Moh Life Drawin'

Some life drawing from earlier this spring, using pencil brushes in ProCreate. Theme was pirates.

Generative AI frenzy: Adobe Firefly vs. Midjourney

A spaceship on the moon... looks more like Mars, but whatever. The details on the ship are dodgy, but the overall impression is quite good. With a bit of editing, it's usable. From Firefly.

Companies are going bananas over generative AI. It's being hailed as a tectonic shift, an existential crisis, a matter of 'embrace or die'. 

Is it really all that?

No. 

Is it useless and laughably bad? 

Also no. 

Wasn't super keen on these Firefly results; the hands are as messed up as earlier versions of Midjourney

It can be useful, it's already being embedded in services we use every day, yet it also has serious limitations (it's not 'thinking', it's just probability predicting based on a huge pool of nevertheless limited data). 

One big issue with Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are the ethical (and legal) issues, which stand in the way of wider commercial adoption. The top reasons for companies to adopt new software, after all, are efficiency and price. If it's cheaper, easier and faster, it'll be looked into. But only if it doesn't bring on all sorts of complicated legal headaches. No one wants to deal with the Legal Team. Sorry, guys.

The frog was meant to be serving the tea, but this is close enough. Looks pretty good!

Adobe's Firefly is designed to be used commercially from the get go: it's trained only on public domain art and Adobestock, which they have rights to. 

So how does Firefly stack up against the perfidious scrape happy Midjourney? 

Good question. 

I spent 4 months fiddling with Midjourney (before cancelling my subscription), and recently I got in on the Beta for Firefly. 

A psychadelic Firefly desert; I quite like this one.

My expectation for Firefly were (probably unreasonably) high: Adobe is the international standard for professional graphics software, and according to their press release, they're planning on incorporating Generative AI into virtually all their other products.

The interface is clean and simple It has a text input field, plus categories to help spark ideas, paired with little icons. I'm not keen on on them: they feel more limiting than helpful, and the icons are too small to get anything out of them:

The image output is... varied. Some is quite good, but much is still dodgy around the edges. The biggest issue right now is subjective: I am not finding the Firefly output as compelling as Midjourney's. 

That's one interesting US flag on the upper right

The quality difference is, perhaps, telling: many Firefly renders often look like stock art, because the tool was trained on, well, stock art. Midjourney renders have more pizazz. They are often better composed, with more impressive colour schemes and just feel... a lot more fun. 

And that fun factor is very likely derived from the living artists and the millions of copyright artwork that Midjourney (and Stable Diffusion) were trained on. 

Generative AI is only as good as the stuff you feed it. Stock in, stock out.

Maybe I'm imagining it. You decide.

I don't mean to sell Firefly short. Some images are production ready or very close to it. My views are somewhat jaded thanks to thousands of Midjourney images.

Stock, just slightly messed up deformed stock (first one); the others I wouldn't be able to tell without close examination, and even if then, maybe not

Overall I like these, but if you look closely the details (as is typical of AI output) don't hold up.

So while Midjourney is (to me) leagues ahead of Firefly, and Firefly will likely never be able to catch up, perhaps Adobe doesn't intend for that to ever happen anyway. Adobe's goal may just be to provide a cheap customizable stock art alternative for people to use and modify. It will undercut Getty Images and the other stock houses (if Firefly is set at a competitive price point). 

A farm in Ukraine... turned out amazing. Still a bit of a stock feel to it, but I couldn't tell it was AI. How much of an original stock image does it pull in? Are some essentially verbatim?

If you look at dozens of Midjourney images, you notice a smooth slickness, a plastic feel, to them after awhile. Prompt wizardry can minimize or negate this, with lens types and whatnot. Haven't noticed that with Firefly, at least not yet.

Lower value jobs will go to Generative AI, much the same way stock dominates when budget doesn't allow for original art, and they can't find overeager students to exploit. But those jobs are already largely gone anyway.

Lowest common denominator content, generic stuff companies need but don't really care about, could be generated by AI and then curated by humans. 

