression to them. I said immediately ‘Allie Brosh’s Depression, parts one and two’, and he said ‘Of course! I can’t believe I didn’t think of that, that’s perfect’. Because it is. There are so many different ways to experience depression, and often that can make it difficult to explain, because one person can give their symptoms, and they won’t match those of another whose feelings are just as valid. But that’s not the case with Allie. I mean, sure, she has some symptoms I don’t and vice versa, but I don’t know anyone who has depression who has read her posts who didn’t identify strongly with the core of what she was saying, or find that she was saying something they themselves had struggled to put into words. In particular, the struggle of talking to non-depressed people about how you feel seems to have hit home. How you end up having to try to protect their emotions, because they will become distressed at hearing how you are, even though how you are is just normal for you, and their distress just becomes something extra you have to manage. And how the way everyone seems to think they can solve your problems with simple and utterly irrelevant answers.

I’ve had a hard time, lately. A financially insecure time. I wanted to buy her book, but wasn’t sure I could excuse the expense, so I asked for it for Christmas. And I got it. And I’m so glad. It has been such a comfort.

Of course, it contains many stories I have read before. It’s wonderful to own them in such a colourful, physical edition that I can just flip through whenever I need them. But it also has many that I haven’t read before: delightful, funny, witty, insightful. Sometimes, when I’ve been very low, it was all I could do to just lie there in bed, and there was Allie’s book. Within arms reach. Full of such comfort and delight. The childlike, primitive, style of her drawings is so easy to identify with. For we are all children inside – confronted constantly with the confusion and wonder of the world, at sea in a world that expects us to have found some sort of secret ‘adult’ perspective. We are brought back to the powerful and clean emotions of childhood: enthusiasm for life and despair at its challenges, and it allows us to see that those emotions are still with us, under the layers of adult behaviour and requirements. Whether you have depression and need the connection that tells you that other people feel this way, too; or you don’t, and you need to connect to loved ones who do, Allie’s unique style somehow captures a perspective that is easy for anyone to relate to.

I’d give a copy to everyone I know if I could (and if I didn’t know some of them would be put off by the swearing). This book is just… a gift to the world.

I know I’ve mostly talked about parts of it you can already go read online, but I don’t want to spoil the surprises of the bits you can’t. And they’re just as good. Just as delightful. Just as spirit-lifting. I don’t know how else to convey how wonderful and important this book is. Go buy it. Buy it for yourself. Buy it for those you love. Everyone should read and share the experiences of this book.

Serene Slumber Party 3: X-Men: Season One, by K V Taylor

Please put your hands together to warmly welcome the most awesomesauce K V Taylor. Particularly so as I have been a bad Womble and utterly failed to upload the review she kindly sent to me weeks ago. The reasons are illness, both physical and mental, but given Katey provided this for me as a favour because I knew I wouldn’t be able to post myself, it’s not much of an excuse.

K V Taylor wants to be introduced merely as a fantasy/horror writer and comic book junky, but I’ll go one further and say that she’s a pretty neato person whose opinions and tastes I have come to respect. You can find her at her website, Tumblr, and Twitter, all of which I recommend.

X-Men: Season One
Written by Dennis Hopeless
Art by Jamie McKelvie
Review by KV Taylor

Last year, Marvel Comics began releasing a series of graphic novels that gave some of their most popular heroes a little backstory update. As a comic book pusher, I actually think it’s a spectacular idea. Jumping into comics can be daunting – all that backstory, all that continuity, all those know-it-all fans. Enter the Season One books and hey! All the background you need in one easy dose, right?

Cover art by Julian Totino Tedesco.

There’s not a whole lot new with these stories, but what makes them special and worthwhile to longtime readers is seeing them come together as a coherent whole between one artist and one writer, and how they change little things up to present the story in new and interesting ways.

The best example so far of that has been the X-Men book, so I’m going to stick to that for my review. Hopeless adheres closely to Marvel canon: the original five X-Men (Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Beast, Iceman, and Angel), are recruited by Charles Xavier to come to his school to learn to control their powers. Adventure ensues, including their first run-in with Xavier’s old friend Magneto-as-mutant-supremacy-terrorist and his equally classic if slightly more ridiculously named line up, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (Toad, Blob, Quicksilver, and the Scarlet Witch).

