New Synthetic Pages: 7 - 10

Following on from the introduction chapter:

The next section will cover how being in a wheel-chair effects this man's life.  And why he's such a big fan of the music of Wham.

I'm also knee-deep in my other comic project which will be revealed soon.  All I can tell you is that I'm working with one Andre McClam-Hammer, and that it's a cool-times adventure comedy that will make you laugh so hard your lungs will ignite.

Stay tuned for more pages, bros and dolls!

Two Sides to Selling Out

Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, is well known for being one of the funniest, most skilled, intelligent and thought-provoking comic-strip authors ever. 

He could put together a strong case for being a great guy, so perhaps it’s not a surprise that he’s also a good example of artistic integrity.

Watterson never authorised any merchandise to be produced in association with the Calvin and Hobbes comic books. 

For a popular comic where one of the two characters is actually a cute plush toy, that’s fairly incredible. 

He obviously felt that using his creation to sell breakfast cereal and pencil cases would water-down the messages and the integrity of his work, and I have an enormous amount of respect for this courageous decision.

But I also think there’s another side to the story.

In the early days of Seinfeld the first couple of seasons had been a bit of an underground hit, and the network decided to move the show to a more prominent time-slot.  Larry David responded that if people weren’t watching the show before, he didn’t want them watching now, just because it was being played at prime-time.  The network executive asked him if he’d considered there were a lot of people out there who hadn’t snubbed the show, they’d just never had a chance to hear about it yet.

Seinfeld moved to the new time-slot, had 9 incredible seasons, went out at the top of its game, and is now considered by many the greatest TV show of all time. 

Larry David was wrong to feel that a bigger audience would affect the integrity of the show.

When I first heard of Calvin and Hobbes I was already in high school.

Had there been Calvin and Hobbes T-shirts, erasers, base-ball caps and plush toys surrounding me as a kid it’s almost certain that I would’ve had the chance to read the comic strips in my childhood. 

Would the merchandise have lowered my opinion of the comic? Absolutely not. 

Even now I have nothing but respect (and a fair amount of longing) for the merchandise of artwork that I love, such as Ghibli’s animated masterpieces.  

Embrace the want.  Become the want.

And I’m certainly not the least cynical consumer out there.

The point is; people are always going to buy stuff they don’t need.  Refusing to print pencil cases will not reduce the number of pencil-cases out there, only a change in the demand for pencil-cases will do that. 

Perhaps the world has changed since the 90s, but I find people these days are ready to forgive a work its merchandise. If I were to judge Southpark based on its wealth of bogan attire I would miss out on the show’s hilariously witty social commentary.

The decision by Bill Watterson not to sell-out may’ve been good for him personally, but I would argue against it being good for the comic strip, and even for comics as an industry.

If someone asked me in yr6 what the best comic-strip was I probably would’ve said something like “Garfield”.  Is that not a bit of a shame?

Of course, there are limits to how much selling-out is acceptable.  Dumbing down the actual comic to appeal to a broader audience would’ve been terrible (I’m looking at you Simpsons and Futurama). 

Luckily the quality of Watterson’s work spoke for itself and the comic was able to seep in to the public consciousness without bending over backwards, but there was every chance that due to artistic integrity many of us might have lived and died without ever reading Calvin and Hobbes.

Plus who doesn’t want their own Hobbes? Damnit!

Synthetic Title Page

In the middle of working on this chapter, so I thought I'd throw this first page out there.

The story is about a man who lost his right shoulder in a frowning competition.

Also the '00s called; they want their pants back.

Zing.

How to Paint a Portrait

Painting is a lot easier than it looks.  

There's a lot of hints and tips that can make you a little bit better, but there's only one that can make you a lot better.

It is...

keep going!

It's easy to be put off by a really professional looking painting, but the big secret is that no matter how good they are at painting, the picture is going to look like crap for about 75% of the time they're working on it.

It's during this period where things just don't look good that everyone gets a strong urge to throw the painting and themselves in a bin, but if you just push through you'll be shocked by how well your picture can turn out.

To illustrate this I thought I'd paint a self portrait in a bunch of steps, and to prove that you don't need to rely on fancy materials or even a steady hand, I decided to use the classic MS Paint.

Actually I don't have MS Paint, so I'm using photoshop, but I'm only using the hard-edged paintbrush tool, and no fancy tablet, just a mouse, so that...

I used this picture for visual reference.  When doing a portrait you'll always need to have a picture of the person. Even if they're sitting there it's still a good idea.

To start off I drew a circle and blob down the bottom for the jaw.  If I was doing a portrait for reals I would always cheat by drawing a grid on the picture and a grid on the page so that you can get all the features in just the right place.  But this is to show that it's not completely necessary.

I scribbled in the rest of the head and body. Looking excellent already!

And then I put in two new colours.

Next I put in some darker tones.

And then some lighter tones.