If the lawsuits go against artists, AI will be more of a threat to job security.

A monkey chess piece rendered in Firefly; pretty solid!

The side nav, with the various categories and options in Firefly

Lenovo's Queen Latifa AI ad

Actual Latifa

This is pretty wild: personalized AI ads featuring Queen Latifa talking up small businesses across North America. 

She does look a little stiff in the AI generated section, with only the head moving, but otherwise it's very impressive, and this will only get better. 

That's not Latifa talking; it's AI leveraging her image and voice

I'm amazed how good her speech is. Sounds absolutely seamless to me, no jarring breaks between words, smoothly flowing, doesn't sound artificial at all.

Midjourney V5: hands up!

"They can do hands now!"

Ladies and gentlemen, Midjourney can now do hands.

They look... pretty good, actually. 

That didn't take long. Check out this article for more. 

Horrifically deformed hands were a hallmark of earlier Midjourney iterations, and (seemingly) major technical barrier blocking it from full fledged commercial use. I mean, aside from the rights and ethics issues. 

From a visual perspective, Midjourney's looking more impressive than ever. The artifacts and weird glitches are far fewer, the 'plastic' feel absent. Some pieces purporting to be done in Midjourney look to me like well rendered classical oil paintings. I still find it hard to believe some images are AI renderings and not originals. 

Some artists sniff that the AI art 'has no soul'. And yet, Midjourney is trained on art by MILLIONS of human souls, so I imagine some of that has filtered through, however gestalt soul mush it may be. 

I know of professional artists, ones far more talented than I (who are also anti-AI art), who have been fooled by these computer created concoctions. 

This is astonishing progress in a mere 8 months, and this is a technology still in its infancy. I keep wondering where it will be in ten years.. 

With Adobe launching their own AI renderer, Firefly, AI rendering is here to stay. 

We're about to see a whole lot more of it. 

 

On outgrowing franchises (Star Wars, natch)

"Is it enough that they can fly now?"

The very nature of television franchises is repetition: give them the same thing, only slightly different. Like eating the same bowl of porridge, just with different lighting. Characters do not evolve: they stay the same through the entire series. Their nature, interrelationships and circumstances shape the franchise stories, which always follow a similar pattern (or you're not getting greenlit), and everything resets at the end of every episode. 

This way, the series can be watched out of order in syndication. If the characters evolved and changed, you'd need new sets, new locations, new characters, and it would no longer be The Show anymore. Friction/conflict generates stories, and that comes from the dynamics of the cast. Someone is always the foil, for example. 

Real changes in franchises only occur when actors ask for too much money, or ratings dip and the show runners get desperate and add a cute fluffy dog to the cast. Or Ted McGinley, the Patron Saint of Shark-jumping, if you want to kill the show off quick. 

Eventually, after a couple decades of this endlessly churning story watermill, you get bored. People stop watching. Ratings dip. Cancelation strikes and the program is shipped off to the archives, or that Christian station that still airs Happy Days.

Times change, too, and what young viewers want to see now isn't what I wanted to see thirty years ago. I'd say kids are more media savvy (and saturated) than I was as a kid. I only had 3 channels plus PBS. Kids today have cable, multiple streaming services, movies, internet, YouTube, Tik Tok, Instagram, Facebook (or is that just for old fogies now?), cell phones, and stuff I'm not hip enough to keep up with. 

Franchises need to grow and adapt to stay fresh; sadly, such change also risks alienating earlier generations of viewers. 

Star Wars is a toy line with a film franchise that's migrated to television, where Mando remains Mando and Grogu is eternally an insufferably cute marketing placement. I mean baby. Even the films just cycle through the same stuff, blowing up the Death Star over and over and over again, or recycling the stories of entire earlier films, just juggling the order of events. Empire or First Order, Rebellion or Resistance, nothing really changes. 

Fortunately, by the time you're on the brink of death from boredom, there's a new generation waiting in the wings to replace you; after that, marketers don't give a crap what you watch. Just toddle off and die under a tree somewhere, old timer.

