Touchdown

Hello from scenic Seoul!

Finally landed and settled after a hellaciously long flight, and my first experience with SICAF. The flight was made mildy more entertaining by a bevy of South Korean businessmen. Let me say that South Korea is not a miserable country one needs to forget the plight of. So I really have no idea what these guys were drinking for. But let me tell you: South Korean businessmen (or at least these fellas) are like fratboys after winning the Rose Bowl. To say that they took advantage of the free drinks on flight could be considered an understatement. Suffice to say, 8 whiskeys later, when the guy closest to me fell out of his chair into the aisle and began to roll around and giggle, it was time to land.

I expected someone to pick me up, but due to miscommunication no one did, so it was a hectic few hours figuring out where the hell to go. But I'm here now, and having successfully managed to master the Seoul subway system (a breeze, natch!), I'm feeling better about my situation. I still kinda feel like an idiot American for not knowing another language like everyone else here. That's something to fix. Soon.

I visited the Seoul Expo Center, where they showed me the set-up they have for The Basic Virus, and it's all very professionally done and looks great. Thanks to Hong-Kwan Lee and his minions (seriously: he snaps his fingers and guys go running) for putting in so much effort for it. Also got interviewed by the South Korean blogosphere. I hope I didn't say something that might have gotten mistranslated:

"Seoul, South Korea: Comic artist Joe Alterio sez he puts mole rats in his underpants for fun and profit."

My camera is acting weird, but hopefully it will clear up, and I can post some pix soon. Stay tuned.

bOINGED to death.

Phew.

What a weekend.

RobotsAndMonsters.org, after getting bOINGed and later written up in the Boston Globe's Ideas Section, took off like a rocket, forcing my hand to shut down donations earlier than expected. It probably also means that we cut off some additional funding, which breaks me up a bit, but I had to stop the insanity sometime: as of this writing, we raised over $8300 (w00t!) for the cause, from over 15,000 hits to the site, which is just stunning to me.

The consequences:

A.) We reached our fund raising goal, and then almost tripled it.
B.) I'm going to be drawing robots and monsters for a very, very long time.
C.) bOING bOING has a power heretofore unheard of when it comes to "underground" interests.
D.) This link gets me misty-eyed in Amelie-esque, sappy, I-guess-we're-all-connected- somehow-kind-of-way
E.) All of the above.

(Turn to next page for answers)

In any event, thank you to everyone for stopping by and donating to such a good cause. Rest assured, your 'bots and 'sters are on their way (Eventually. Those at the back of then line: well, they'll make great Christmas presents!). Check out a continually expanding gallery of them here, and keep in a mind that R and M will be reopening later on as a more expanded project, with different artists, different causes, merch, links, and a whole lot more, so stay tuned. Email me if you want to get put on the mailing list, or know an artist who wants to help out.

As a reminder, I'll be leaving for South Korea on Tuesday, for my presentation about mobile comics at SICAF. I'll be posting photos and updates of the trip when I get chance. Very exciting: I think I may actually get to meet Moebius . My nerd-heart is all a-twitter. 너를 빨리 보십시요!

Robots and Monsters and the 100th Post *UPDATE!*

This blog is 100 posts old today! Woo Hoo! I'd like to personally thank all of you for stopping by and saying hello, leaving comments, linking, and generally giving me the time of day. I know there's a lot of outstanding places to waste your time on the web: I'm humbled that any of it all is with me. So, thanks.

And what better way to celebrate such a landmark than with a charitable effort, eh? I'm proud to introduce my new project RobotsandMonsters.org . As you may or may not know, I've undertaken running the San Francisco marathon in July to raise money for the SF AIDS Foundation and the Pangea Foundation, which help folks afflicted with AIDS in the Bay Area, as well as in the third world. This project is part of that fund raising efforts.

It's pretty simple: for a simple donation of 25 bucks, you can give me three words or phrases, out of which I'll draw and paint a robot or monster and send it to you. Hopefully, if enough people participate, we'll start getting some great breadth of imagination in the gallery. You can read more about it all here.