That is basically how I go about painting.  I throw a dark tone in and then I go back in with highlights, then I get a slightly lighter dark tone, then a slightly darker light tone.  It goes back and forth like this while you feel your way towards a balance between them.

All of a sudden I've got a serious skin condition

Not to mention a raging fur-face, and some big squinty eyes.

Here's the part that is really going to hurt.  I looked at the picture and noticed that my painting's head was too round.  Instead of giving up or starting again I just painted over it with the background colour until it was closer to the right shape.

Now the head is less developed but the shape is better.  

Also, those are some gorgeous lips. 

I've been going for a bit over an hour by this point, so it's a good time to take a bit of a break.

Painting is definitely a marathon, not a sprint.

A bit more beard and the hair goes on.  Suddenly things aren't as bad as I thought.

 A bit more hair and fixing up the jaw makes the head look a lot better.  The biggest issue now is that the eyes are too big and a little misshapen.

Working a little bit on the pupils is a good way to give yourself some well-deserved confidence.  

The eyes always effect the picture a lot.

Not sure what the difference is between this the last one and the next one.  I probably just saved it twice.  We're looking at about 2 hours of work by now.

Everything's getting a little bit cleaner now, but it's a slow process.

I'm still pushing the eyes back, lightening some of the heavy shadows.  Also the lips get a makeover.

By now almost the whole face has been layered many times with different colours, back and forth.  And it's starting to come together, but don't give up now! It'll keep getting better.

Here I start to go around and put mid-tones in between colours, so they look a bit smoother.

Now the things are starting to get smoother.  It must be at least 3 hours by now.  

Now everythings had a bit of a polish and I put some tones into the clothes.

Just for fun I put a bit of a filter on to blur things up a bit.  I also threw a bit of blue into the eyes, just to add to the seductiveness.  

And hey! That's all there is to it!

The point is that for more than an hour it looked like a complete piece of crap.  I could easily have packed it in then, but I just kept working on it, fixing up all the little things and suddenly out of nowhere the picture pulls itself together.

If I had've been working with actual paint it would've been a lot quicker and easier, but it's good to know that all that stuff doesn't really matter very much.

If you just keep looking at your reference picture and don't feel afraid to follow it closely, even when it seems painful or ridiculous, you should wind up with something you can be proud of.

Cheers!

The Arbitrary Gene Defense

As a reader of the occasional scientific and politically progressive article I've noticed that discussion of homosexuality has found its way into a strange place.

On the one side you have conservatives who feel that homosexuality is wrong because it is a life-style decision, and on the other side there are gay-rights advocates saying that there is a biological basis for homosexuality and therefore it is acceptable.

I find it distressing that the enlightened view is basing an advocacy of liberty around the fact that there appears to be a genetic basis for homosexuality, because this implies that it would be unacceptable if homosexuality was simply a life-style decision. 

The justification of human rights and personal liberty is not a matter of genetics. 

While geneticists have proposed a gene that seems to be related to male homosexuality, some experiments have indicated that the gene is only partially related, while other tests have found no correlation between male homosexuality and the gene.  As far as I know there is no evidence of a gene that ‘causes’ female homosexuality. 

The danger of basing a liberty argument on something as arbitrary as finding a gene that you think contributes to a certain behaviour is that it’s possible that the gene theory should be critiqued.  Diverting to an argument about gene-theory is not a step forwards, and if the theory is found to be incorrect, advocates of gay-rights will take an unnecessarily heavy set-back.

Personally I think that homosexuality is at least as socially constructed as it is biological, and I find it annoying that this opinion is seen to imply that homosexuality is illegitimate.

There are basic areas of the human brain inherited from reptile origins that advocate an entirely antisocial lifestyle of killing, raping, stealing etc.  That fact doesn’t make crime acceptable.

Similarly it would be ridiculous to dismiss a person’s achievements as merely a fatalistic product of their genes.  I also don’t hear anyone arguing that a life of pure altruism is wrong because it doesn’t have a direct biological basis. 

People have a right to a personal liberty of behaviour that does not impinge on the freedom of others.  If you start dishing out liberty based on genetic determinism you go to a weird, confusing and face-palmingly annoying place.

Consciousness Conundrums

I find thinking about consciousness can be a real brain-twizzler, so I've tried to come up with a Whitman's Sampler of scenarios to spin around the ol' noodle.

If any of this reminds you of The Matrix, that's acceptable, but if it reminds you of Inception, please, please go out and find some sci-fi that isn't awful.


Like many of my fellow humans I spend most nights unconscious.  I close my eyes and my consciousness switches off, then a (insufficient) number of hours later my consciousness switches back on and I open my eyes. 

What if one night I accidentally took a grenade to bed and exploded in my sleep, but then a crack team of scientists got together and decided they could perfectly reconstruct my body?  When I opened my eyes again it would seem to me that I'd just been asleep.  I would still be the same consciousness, continuing on from a period of unconsciousness, just as I do every night. 
It would essentially be quite normal.