Franchises like Doctor Who, Star Trek and Star Wars I don't enjoy much anymore. It all blends together now, like some kind of gigantic genre pastiche golem. 

Took long enough! 

I tapped out of Who with the later Matt Smith era (too convoluted, characters all sound the same, and when everyone is snappy and glib, no one is), Star Trek changed too much (got dark and more like Star Wars), and Star Wars pumped out a deluge of poorly thought out content.

It's long past time I was done with Star Wars, in particular.

It is explicitly made for children. I'd say the first two films (Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back) are all ages films, but Return of the Jedi (and the Ewok merchandising placement) aimed at a much younger target audience, and the Prequels even more so. 

George Lucas has repeatedly and loudly affirmed that the films are for kids.

Maybe we should listen to the guy.

For example, in Kenobi where they escape from an Imperial base with Little Leia Lulu hidden under Obi Wan's trench coat, he looks like a character from the cartoon Bojack Horseman. I kid you not. I don't think this is political commentary on the Empire (which was an impressive logic pretzel someone tried to construct, and kudos for the effort), but if it is, it's preposterously hammy. My bet is that the writers thought little kids would find it funny, and they very well may. No doubt it's been tested with focus groups. It's Disney after all.

Yet when I was a kid, I hated shows that talked down to me. 

Some kids (and some adults!) will love Kenobi, but it just rubbed me the wrong way.

The characters in Kenobi have no more dimension than the cardboard cutouts populating The Abominable Book of Boba Fett. 

I am greatly enjoying shows like Severance, Better Call Saul, The Expanse, The Boys, Barry, Dark, Mindhunter, The Witcher, To the Lake, Bojack Horseman, Devs, Brooklyn Nine-nine, White Lotus, and Tales from the Loop. Many of these are bleak, but I find them much more compelling than Star Wars.

The whole franchise has been pulled along for almost 50 years based on the strength of the first two cinematic outings. Personally, I think they should have aimed at all ages rather than titling so far towards kids, but that's just me. 

I understand Taika Waititi is making the next Star Wars flick. If any director can get me to throw money away on this franchise, it's Taika or James Gunn. Both are smart, funny and have a strong creative voice. 

Jojo Rabbit showed Taika's got things to say; he comes across as someone with artistic integrity (and maybe also a creative madman; I cannot imagine trying to pitch the concept of that film and getting a green light). My fear is that Taika's sense of humour would make him a much, much better fit with Flash Gordon than Star Wars. 

The tone of Flash Gordon is almost identical to Ragnarok. They're a perfect match: both are fun, irreverent, wahoo space adventures. Pure fun.

The original directors of Solo were fired for deviating too much from the Star Wars tone (presumably making the film too funny), and I suspect Taika would make a wickedly funny film that is totally unacceptable to Disney stakeholders.

Change, just not too much change.

Could be wrong. I thoroughly enjoyed Thor: Ragnarok, and expect to like Love and Thunder (EDIT: I hate Love and Thunder). 

I was going to post this last July, but Andor really surprised me, so I shelved it for awhile. Andor's definitely for adults, and won't appeal to most kids. Hell, a lot of adult fans found it boring, but I loved it. That said, the whole franchise can't move in this direction: there's not enough of an audience for it, and you can't afford to alienate kids. 

But it was nice to see the franchise stretch.

Adobe's new AI renderer: Firefly

Step aside, Midjourney, Adobe's entering the AI renderer ring with Firefly.

The biggest thing about it? Firefly's built for commercial use. It was only trained on public domain, openly licensed images... plus Adobestock (which has hundreds of millions of professional grade images). 

Adobestock contributors will, apparently, be compensated; they're working on it.

So they say.

Adobe's going to integrate Firefly into Adobe Creative Suite all over the place. It'll be inescapable. Right  there on your interface, a click of a button away. On the most used design and illustration software in existence.

AI Renderering is going mainstream commercial, baby. 