In the long run, after the marathon, I'd like to turn RobotsandMonsters.org into a continuing source of revenue for charitable causes, with a whole bunch of artists contributing to a multitude of causes: kind of like a mash up between 700 hobos, Fist-A-Cuffs, and an NPR pledge drive. But cooler. So if you're a artist who wants to participate, or your a cause that might want to partner up, be sure to drop me a line.

Thanks, again, everyone.

**UPDATE!** Thanks for the link love everyone: BoingBoing, Drawn!,The Boston Globe's Brainiac blog, Suicide Bots, Kaiju Big Battel, Scatterboy, Continuity Concern and everyone else. I am eternally grateful. Now I just...have to...do...all these...drawings... *sigh*

Cartographica

I love maps. I love 'em. When the rest of family was busy arguing over who gave gramma too much to drink, I would be content on family vacations to pore over the maps of our destinations. Besides the information provided, they just are cool aesthetically. The infomation is arrayed is a visual pattern they we've all subliminally agreed upon: this dotted line means 'county line', this star means 'capital'. It's a nearly perfect intrepetation of what I'm always harping about, namely, using pictures and words in conjuction. And that certain blue they use for water is always a constant, isn't it? They have a swatch for that thing? "Cartographical azul"?

So I got maps on the brain this Saturday morning, and in that vein, a hermenautic group I'm a part of pointed me to this outstanding blog: pages and pages and pages of weird ass maps. And then, of course, there's my friend Francesca Berrini's reconfigured map art, an example of which is above, which is some of the best damn map art of the planet.

The internet as a force of destruction

Drawn today has an interesting post today on Stephen Beisty, the illustrator most well known for his cross-section series: I picked up the Man-o-War one when I was a 16 during my I-wanna-be-a-pirate-phase (before it was cool!), and have been hooked ever since.

You'll notice that I didn't link to his site above: that's because he doesn't have a site. (Gasps from audience, woman in front row faints). He's not part of a collective, he doesn't put his work on an agents site, and the shock, the horror, he doesn't even have a BLOG. Jaleen from Drawn makes a trenchant point, in that Beisty's work isn't something that translates well to the web, and Beisty is hesitant to put enormous files that show the true scope of his work on a site, for fear that it may be stolen or manipulated, and that is all valid. But I think that the issue reaches deeper than that, and I think this is one of the better examples of the web defining the ground rules rather than the other way around.

To define the web as anything other than an enormous potential canvas is intransigent, but to define it as limitless and completely freeing is also being a willfully blind to it's very clear guidelines. The web, like any other media, has rules that ease of use demands you abide by. You can experiment all you want, but if you're writing a book, and you don't place the paragraphs of a story in order, you can make an interesting art project, but your readers will have a tough time getting what your book is about. And the web is the same way.

To not exist on the web is to really be at a deficit in terms of whether people can find you or not. That is clearly still be processed by a great deal of people in the creative fields, and the sea-change is even greater than people realize. The repercussions are being felt throughout the creative world, across a multitude of industries. In the old days - my mom's days - an illustrator would get an agent by getting the gumption to stop by offices of illustration eps, after which, if taken on, the rep would send out postcards and place ads in illustration annuals, to get the work in front of art directors. Now, the reps are broke due to stock illustration, the postcard printers are replaced by Kinko's, no one reads the annuals anymore, and if an art director really does want to hire an illustrator for custom work, where do they go to find that illustrator? The web, of course.

As a burgeoning self-promoting force to be reckoned with, it's not a lie to say the creation of a presence online is a lot of work. Besides the basics of actually creating a site, a creative person who doesn't have the money or is too much of a control-freak to pay someone else to do it needs to immediately become a novice web designer and info architecture acolyte to be a part of the party. Beisty is lucky to be successful and well-known enough to not need this presence online. But Joe Schmuck (or maybe Joe Alterio), that unknown artist who's trying to break in to the worldwide junta of getting paid for art? He's up a creek. Jaleen argues that if you don't exist online, you don't exist, and tragically, that's correct.