CAPTION: Hank meets the Bad Guys.

There is a dearth of lady stories with the Season One books so far, which is what makes it extra great that Jean (Marvel Girl) is the voice of Hopeless and McKelvie’s X-Men. Hopeless’s Jean is not only the only one who seems to see the flaws in Xavier’s program from the beginning, but her relationships with each of the others have been changed up and intensified to become both the main plot engine and a symbol of their growing coherence as a team.

I’m just gonna leave this here…

Her relationship with Xavier has often been called creepy, and not without reason. Hopeless and McKelvie acknowledge and update that with her constant questioning of how and why Xavier has brought them there, and why this ‘private boarding school’ he’s convinced their parents to send them to is more training against random baddies in the ‘danger room’ than calculus homework. She likes it, but she isn’t sure why or how – or that she should.

In the original 60s version, both Warren (Angel) and Scott (aka “Slim” back in the day, Cyclops) crushed on Jean hard – hence the tension (and her reputation with some fans as a ‘Mary Sue’, but the problems inherent in that are waaaaay off topic, so I’ll just let that be for now). This time around, as Jean gets to know Warren better and faster than any of the others, she’s the one with the crush – and Warren figures it out just late enough to screw up.

And let’s not deny the power of a rich pretty-boy best friend… with wings. I don’t blame her.

Yeah, strapping your wings down to your back to hide them from your own parents is pretty messed up. Good call, Jeannie. Takes one to know one.

Meanwhile, the canon relationship everyone knows (whether they love it or not is a question of personal taste) is developing in the background – Scott (Cyclops) is being hyper-pressured by Xavier to turn into some kind of mutant leader-man… and simultaneously developing the most awkward interest ever in an oblivious Jean. This change-up in one of the oldest love triangles in comic history is a pretty loud example of how refreshing these titles can be for longtime readers. Much more rewarding for new ones, in some ways, since (good) modern romantic subplots tend to focus more on why the couple are good for each other, how they bring out the hero in each other, rather than ‘woman as prize in a pissing match’.

Her mutual-respect friendship with Hank (Beast) is beautifully done as well – when she needs an escape from the madness, she leans on Hank, and he leans right back in his hour of doubt. Her older sister deal with Bobby (Iceman) is less well fleshed out, but it does provide more than a few hilarious moments. It’s Jean’s voice we read in the exposition boxes, and it’s Jean’s changing relationships with her team and the mutant-hostile world around her that tie the story together.

With the occasional giggle involved, obviously. Nice cheek chillers, Iceman.

But they aren’t the only ones that count. Hank and Bobby’s trademark friendship, one of the greatest things about the original comics, is well-celebrated, and the driving force behind the discovery of Magneto’s ‘evil lair’ – and Xavier’s involvement with Magneto, which leads to a disillusioned Hank in the long run. Scott and Warren have relatively few scenes together, same with Scott/Bobby and Warren/Bobby, which is a shame, but what they do get is so perfectly characterized and balanced that it still feels mostly satisfying. Xavier and Scott… well…

This is what I mean about hyper-pressured.

Easy to see why he ended up the Cyclops people love to hate these days. (The Avengers vs. X-Men debacle… Long story. Don’t read it, trust me.) But also easy to see how he needs Jean to balance him out, and how he could inspire her to let loose her fierceness. Because oh, is Jean fierce.

The writing is just the right touch with these kinds of largely unspoken dynamics, but what pushes it over the top is McKelvie’s trademark clean lines and way with body language. His concept for each of them is at once perfectly in line with classic X-Men designs, but with that deft touch of the modern that few other artists manage–and he makes it look easy, as usual. I could basically go on about Jamie McKelvie all day, though, so I’ll spare you. Just. He’s my favorite currently working artist in comics, so I might’ve had a minor fangirl freakout when I saw he was on the X-Men title.*

Best panel ever? Quite possibly.

The book has its flaws, of course. The story tends to meander, without one coherent plotline, but several smallish encounters with the outside world and Magneto’s Brotherhood that build on each other. One of the pitfalls of trying to showcase an ensemble cast in a single GN rather than in serial with multiple storylines, ala monthly comics. Backstory wise, we’re mainly focused on Jean, of course, Hank, and Warren. A little more of Scott and Bobby would’ve balanced things out. And this is just a personal thing, since I have deep love for the original Brotherhood, but the only recruit we see happen is Blob. I get it, it would’ve been a digression, otherwise, but I like my villains fleshed out, and Magneto is one of the best ever. S’okay, I don’t hold that one against them.