Firefly is designed from the ground up for just that. Text, vector, raster... holy crap they are ambitious little heinzelmännchen, aren't they?

I've been wary of the AI renderers for a little while, both in regards to copyright, and the unethical sourcing of imagery, which Adobe's... solved? That and embedding it into products designers use every day is going to make it awfully tempting. 

From their site:

• First Adobe Firefly model will empower customers of all experience levels to generate high quality images and stunning text effects
• Adobe launches beta of first Firefly model focused on commercial use
• Adobe Firefly will be integrated directly into Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, Experience Cloud and Adobe Express workflows
• Adobe will introduce “Do Not Train” tag for creators who do not want their content used in model training; tag will remain associated with content wherever it is used, published or stored
• Adobe is planning to enable customers to extend Firefly training with their own creative collateral, generating content in their own style or brand language

Holy crap. 

Things are changing. 

Artist Karine Giboulo does Covid-19 lockdown

Some days I feel just like this...

Saw the Karine Giboulo: Housewarming show at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, tucked in across the street from the far better known ROM. The show's about the Covid-19 lockdowns, and it's a wonderfully fun, whimsical and idiosyncratic take:

"Enter a world at once familiar and uncanny. Montreal-based artist Karine Giboulo invites visitors into an immersive reimagining of her home. Brought to life by over 500 miniature polymer clay figures this is no ordinary house. The figures tell stories that unfold inside or on household furniture appliances and everyday objects.

Just the place to wear Kramer's fragrance: The Beach

On the kitchen countertop a line of people masked and socially distanced await access to a food bank. In the bedroom the drawer of a dresser opens to reveal rows of masked factory workers hunched over industrial sewing machines. In the laundry room a forgotten iron causes a forest fire forcing animals to flee their natural habitat."

It's a faux house filled with little figurines. Certainly a productive way to cope with Covid's disruption of all our lives. 

Rather than being a downer, it made me laugh. 

Posing before the Jeff Bezos Dick rocket

Hi ho, hi ho, a disinfecting we will go. 

This happened to me too.

Biohazard team to kitchen table one

It's even got the kitchen sink

A comment on all the horrors going on in the long term care facilities

Alexander Stubb vs. John Mearsheimer on the war in Ukraine

Former Finnish Prime Minister Alexander Stubb recently talked about John Mearsheimer's theory that the war was provoked by the US and NATO expansion. He presents five arguments:

Seductive Midjourney V4 Easy Bake Imagery

Midjourney is seductively easy. 

Write a prompt. Wait a minute and voila: result. Boom. Done. 

I stopped using Midjourney over the ethical issues, but it was damn fun. Midjourney creates a powerful and beguiling illusion of accomplishment, and every time I walked away I'd have another idea that'd draw me back in. 

There are really wonderful, idiosyncratic and inventive imagery being generated. Human users play the role of art directors and curators. 

The more I look at Midjourney imagery, easier it is to spot it in the social media wild. You have to dig into the history of visual arts and tailor your prompts to carve out a more distinctive, curated look. 

I didn't do much of that. My main interest was in sci-fi imagery, pictures to support stories I've either written or contemplated writing, as opposed to purely aesthetic explorations. 

If I ever go back to Midjourney, I'd like to explore aesthetics, and see if I can create a distinctive 'style' through advanced prompts. But I'd prefer the software to be ethically sourced before I do.

Anyway, these are some of the results I got:

A derelict cyclopbot stands sentinel over a desert oasis in Nevada

Beached freighter hulks on a salt flat

NeoBabylonian-Deco style tower over the Grand Canyon

Desert spring pool

Mr. Moogles and his post-apocalyptic junk shop

Werewolf reacts to the lack of fresh dog food at the Quickimart

Captain Nemo's leisure yacht

The lonely Blue Wizard Otho Four Star Box

The most accomplished Blue Wizard was Three Cone Methusaleh, who feuded with his brother Otho for centuries

Ukraine can’t win unless Russia agrees to lose

A year into the war and Ukraine has not only fought the Russians to a standstill, they've pushed Russia back across the Dnieper River and away from Kharkov (Okay, some say it was a tactical withdrawal to buy time, but my way sounds more dramatic). 