So to exist, an artist needs to learn how to build a site. They need to figure out how to get their work posted. They need to get their numbers up. Make sure they come up first on a Google search. That means getting linked to, so they should have a blog to let people know what they're up to. And they really should syndicate that blog to track their readership. Getting featured on BoingBoing or Drawn helps. Better be letting them know you exist. And all this, now taking time away from the actual creating of work.

Is there any grosser word in the world than "usability expert"? Ugh. Just typing it makes me shudder. The "usability expert" is the beginning of the end for creative types. Placing these laurel wreaths of Web 2.0 around our brow is creating a system that rewards the processing and delivery of content, while being completely devoid of any real deliverables. That Beisty is somehow now at a deficit because he spends his time on his gorgeous craft, and less time dicking around with Dreamweaver, is a total disgrace. To think that in 20 years time, we'll all be "usability experts", figuring out the best way to hand off all our great content as quickly and efficiently as possible, is a joke to me. The internet as a self-defining cage is already a reality: already, 95% of blogs are just recycling what someone else already posted. Where's the breaking point? When will the day come when the entire web is just different iterations of the same single idea, processed and homogenized through one million and one linked sites?

The Hijinx Ensue

As a former teenaged, pimply-faced usher at a movie theater, I'm well aware of how important a movie poster is to it's success. I don't have any solid data for this, but there's something about a good poster for a bad movie (even a movie with such promise!) that seems to be worth the investment: once you get people in the door, it doesn't matter that your story sucks and the acting is atrocious. You already have their 10 bucks!

Posters, like other design media, go through trends, and few are more mysterious or distinctive to me than the painterly, heavily-caricatured movie posters of the mid-70s through late 1980's. Fallen out of favor now, the movies they advertised regularly occupied one of two catagories, either the multi- cast-adventure-movie, or the Animal-House-inspired wacky comedy.

A little digging around (on my new favorite site) found that a likely progenator of this style is Drew Struzan. His site is kinda off the hook, because he seems to have had a hand in every famous movie on the planet. And this, folks, is why I love illustration. While the gallery artist makes a name for himself above all, the workhorse illustrator slyly burrows himself into the popular consciousness, a covert operative of style and aesthetic. At a certain point, if an illustrator is good enough, his or her style is almost taken for granted, like it's own school, so ubiquitous as to have imitators who don't even know who they're imitating. And when, like I did just now, one does finally find the creator behind so much of what you see before, it's like the ultimate reveal: you see, finally, the man at the controls, and are so much more awed by it.

The Great White APE -*UPDATED!*

or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying, and Love the Expo, as told in Three Parts.


My view for 2 days

APE was a blast, thanks to everyone who came out for it. I sold some shirts, made a lot of contacts, and bought some unbelievably weird/cool stuff. Some highlights:


I. 'Bot Building

I had decided about three weeks ago that I was going to build a robot to feature the new teeshirts I'd be selling, as well as show off some of the images from the comic. I'd made one right choice and one wrong choice in this endeavor: I was correct in enlisting Tim Lillis' help in engineering the structure. I was wrong in thinking that would take, like 2 hours, tops. D'oh.


Tim and the early structure.



Yes, that's a flowerpot for the head.



The only place I could actually paint the damn thing was in the bathroom, lest my cast chew the hell out of it. We still have red paint on the bathtub.



The final result. I like that in this picture, it looks like the robot is thoughtfully stroking his chin. I'll link to a Flickr set soon with more photos.

II. Dear Apple

In my hubris, I had assumed that the really tough part about this set was going to be the foamcore robot. How wrong I was.

Firstly, Mr. Senator, let me state I am, and have always have been, a member of the Apple Nerd set. Ever since Pop brought home the Apple IIC, I've been hooked. I admit that in the past few years, Apple's willingness to play ball with the copybarons by intergrating DRM into their iTunes files, as well as their Big Brother-like "ministore", has caused some the sheen to be lost off the Apple for me, so to speak. But it was this weekend that really made want to be more self-determinate than Apple would have me be.