But what if those scientists made another reconstruction, what we could call a clone, and now there were two of me?  If I were to die after that, I would not think that I would close my eyes and 'wake up' inside the body of my clone.  Now that we both exist at the same time, we're two different people, and the fact that I have a clone would not make me less concerned about dying.  In fact I would be even more annoyed than usual, because having a clone running around means people would probably miss me less.

So if a clone is made after my death it is my consciousness, if it's made before my death it is its own consciousness.  But what about where the lines blur?

Say I suddenly contract an exploding disease, where I will suddenly explode sometime between 20mins from now, and two weeks from now.  Not a great diagnosis, but that's cool, I've got my team of scientists ready to reconstruct me.  The only thing is, as there's no cure for exploding disease (obviously) they will need to reconstruct me from the time just before I contracted the disease.  So I might lose a couple of days worth of memories, but it'll still be me right? Maybe not.

If I'm going to be reconstructed from a couple of days ago it doesn't fundamentally matter whether that reconstruction occurs after I explode, or while I'm still waiting to explode.  But if I'm still waiting then suddenly there'll be two of me at once, and we've already decided that when I die my consciousness will not transfer to my already living clone.  And rationally it must be true that if the scientists just delay construction of the clone, it's not going to change something so fundamental as the transferal of my consciousness. 

So we would have to conclude that the me who contracted exploding disease is doomed to be extinguished, and should not be in any way comforted by the fact that a copy of an earlier me will continue on, because already we're two separate people.

But what if I can be cloned into a body without exploding disease? Then I could get the team to make a copy and instead of waiting around to explode, I could get them to kill me the instant the copy is created.  This scenario we have already established is much like falling asleep and waking up, and is therefore perfectly acceptable. 

So here's what we're saying.  If I'm cut and pasted (the original disappears) then that's still my consciousness, but if I'm copied and pasted (the original remains) then I'm split into two people, and there can be no transferal of the consciousness.

If I make a diagram of the life lines here:

(Original me)_________.
(New me)                        ___________-->

is acceptable to the original me.


(Original me)____________________.
(New me)                        ___________-->

is unacceptable to the original me, but only after it turns red.

But why is this?  What if we look at the diagram broken up into discrete sections of time:

(Original me) _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ .
(New me)                                 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ -->

Now every _ is a moment of time that I experience.  It must be possible to break up the moments of time, because we've decided that a jump can happen from one line to the next that is essentially experienced as unbroken.

Each moment of consciousness does not experience any of the earlier moments of time.  We do not experience the past, but we remember it.  So the only difference between a red dash and a black dash is that they have slightly different memories.  When the original me dies he is the me that has memory of all of those red dashes, and the new me that continues on has memories of only the black dashes.

So memory is the crux of my consciousness continuing? I can think of nothing else that could distinguish the two me's, but surely that is an insane hypothesis.

What if I had to pass through a doorway that would erase the last 20 minutes of my memory.  That doesn't sound so bad, but consider; the 20 minutes immediately prior to passing through the door would have to be drawn in red. 

(Original me) _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ (Erased)
(New me)                                 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ -->

While experiencing those red twenty minutes I would be walking in the shoes of a dead man whose consciousness will soon be extinguished forever, and who can take no comfort from the fact that a different me will live on.  As such, it would be crazy for me to experience those twenty minutes, knowing they will be erased, and then willingly pass through the door!  It would go against everything we've decided here!

But I can still get through the door fine, all I have to do is knock myself out, wait 20 minutes and get someone to throw me through the door.  Then it would be identical to the sleeping scenario, and therefore completely acceptable!

I don't know about you, but that bends my brain. 

It means that all my instincts to keep myself alive are not trying to preserve my body, or my past, I am only concerned with preserving the memory of this moment!

In conclusion I have one more 'what if' that will hopefully screw with you.

Say I go to sleep and I have a dream that seems completely real, I seem to be fully conscious and can walk around and make decisions.  However, I know that it's a dream and furthermore, I know that when I wake up I won't remember any of the dream.  As I'm experiencing the dream I would have to consider myself in the red part of the diagram.  So here's the big question:

What if in the dream I realise that I can stop my heart from beating, which will also stop the heart of the me who is lying in bed dreaming all of this. 

As a guy in a dream, I'm doomed to die anyway, so do I have any reason not to kill my dreaming self?

Opening Sequence

The opening sequence of Synthetic.

 

This is the precursor to the main story which takes place years later, and follows on from the work these two will do in developing synthetic humans.

I may end up redoing these pages later, but as of now the graphic novel has begun. 

Stay tuned for more!



Edit:
The blog makes the pages hard to read, if you want to see higher res versions follow the links:
P.1&2 http://sta.sh/#/01l4d33ehmq
P.3 http://rob-von-robovonoch.deviantart.com/#/d5d9np7
P.4 http://sta.sh/#/014sqzpprxgu
P.5 http://sta.sh/#/0wv2gs6tn8r
P.6 http://sta.sh/#/01evdov5etxw