Amazing!

What Ukraine cannot do, however, is march upon Moscow and depose Putin. Even if they push Russian forces out of Ukraine, it won’t spell an end to the Russian threat. Putin can just take a few years to eat borsch and rebuild his armies and try again.  

 

The Russian army invaded with 190,000 troops against a Ukrainian army of 200,000, about a third of what Russia would need to win. Ukraine began full mobilization on day one, meaning that Ukraine may very well have had (at some point) more troops in the field than Russia did. 

 

Russia has taken horrific casualties (over 200,000) thanks to crude tactics. The invasion strategy was basically to pound a square peg into a round hole, and it didn't go well. Hundreds of Russian vehicles have been captured by the Ukrainians. Reliance on cell phones has helped Ukrainians eliminate Russian field commanders, while Russian logistics are so bad their Kyiv pincer ran out of gas, then food, and had to retreat, raiding convenience stores as they went. In their wake they left rape rooms, torture chambers and mass graves of the not-so-happily ‘liberated’. 

 

For all the labelling of the Ukrainians as Nazis, the Wagner mercenary group’s recruitment of convicted rapists and murderers is an echo of Oskar Dirlewanger’s charming SS brigade, a collection of thugs and criminals in WWII so odious even the SS distanced themselves from the unit. Which is surreal, as the whole purpose of the SS was industrialized mass murder. Maybe the Wangers were too ill mannered in their mass murderer. Convicts are notoriously ill disciplined and prone to committing atrocities, but it seems the regular Russian army is going to give The Wagner Wangers a run for their rubles.

 

Russia has mobilized 300,000 men, with another 500,000 more cannon fodder on the way. (Un)fortunately, these poor bastards (sorry, soldiers) are badly trained (or not trained at all) and poorly equipped. One video purported to show a Russian soldier armed with a pellet gun. At best, they’ll be using 60-year-old weapons and ammo that have been badly maintained (and may blow up in their faces). It’s Apocalypse Now meets a nightmarish and lethal version of Bugs Bunny.

 

Nothing new for Russia: in WWI, they used human wave attacks, and sometimes only 1 in 2 had a rifle; the other was to pick it up after the bearer was killed and carry on. Doesn't exactly instil confidence in the system. Many wars start out badly for Russia, though; then they course correct and plow over mountains of corpses to the win. 

This won’t end until the Russians (Putin specifically) decides to give up. 

 

How likely is that?

About the same as me winning the lottery.

Don't hold your breath: I don't buy lottery tickets.

 

And while Putin ponders, Ukraine is being wrecked. No doubt part of Putin’s plan: he wants a weak Ukraine, a neutered buffer state between Russia and NATO. Destroying Ukrainian infrastructure potentially increases pressure on Zelensky to seek accommodation. Yeah: won't work. The Ukrainians have no interest in ceding territory and NATO is pouring weapons in. Mass famine will hit before Ukraine ever considers surrender. 

 

Negotiation for Zelensky now would be political (and possibly the more existential variety) suicide. Arafat had the same problem. 

 

John Mearsheimer doggedly asserts that the war is being fought to the last Ukrainian, that they are puppets of the West, cynically manipulated into burning their own country to the ground. I am not so sure I buy that, whatever the folly of Bush pushing Ukrainian NATO membership. 

However much the United States relishes the opportunity to thwart Russia (and they do), it's the Ukrainians who are fighting. People who don't want to fight don't fight, no matter how many weapons you give them. The US provided billions in arms to South Vietnam, and they promptly collapsed after US withdrawal. Same with Afghanistan. They didn't want to fight, not on their own.

The Ukrainians, on the other hand, are fighting like demons in the defence of their country. Effectively. Resolutely. There are even partisans fighting in Russian held areas. That does not happen if there is no will to fight. 

After The Holodomor, back room interference and annexing Crimea, many Ukrainians just don’t want to be ruled from Moscow, and I can’t say I blame them. 