I won't bore you with the technical details, but suffice to say, what would seem to be the relatively simple process of mirroring an external montior on an Apple laptop
was prohibitivly costly, aggravating, and unintuitive, mostly because Mac laptops of different models, and even different years, have different visual out-ports. Why? Because god forbid Apple uses the industry standard of a mini-VGA port. Because they're too busy Thinking Differently to actually be part of an industry standard. Heads up, Steve Jobs: if by next year I'm running Gimp on a Linux box built out of plywood, this will be a turning point. You have been warned.


III. Sketchblog - Special APE Edition
I'd love to tell you I was so busy all day long with people clamoring for my attention that I didn't have any time at all to draw, but I'd be lying.







*UPDATE!*

- Wow, I got linked to by Bonnie Grrl , of the famed Grrl.com, who called the robot "super-rad". Color me flattered and totally star struck. And here, I thought she was just a charming chick who was *very* excited about the teeshirts.

-I also got some supremely awesome link love at Suicide Bots. Wow, what a bunch of nice kids. Notice, in that picture, as well, that I'm being elbowed in the throat by my DisplayBot9000. Send help quick!

The Art of Manufacturing Nightmares

I don't usually do this, and leave it to my good friends at Suicide Bots to cover the coming Robot Revolution in our world, but this is too freaky/cool to ignore.



Meet Ava. She can talk physics with you, direct you to where you need to go, and her neck in fused to a piece of wood. Ava is created by Dave Hanson, and will be haunting my dreams for weeks to come.

Episode 4 is up!

Episode 4 of The Basic Virus is finally up, just in time for my booth at the Alternative Press Expo that I'll be sharing with Kaiju Big Battel. Come on by, say 'hi', and pick up one of TBV's rad new teeshirts: American Apparel, in both black and chocolate brown, for the discerning hipster or robo-lover:



***

In other related news, Aida from Iceland has once again requested another look at the creation process for TBV, and I'm happy to oblige. I'll take the first three hand drawn panels of the most recent episode, and give a layer break down, because I think it will be more elucidating than any kind of long-winded explanation.

This is my first step, after typing out what I feel is a pretty close approximation of what the episode will look like in script form, though when I actually make it, it usually is altered slightly because of visual considerations. The red-boxed panels are the panels in question:



Then, I make a nice clean pencil drawings on Bristol board, and when I'm happy with the lines, I ink it with the unbeatable ...reliable, good response, and best of all, cheap as all hell:



I scan the lines as bitmap, and convert to Greyscale in Photoshop, using the Threshold tool to clean up the image. Then, on the layers below, I use the brush tools, as well as found posterized images, to create the BG and atmosphere:



And finally, the combined images with the speech bubbles as the last touch.



As you can imagine, this takes a really really long time, which I don't mind, because I think it ends up looking pretty good, but I really need to streamline my process. There's some webcomic creators that, because of their style, get to post everyday. Because of how I do things, I'll be thrilled if I can get my turnaround time to once every two weeks.

The Storyteller Speaks

I've described my artistic demeanor here in these pages (pages?) previously as a 'narrativist', by which I've mean someone who puts a premium on getting the point across that so troubles the mind those long late nights, whether it's the price of oil or your own personal heartbreak. Leaving the experiements in didactic theory to the art school kids, the term 'narrativist' was never meant to be strictly about telling a literal story or an anecdote: you can be a narrativist and not a storyteller, but maybe not vice versa, if you follow me, though some efforts to the contrary may end up making this little theory of mine look like so much bunk.

Happily, in the business of my chosen poison, comics, I happen to be both. So it was with great joy that Molly directed me to this interview with Ira Glass about what he sees as the two main anchors of any good storytelling excercise, namely, The Anecdote and The Point. Considering the great success of This American Life as a now near-franchise, and it's consistent achievement in the face of increasing popularity (a tough hoop to jump through), he's prolly a good guy to listen to.

As a side note, notice he never mentions accuracy or "truth", two overrated concepts that any good storytelling effort should echew like a LA Times subscription. I sometimes get in trouble with Molly after a night of drinking, when she'll turn to me and say: "That story you told was way more interesting than what actually happened!" I think I'm missing the part of brain that sees anything wrong with that. I mean, sure, if I was a scientist or journalist, I could see the issue: but as it stands, I consider stretching the truth part of my research.

