THE WATERWORKS

I’ve never had much use for religion. My parents were not religious. It wasn’t that we were atheists. We had some sort of generalised belief that there was something more than this. It just seemed wrong to deny that there was more than this life we have. Like we would be eliminating the idea of possibilities. Even so, I am still a person raised in the West, and Judæo-Christian framing is part of my world view, if only because it has been the one I’ve been most often exposed to.

I was also raised in a relatively nonjudgmental fashion (who are you to think you’re better than they are?), and I’ve been grateful for that, though to say I am unbiased and nonjudgmental would be a lie. Life after you grow up shapes you in ways you never expected, but if your parents do the job right, they instill you with values that will carry you through your life if you choose to listen to them.

The unfortunate part is that we’re not all instilled with the same values. Unfortunate not because one set of beliefs is inherently better than another, but because we’re all stupid enough to think that our beliefs are better than the other guy’s and we’re willing to back it up with force. In their benign forms, all the world’s religions are about tolerance and understanding and living within the law of humanity so that we can grow and live lives of peace. If you are a person of faith living in that context, all the power to you. It’s a source of great strength, I’m sure.

Look at us, though. We’re all in the process of swallowing our tongues while someone offers us a glass of water. It’s a holy war so that we can live in peace and freedom, and we’re on the right side. God is on our side because we have the right religion. Which religion? Fundamentalist Christianity and Islam bear little difference from each other. Each side continues to ramp up the rhetoric and the oppression, forcing ever-more-rigid interpretations of scripture that gives no one a chance to take a step back and compromise gracefully. Americans put bible code on their rifle scopes, and their opponents believe paradise and virgins await them in death. But we are fighting because our world is shrinking. The peaceful ideas of faith continue to be used to justify aggression.

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We are facing a steady erosion of basic human rights regardless of whether we are first world or third world. Our governments no longer listen to us, because they believe we have no power and no influence.

And we never will until we get good and angry about that and remember what it is to think critically as citizens, not consumers.

Click on the image to download a PDF.

It’s been a time of reassessing my creative work, brought on by a change of the day job back at the end of September 2009. In some ways it’s meant jettisoning some things that have been gathering dust on my shelves for many years. In others, it’s meant investing in some new tools.

Case in point, I do comic book work sometimes, and I still draw 10″x15″ ink artwork on 11″x17″ pieces of bristol. Scanning that on a standard letter-sized scanner (like my Epson Perfection 4870 Photo), as good a scan as that is, means making two to three scans of each page and then stitching them together in Photoshop. It’s a big pain.

Before I go any further, I’ll say that I’ve received no consideration for my remarks, and have no relationship with these brands other than buying them. My workflow is Mac based.

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I’m happy to announce the release of my first novel, Return to Barsoom, a free ebook available here in PDF and EPUB format.

Return to Barsoom is a modern look at Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars. Burroughs began his series of 11 books with A Princess of Mars in 1912, and ended with The Skeleton Men of Jupiter in 1942.

Burroughs is one of the best of the early science fiction writers who started out in pulp magazines. He is better known for creating Tarzan.

When I began reading the Tarzan books I was 12 or 13, and I thought they were fantastic. The first few were the best. I continued on to read ERB’s other works, which included the Carter books. Whatever Burroughs may have lacked in subtlety in his writing, his stories were always imaginative and rich with detail.

Rereading the stories as an adult in the late 1980s, some of the underlying assumptions in Tarzan and John Carter were out of place in today’s world. Both series of books are in the genre of colonial fiction. The educated western man will invariably triumph and rule over ’savages’. It is his rightful place in the order of things.

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I recently read a piece on why people won’t buy tablet computers.

You can read the article for the full argument, but the points that stuck out for me are:

• High cost for a new technology that many will be unwilling to pay for
• Typing on a touchscreen keyboard is an ergonomic nightmare
• It’s a tween device, more powerful than your smart phone, but not as powerful as a current computer, making it an optional third device
• The author’s sum-up statement: “Tablets need to cost a lot less and do a lot more before they establish a foothold in the consumer market.”

In the short term, the author has a good chance of being proven right, but I think beyond a year or two he’s missing the mark.

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The grade nine science trip to Calgary was pretty cool. Four-and-a-half hours by school bus (without seatbelts, woohoo) from Cranbrook to Calgary at some god awful early hour. A visit to the planetarium, another to the zoo, and a stop at a shopping centre (I think it was Chinook, but I can’t really recall), and then four-and-a-half hours in the school bus back across the mountains. It was a very, very long day.

With the death of Farrah Fawcett this week, I was reminded that in 1979 her famous poster was still much admired by teen boys. But I had other ideas about what would look good on the walls of my bedroom, and the (still) amazing cutaway technical illustration by David Kimble of the updated original Enterprise called out to me from the wall of the poster shop.

So while the other guys bought posters of Farrah Fawcett, Cheryl Tiegs and maybe Loni Anderson, my choice was… suspect. In reality, I liked Jan Smithers a whole lot more than Loni Anderson (I still have an aversion to large-breasted blondes), but they didn’t make a poster of Bailey Quarters. And Bailey would have understood anyways.

A follow up to the previous pencil drawings. Will be coloured and will replace the older splash images currently on the site.

Here are some more images that will be used for the website. That’s Nuit Blanche above. Below is a heroes cast shot with Midnight Lady, Captain Canada, Three, Captain Clockwork Jr., and ExPatriot. Below that are some of the villains: Negative Three, Masquerade and The Wild Canadian Beaver in the foreground, and the Science Syndicate troops will fill out the background.

When I was a young man, I thought being book smart made me smart in life, but I was absurdly stupid about the latter. Much of my life has been spent on my own and social interaction is something I find challenging to this day. I’ve never quite found my comfort spot, but at this point I’ve made my peace with that part of my character and more or less accept what I am and what I am not.

At 21 though, I was years away from understanding anything about myself, and I was at the end of my first three years at the Alberta College of Art (now ACAD). College was not like high school, and the visual communications program demanded a level of maturity, discipline and talent I did not have at that point in my life. And not being able to deal with it, my behaviour was disruptive and not appropriate for someone who was hoping to become a contributing member of society, let alone a creative professional.

It came down to the third year jury crit where it was recommended that I not return for the fourth year. A smarter, stronger person would have stepped back and taken it as the “this is your life and you’re throwing it away,” and dealt with it, but all I felt was weak and defeated and unable to cope with the situation and so I was gone without a fight.

(There’s some other stuff in there about the fact that I had gone to school because I wanted to do comics, and comics were very much looked down upon by that generation of faculty, and I was impatient to do the work that I loved, but let’s stick with the design aspect and learning to be an adult.)

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Here’s a recent illustration done for Alberta Venture. We built the entire Meeting + Convention Planning Guide around isometric drawing language which began with this piece. The secondary language of path traces came from electronic circuit diagrams and the classic map of the London Underground.

Sketch and magazine layout below.

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