Who could say no to a man this sassy?

This is more a story of these characters realizing that their place in the world right now is together, taking care of business, rather than the direct civil rights movement parallel that it was back in the 60s, which I think wise. Of course that element will always be there, especially for the X-Men, but let’s face it: telling a story that belongs to PoC with white characters is a dick move on multiple levels. Yes, Stan Lee was way ahead of his time–and still is in many ways. Marvel does a lot of things wrong, but a lot of things right, when it comes to that.

Are there other ways to get into comics? Definitely. X-Men: First Class (not the movie, which has nothing to do with comic canon) was a great title for that, and reads well. Or you could just start with the current Marvel!NOW titles, in which the Avengers and X-Men are all scrambled, but the combinations are all still new. (Possibility: the upcoming X-Men #1 by Wood and Copiel, with its all-lady cast.) But Season One is more bang for your buck, and it’s one of the best-looking comics I own thanks to Jamie McKelvie. Longtime fans, it’s worth it for the change-ups and the pretty. Hop on board, I say.

*McKelvie and longtime collaborator Kieron Gillen are on the new Young Avengers title. I’m pretty sure it will be amazing, if you’re looking for a monthly to jump on. #1 drops January 23.

Box Art

Now that Christmas has passed and all presents have been given, I am liberty to post them in the world.

A local shop started selling these nice-but-plain-looking wooden boxes, you see. And as I’ve got a bit of a black and silver paint thing going on at the moment, I thought it might be quite effective to paint them up in such colours, especially as a very dear friend had a significant birthday approaching, and I couldn’t afford to get her anything exciting. And so, came the first box*:

I was really pleased with the effect, so I did another one as a Christmas present, this time on a tentacle theme for a friend of the Lovecraftian persuasion:

But the one that took me the longest, and of which I am now most proud was one I made for a friend who’s been there for me a lot over the last few years and who watches Game of Thrones with me (her husband has, too, if he’s reading, but after I made this I didn’t have time to make one for him and so got him Darth Vader chocolate/ice cube moulds instead):

When I first started this I really had no comprehension of the work it would involve, but I am nonetheless pleased with the results. You can see here the sigils of the houses of the contenders for the Iron Throne: Lannister (lion) and Stark (dire wolf) fight it out on the front, embodying more typical coat of arms poses; Baratheon (the stag) is on the side, to the right hand of the Starks, sheltering under a weirwood tree; on the back is the kraken of house Greyjoy, its tentacles sprawling with the branches of the tree onto the top; coming from the back round onto the side is the three-headed dragon of the Targaryens, with the flowers of the Tyrells just edging up the side.

Anyway, once I was finished I wanted it for myself, which I think is always a sign of a good present.

*Please excuse the poor camera skills throughout. It said it was running out of battery, so I rather rushed things… now suspect if may have been lying.

I had an idea, but I’m unsure how to realise it

So, I had what I thought was a really great idea. I checked it with some trusted friends who would have pulled faces at me if it were utterly daft, and they agreed that it sounded like a pretty good idea, like an idea they could get behind. The idea was to illustrate one of my pieces of flash fiction, or, more ambitiously, a set of pieces of my flash fiction – most of which would be things I have already had published – and, in the less ambitious vein, to produce a PDF that could function as some sort of give-away when I reach 500 Twitter followers (or other suitable milestone, depending on how long this takes me). In the more ambitious vein (possibly if the giveaway goes well) I might launch a Kickstarter (or non-US equivalent) to produce a short run of quality illustrated books.

I haven’t done much art lately because I’ve been busy with my PhD. But I’ve done some good work in the past and it seemed like a reasonable and fun thing to do whilst I’m on a leave of absence from said PhD. One never gets paid very much for flash fiction anyway, and if one has already had one pay cheque from it there doesn’t seem to be that much wrong with turning the piece of flash fiction into artwork for kicks and giggles.