Humanspeed...

...Mr. Vonnegut. So it goes.

Kim Dietch Interview

One of my favorite artists from the 60's underground SF scene is Kim Deitch. I'm not sure whether it's that he's just as raunchy as Gilbert Shelton but his drawings recall old school design (echoed later in the subsequent Air Pirates flap), or just that I grew up watching his station IDs he did for Nickelodeon: either way, he is an enduring giant on the scene, and the AIGA site has a great interview with him. Check it out.


As a side note: I may be shooting myself in the foot here, considering that fact that it's my own guild, but has any noticed how crappy the AIGA site looks? I'm no web designer, per se, but...the big black box in the top left corner sticking out like a sore thumb,the strange pallete, even the leading of the menu text...what is up with that? And the parts that aren't ugly are just BORING. You know, there's some folks in the design industry that take their website site, and what it says about them, seriously.

Maybe someone's kid got the redesign job...?

Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau

The dudes over at The Daily Crosshatch tuned me in to this sketchbook making the rounds of comic-cons, between some of the more well known cartoonists: a kind of Exquisite Corpse for the funny papers set. I love it so much, and wish there was more of it. Besides getting to see the likes of Johnny Ryan and Bwana Spoons in a looser form, which informative, it's cool to see that the random neural firings of other artists involve as many tentacles as mine.

In a similar vein, (like the hey-look-we're-all-dorks vein) FIST-A-CUFFS has been doing something cool. This is an idea that the Fine Comix gang in Seattle did a few years ago, but it's still fun. It kinda reminds me of the little pink M.U.S.C.L.E. men, an exercise in childhood surrealism that I didn't really comprehend until later.

Traffic Magazine blurb on yours truly

This is an article about me written by my buddy Steve that I forgot about that, was publsihed last summer. Oh, well. Better later than never. In his inimitable style, the article is actually more well written than the dialogue in my comic. Damn.

Let My Robots Go!
Steve Lohse

Don’t call Joe Alterio a comic-book guy. He’s a storyteller. His medium of choice happens to be comics, or “sequential narrative” as the highbrow will have it, but in another life, he freely admits, he would be a shadow puppeteer. The point is getting the point across. Get it?

Sitting in a Capitol Hill coffeeshop, Joe looks perfectly comfortable behind his warmly glowing laptop, watching the neighborhood traffic- mostly stylishly disheveled twentysomethings- flow glamorously by. “Of course,” he says, correcting himself, “It’s no secret that comic books are the refugee of outcast young males.”

Hailing originally from Boston, MA and currently residing in Seattle, Joe spent eight years living in Los Angeles, earning a film degree from USC and afterwards doing animation for the likes of Nickelodeon and Adam Sandler. Joe turned his long last year in tinseltown in all its frustration and glory into 365, a graphic novella/comic journal wherein he rendered his daily struggles into three-panel diary entries, short, simple, and sweet. There’s a sense of immediacy to the way the story is told - written as it’s actually happening- not to mention a certain existential horror in the way that the writer has no better idea of how his story will end than we do. As 365’s tumultuous year progresses, Joe spends time both with the important, life-changing events and the tedium of daily existence. The simultaneously simple and complex moments build towards an intimate portrait of an artist suffering the post-college careerless/lovesick blues. 365 can be found at select bookstores as well as from www.joealterio.com. Daily strips can be downloaded to your ipod freely from www.clickwheel.net.

Critical response to his work has been uniformly positive, though Joe is hardly one to rest on his laurels. Upon arriving in Seattle, he began his ‘Robot Revolution’ Poster Series- not-quite-ironic posters wherein sentient robot revolutionaries (the Robo-equality party) urge their fellow robot-laborers to rise up against the injustice of servitude. The posters, reminiscent of labor-movement era propaganda, are rendered in bold colors and confrontational imagery, and are both hilarious and strangely touching. The posters have been shown and sold in Seattle as well as other parts of the country, though Joe isn’t content to keep the robots stuck to the wall. “The printed page is a dinosaur waiting to die,” he says. “Everything lies in the internet.” Joe sees the internet as a way to completely flip the way information is presented to the reader, for instance allowing interactive comics where the reader is dropped in the center of everything and allowed to explore.