True, Western Ukraine is more anti-Russian than the East, which has a large Russian speaking population. Even given that, there doesn't seem a lot of support for the invasion in Eastern Ukraine. There have also been Russian atrocities in Eastern Ukraine, and the Donbas paramilitaries have been used as disposable cannon fodder. Is there not a point where you look at your rescuer, who's willing to throw your life away like it was a piece of toilet paper (and I'm talking post-Covid toilet paper crisis here), and question their benevolence? 

When someone says you are a brother, and then bombs, rapes and murders your fellows, do you believe they have your best interests at heart? 

No, the United States does not have the best interests of Ukraine at heart, either; they are first and foremost pursuing their own, yet these can align with Ukraine. So could Russia's, but since they've been flying hypersonic missiles into apartment buildings and flattening whole cities with artillery fire, I admit I am more dubious of Russia's motives than I am of the Americans. 

 

Russia is in stage five of demographic transition, they will eventually run out of soldiers, unless they want to roll in geriatrics. That bodes trouble for the Russian Empire down the line, as many ethnic groups in Russia have more robust demography and aren't keen on being ruled from Moscow. More regions may secede if Russian dominance falters. That'll be fun.

 

All the lives Putin is throwing away in human wave attacks means fewer potential fathers and fewer potential Russian families with fewer potential children. Same goes for Ukraine, which also is in stage five. There may be no one left to inherit their earth, which would be the ultimate tragedy for both sides.

 

Eventually, Putin will die, too. Mearsheimer and other poli-sci experts’ claim this will not change anything: Russia must dominate Ukraine, as an existential issue, and any Russian political leader who follows Putin will also be compelled to attack.

Maybe, maybe not.

 

If Putin is the driving force behind the war, it could end with his death. If the driving force is great power politics (the need for Russia to seize the gaps on either side of the Carpathian Mountains, north to the Pripet Marshes and east to the Black Sea), then Putin's death won’t mean jack. But it would also mean that Russia is likely to try and close the gap to the north of the Pripet Marshes (to the Baltic Sea) by invading Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland. All NATO countries... so let's hope not.

Putin has not drafted enough troops to overwhelm Ukraine. He'd need a few million men, but he doesn’t have the ability to supply or equip that many. Such a vast mobilization might even provoke civil unrest. So instead, Putin’s drip feeding young Russians into the meat grinder of an unwinnable attrition war. 

On the other hand, Russia has almost four times the population of Ukraine, so in an attritional war, Ukraine will run out of bodies first. Casualty estimates for Ukraine are more difficult to come by: they vary from one third to over 100%. Bakhmut may be the new Verdun: designed to bleed the Ukrainian army dry. As German Commander-in-Chief Falkenhayn famously said, the point of his attack was not to capture Verdun; it was, instead, to 'bleed France white'. Japan resorted to the same strategy at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. It's a workable, if utterly ruthless, path that will consume plenty of Russians, too. 

Perhaps the much talked about summer offensives will tip things in Ukraine's favour. 

With China now threatening to supply Russia with lethal military aid, US-China relations may go from bad to abysmal, and tough sanctions on China would cause even more economic disruption as we head into a recession. 

 

There is another unsavory issue: grain and fertilizer exports to Africa, Brazil and China have been blocked by the war. That will impact marginal farmlands (which require copious amounts of fertilizer to be productive), which will lead to large scale famine(s). 

Peachy.

As Hawkeye Pierce might say, "Just end the war!" He was always light on the details but I get the sentiment. 

Nil, Rebel Angels and possible book looks for The Future

For the Nil short film, I added in gradients and cloud backgrounds to enrich the scenes. I rather like the result; it enhances the style. 

Earlier I'd tried with Rebel Angels to combine photographs of classical art with the flat graphic environments, but the result was not received well. 

Still, be interesting to try again. 