So. But. I’m impatient. I had the idea and I wanted to start as soon as I got home. As depression has been kicking my enthusiasm and motivation for pretty much everything, lately, it didn’t seem like such a bad idea to just go with the flow. Unfortunately, it turns out that a lot of my paper was damaged by the mould and damp in the various hell holes I lived in prior to Lovely Flat. Also, I didn’t have any good sketching pens, and I knew I didn’t want to work in pencil. What I did have was a silver pen and a small amount of black card. So, I sat down and did a number of sketches that surprised me by actually looking pretty good.

Problem 1: I really didn’t have a lot of the black card.

So, I sketched away and produced a lot of things I really liked but which would need scanning into the computer and separating out from each other in order for me to do anything with them. I went into town the next day and found some slightly less good quality, but much more plentiful, card, and a black pen, in case the whole black and silver combo turned out to be as bad an idea for scanning in as I feared it might be.

My first scan.

Problem 2: The black and silver combo does not work well once you scan it in. At least, not on my old HP psc 1317 all-in-one printer and scanner.

I also tried photographing it, which in some ways was better, but is still not really like the quality I’d need for my project. My results turned out like this:

I then tried fiddling with the scan settings, but it didn’t really make a difference.

I also tried using PaintShop Pro to render it all into black and white, but I’m not sure the results look all that great, either.

My attempt at converting it to black and white, plus the first few lines of the text.

You can see, here, I also made my name smaller, as it had been throwing the composition off, and I tried it out with a few lines of text just to see how that would play.

(Note: this one looks OK small like this, but if you click through to see it full size you’ll see what I mean about the pixelation. It just looks amateur, and that’s not what I’m going for.)

Finally, I had a go with my camera. The silver looks OK, like this, but it’s hard to photograph at a high enough quality, properly focused, and with the paper not at the right angle.

The best of the photos I took.

Well, I like to do things for myself, but if you can’t get it right there comes a point where you need to ask if anyone with more experience can give you some guidance. None of the above make the picture look as good as it does in person. I have limited equipment and resources. Should I give up on the silver-on-black thing altogether? Is there a better way to work with the camera or the scanner? Are there cheap professional services that can do this for me? Should I just redraw it all in black on white, or is there a way to render the scanned image into black and white that doesn’t make everything look a bit pixelated?

Thoughts?

Save Romatically Apocalyptic!

Only just over a week ago I discovered this most unusual and high-quality of comics.But – woe is all of us! – Romantically Apocalyptic is in real danger of disappearing for an unknown period of time. Basically, the computer of the awesome dude who creates this most impressive of comics has died. I don’t usually go in for the ‘please help pay for x of y complete stranger’ but this is a cause I want to support. I don’t have a lot of money to donate to supporting the arts, but I contributed a meagre amount. Because this work goes so far beyond just about anything else I can think of in terms of quality and labour-intensitivity for something given out for free.

Alas, although most of the fans seem aghast at the circumstance, most of them seem to be as skint as me, if not more so. If you liked my review, if it persuaded you to go read the comic and you liked that, please consider donating. I know times are hard believe me, but we need to support artists in the hard times if we want to live in a rich and entertaining culture. More info over at their site, under the faux-scream.

Review: Romantically Apocalyptic

It’s all got a bit comicsy in Womblevonia. I don’t think of myself as someone who reads a lot of webcomics, but these days, it seems I do, and slowly, by following links from one to another, I get introduced to more. In this case, Coelasquid, who writes the awesome Manly Guys Doing Manly Things, mentioned on her tumblr that she was up against Romantically Apocalyptic in ComicMix’s March Madness Webcomic Tournament. I poked my nose over, always happy to support those who give me pleasure, but I thought, ‘No, I will be a good girl and check out the competition, rather than just voting on bias’. So I clicked the link and went over to Romantically Apocalyptic, and…

Oh my goodness.

This is a wallpaper made by the creators for use in promotion, so I'm sure they won't mind me posting it here. Click through to view full size.

I’ve just never seen art this stunning in a comic before, and it happens to concern one of my very favourite things: apocalypse. I’d say they made it just for me, except that one of its few flaws is a certain lack of women. Not that I’m going to press that complaint too strongly. It’s doing a number of interesting things with gender, one of which is that the main* character’s gender is ambiguous. More on that later, first, let me tell you a little more of what it’s about.