Perhaps taking his own advice, Joe has recently launched his most ambitious offering yet: a serial web-comic based around the sprawling, dystopian world of the robot revolution posters. The storyline imagines an alternate present wherein robot laborers have begun striking against the capitalist society that enslaves them. Call it socio-political commentary or just call it entertainment, Joe’s robot revolution begins in March and can be found for free at www.robotrev.com. Viva la revolution!

"Waters Red" wins award

"Waters Red", the video I did for Argo, just one won runner up at The Greatest Story Never Told's multimedia contest. Word! Watch it again for the first time.

Sterescopic Photography

Above is a frame from a page I found with stereoscopic images looped into an animated GIF, and it's just phenomenal. Remember how incredible 'Bullet Time' was the first time you saw it? And then NFL tried to do it, to hideous, awful horrible effect? This is better than all of that. Like, times a million. In my humble opinion.

The best part about the relatively recent obsession with stereoscopic technology is A.) how old and low tech it is, and B.) the level of fanaticism of the current crop of lenticulators. While the current level of stereoscopy is involved in some serious next level stuff, the quaint turn-of-the-century old-timey charm of vintage stereoscopic images is undeniable. I think it's because these images are clearly produced strictly for enjoyment, and the manufacture of a 3D realm out of a 2D medium is also what happens turns my gears. I guess it's because everything that I'm interested in, on some level, exactly that: the manufacturing of reality artificially. It's the God Complex writ large.

So, why is this stuff so much cooler than the high tech stuff? Because it's mostly all DIY, and DIY stereoscopic tech is sometimes, very very DIY. Additionally, these stereoscopic images, on Chinese Jet Pilot and else where are, for the most part, still very prosaic images: people living their normal lives, without exploding cars and flying bullets. The benefit is that, for just a fraction of a second, you get to be there with these people, in their private moments, sharing their space, as only they experienced it, a frozen moment of nostalgia for anyone to share. And that's deep, baby.

Sketchblog 3/23/07

Above is a birthday card/invite I did from my friend Matt's 30th birthday party, and I like how it turned out. It was unintentional initially, but I like how the tonal quality of the color echo the old super structure of the bridge and the car, making it kind of industrial and nostalgic at the same time.

And hey, if you're in SF, and you wanna stop by the party, email me to get the info, the more the merrier.

MOMA (heart)'s Comix

Above is Arturo Herrera's's entry into NYC's new MOMA exhibiton, Comic Abstraction, a show in which 13 artists took on the genre of comics, and it's interplay with the wider art world. There's some pretty ridiculous ones in the show, but there's also some really really outstanding stuff, like Herrera's, too.

(Flash player required)

Onward and Upward

Two rather self-aggrandizing points to note, and then back to the good stuff (I know, I know, after yesterday's post, it's a little too much to bear: sorry, I'll get back to bitching soon.)

* I'm now officially represented by Richard Salzman Int'l, my first agent since beginning to self rep myself 5 years ago, and it feels really great. Richard is a super nice guy and is very experienced in the field, so here's hoping that great things come of it.

* I've been shortlisted for The Greatest Story Never Told prize for multimedia animation for my Waters Red music video for Argo. You can go here, and help me win by casting your vote for my stuff. Go! Do it now! I'll wait. (The site is a little hincky, and very Flash-heavy: be warned.)


(The above image was done in effort to round out my portfolio for editorial stuff: I think that it would look great in the pages of a magazine, don't you?)

AIDS is SO last century.

Just quick note to let you everyone know that this summer, I'll be running the 2007 San Francisco Marathon in support of the fight against AIDS, here at home and in the developing world. Molly, who I'll be doing this with, and I, have committed to raising 3600 dollars by April 27th to this effort. While you maybe don't know anyone personally with this terrible disease, you know someone that does. And I'll be damned if I let some stupid virus push the human race around.

If you're feeling generous, you can donate to our cause here. Anything at all helps, thanks so much for you help. More artsy-fartsy stuff soon.