Nil had a very flat, graphic style, with no gradients at all, originally: just flat fields of white, black and grey. Character designs were simple and iconic, the backgrounds ultra-detailed:

A page from the original Nil graphic novel; I loved playing with the layouts and merging illustration and design. That was a happy place for me, and I'd like to go back there. The subsequent books were all less 'designy' or abstract, and more attempts to describe environments.

Elements from the book, cityscapes and impossible buildings, covered with blends to knock them back and emphasize the character in the foreground. The haze also softens the scene. 

Soft background clouds give the scene greater depth and a stronger sense of desolation and vastness.

When I got to Rebel Angels, I'd been doing graphic novels for awhile, and had Nil, Rex Libris, and Warlord of Io under my belt. Rebel Angels was actually an outgrowth of Nil, but during development became completely disconnected from the source material. 

I had a young female punk rocker who was wrongly condemned to Hell teaming up with Muk to overthrow Satan, but at the time I really didn't want to draw humans. Just monsters and demons, so I cut her character. Maybe not the best of choices. 

But you can only do what you can do.

The characters in Rebel Angels became more animated, a little more in line with cartoons: a clean outline and flat blocks of tone over more complex backgrounds. It was more sophisticated in some ways, yet less experimental than Nil.

I'm happy with the visual result. The story itself got away from me and I burned out finishing the book. It would be almost ten years before I attempted another graphic novel. 

Beware of burnout, man, and pace yourself. When it hits you, it really, REALLY hits you.

Hell Lost / Rebel Angels is still up on my website and can be viewed here.

A ridiculously detailed version of the cover for the online version of Rebel Angels.

Skulls used as texture over the graphic elements.

Again with the clouds; they really assist in creating a sense of space.

Polarized photos of classical art I took in, I think, Paris. The figures were embellished with nosed and horns and swords. I thought they added an interesting, almost Boschean aspect; nobody seemed to like them though so I abandoned the approach. Sometimes feedback's a bitch.

Max Zing / Warlord of Io screens

I've been digging around in my archives and found fab forgotten things. These images are from a presentation in The Before Time:

Max Zing (it's currently on Drunk Duck) was an outgrowth of the graphic novel Warlord of Io, and put the eponymous character into comic strip format. 

It's like poetry: one, two, three-joke! One-two-three-punchline! 

I pumped out some 75+ strips before moving on to other things. 

I had some fun doing it, and enjoyed playing with a new (and challenging) format.

The earlier graphic novel was also a great visual exploration. The images are made entirely with blends, no lines (well, a few for emphasis at times, but no outlines). Don't think there's anything else out there quite like it, even to this day.

That may not be a good sign. 

Heh.

But it was a novel look!

Worst meeting EVER.

A meeting like this is just what you don't want early in the morning before you've had your cup of coffee. It'd totally derail your day. 

Mind you, after they deliver their schpiel, I don't think you'd need coffee anymore. More like a few dozen stiff drinks.

It's wonderfully shot and scripted but apparently drifts from what actually happened. 

Damn good scene though.

The Last of Us: Girl With All The Gifts déjà vu?

I watched the premiere of The Last of Us with Pedro Pascal and found the opening sequences quite harrowing. After Covid, I'm not sure I'm as keen on shows depicting the collapse of civilization and the death of all our loved ones. It's just more depressing now. 

It also reminded me of The Girl With All The Gifts, another post-apocalypse movie with cordyceps fungus zombies, a Special Girl protagonist, a mission to visit a doctor/scientist, the possibility of a cure, and lots of side characters who are rotten, miserable bastards who deserve to die (and do, in large numbers). 

Having seen The Girl, I bet I can predict the ending of The Last. 

As they say, it's not about the end, it's the journey. Heh. 

I think that's actually an oversimplification, endings do matter, but there's still truth in the statement. 

The Last of Us is very well produced, depicting a gob smackingly expensive looking dilapidated post-apocalypse, and I like Pedro. 

Also, Craig Mazin (the dude behind the Chernobyl show, which was superb) is producing The Last of Us. 

I bet it'll be an interesting journey.

I'll keep watching.