The Captain and his (or her) two gas-masked companions, Pilot and Mr Snippy, are three of the last human beings left on Earth. The story unfolds slowly. At first we are introduced only to the Captain and his/her companions, who seem content to wander the wastelands, finding what enjoyment they can in the end of the world. The Captain doesn’t appear entirely sane, and Pilot seems even less so, but in the absence of other companionship, Snippy appears content to follow the Captain’s deranged but faultlessly optimistic lead. Slowly, though, the seemingly random and amusing events of their lives start to fit together and reveal elements of the past: how the world got to be this way, and how three such unlikely companions would come to spend what’s left of their lives in this way.

The revelation of back story is catalysed by the advent of an alien spaceship, which attempts to abduct Snippy and the Captain, but proves ultimately unable to face up to the force of nature the Captain comprises. In retaliation, the aliens send out Biomass 117, which the Captain takes to be Cancer, summoned by a handbag s/he found that supposedly contains cancer-causing chemicals. In an attempt to better understand the Captain, Biomass 117 captures Snippy and starts absorbing his memories, and through this, we learn, also, what has happened.

Not wanting to spoil too much, I shall merely say that what is revealed is fascinating and still incomplete. I can’t wait to see how the rest unfolds. The Captain is enigmatic and fabulous, whilst poor benighted Snippy manages to effectively garner one’s sympathy. The mixture of joy and desolation is quite compelling, and the slowly unfurling plot reveals a world that only becomes weirder and more interesting as time goes on.

And I really can’t praise the artwork enough. Photographs of models in real places are blended seamlessly with digital artwork in what has clearly been a labour of love that goes above and beyond what one would usually expect of a humble webcomic (although I know that even the humblest of these generally take much longer to produce than many people realise). Employing models whose identity is anonymised by the gas-masks they wear also adds an interesting twist. Gender remains ambiguous until confirmed by story elements. We see Mr Snippy in the past, and know him to be male, but even in the past the Captain’s features are hidden from us. We have only the reactions of those around him or her to go on. Most refer to the Captain as male, but s/he is also taken to be a girl in a flashback to his or her childhood. Moreover, the character is reputedly modeled by both men and women, and the main model is female. I quite like that this is ambiguous, and although part of me naturally wants to know, I rather hope that it remains so. It would be great to have a character like this – all excentric enigmatic charisma and easy command – that was female, but it would be equally wonderful to have a charismatic and commanding male character whose favourite object was a mug with a giant red heart on it and who is as happy to carry around a Hello Kitty handbag as a bomb.

Incidentally, if you’re not into romance, do not be put off by the title. There is some hint that the comic is romantic in the sense of taking a romanticising aesthetic on the apocalypse, more than anything else, although it is clear that Pilot has feelings of some description for the Captain, and the creepy super-computer, Annie, (which may have helped cause the destruction of everything) seems to feel some twisted kind of affection for the engineer, Alexander Gromov. It may be that romance is on the cards somewhere down the line, but what is clear for now is that things are only just getting going. I can’t wait to see where it goes next, and in the meantime, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

And, in case I haven’t convinced you yet, one of my favourite sequences, for your delectation:

The only trouble now is that I can’t decide on my vote for March Madness…

*Although, as time goes on I’m half convinced that Snippy is the true protagonist.

Because I’d like to post about something wonderful, now

Read this. It was described as a ‘rage’ comic on tumblr (I found it via It’s a Space Romance, which I went to to cheer myself up.) I don’t really know what a ‘rage’ comic is, but I thought it was beautiful and heart-rending and life-affirming. An 86 year old reflecting back on their life in comic form.

People seem to be saying a lot ‘I hope it’s real’. Me too. It never occurred to me that it wasnt when I was reading it.

Relevant to my Interests: Man with Wings

As some of you will know, I’m currently writing a superhero novel. Some of those people know that its lead character is a man with wings. Others of you will have seen the background of my twitter account, which includes a copy of a painting I did four (?) years ago, of a man with wings. This is not the only piece of artwork I have done of people with wings. I like drawing wings, I like drawing people, I like the combination. Anyway, point is that this was a thing that was likely to be relevant to my interests, hopefully it is also to yours!

(image via @mhtoomes on Twitter)

This, I’m reliably informed, is Sufjan Stevens. Who it turns out is a rather cool musician. I would not have heard of him but for his admirable wings. Kudos to you, sir! Only too happy to spread the love and point people at this rather beautiful song of yours:

(via @Contrarah on Twitter)