"Thank God I'm Pretty" (complete)

"Thank God I'm Pretty" (complete), originally uploaded by chris_lowrance.

Did a portrait of Emilie Autumn, a really incredible musician I recently discovered. Extra points if you can tell what classic B horror movie I'm referencing!

Cover for the Sheperd Express

For a story on day vacations in the Shepherd Express in Milwaukee. You might still be able to see the final, with title and logo over it, at their site.

I promise I didn't do that to her.

Making faces with the SketchyCon gift bag, originally uploaded by Mollycrabapple.

Molly Crabapple, uh, posing... with the illustration I made for Joe Wos' custom gift bags. For SketchyCon, a private international conference of Dr. Sketchy's ringleaders happening this weekend.

"How We Quit the Forest"

Just finished a big digital illustration of my favorite band, Rasputina. Look at it bigger, with the sketch and details, at Behance.net.

You can also look at it at my Deviantart account, even bigger but without the extra stuff.

I'd have it at Coroflot, but as usual it won't load. But go look at the other ones, and if you were to make accounts and favorite/likey/appreciate/whatever my stuff... well, God himself would smile on you.

What he said

Warren Ellis' first column for WIRED UK is up:

While I will write about things that relate to Wired UK’s fields of interest in the coming months, for this first issue it’s worth standing outside in the cold away from the internet and consider why print and newspaper/magazine structures still exist. Because reporting and editing are honest-to-God actual fucking jobs that don’t get taught at the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast, and because all those faceless blog-networks infesting the Bay Area like tongue herpes have no interest in their minimum-wage blogmonkeys thinking about anything bigger than their hitcount. These things are fun and great for finding out about paedo-paramedics and Ukrainian porn, but they shouldn’t be confused with informed reportage and actual thinking.

This planet deserves justice. He's going to give it to them.

What if Alan Moore were to write a revival of the Captain Planet and the Planeteers cartoon?

It's the near future, in a world where Bush is still president after a disaster at a nuclear power plant, blamed on the Planeteers, instills America with enough fear that they abolish term limits and reelect him. The world has never been more polluted: It's getting hotter, the oceans are rising, whole mountains are being blown into neighboring valleys in search of oil and coal. "Going Green" is just another bit of propaganda, a way to dodge taxes with a few useless solar panels while the processes that make those panels dump mercury into the water by the ton.

The Planeteers are underground fugitives, marked as the world's most notorius eco-terrorists, a label that isn't entirely inaccurate. The four original members have been unable to contact Gaia for years, and Hope Island has vanished. Ma-Ti, holder of the ring of Heart, is dead under circumstances no one but Wheeler fully know. Wheeler and Linka's marriage is as estranged as possible given the circumstances, and Linka has taken back up her addiction to the designer drug Bliss. The drug is supplied to her in secret by her father's old friend Vladimir Putin, to exert his influence on the Planeteers' more violent activities in order to weaken America while steering them away from his petropolitik manuevering.

Kwame is still de facto leader of the team, but years of intense violence in his homeland has turned his good-natured solemnity into something more bitter and dangerous. The rest of the team is resentful for the two years he spent away from the team, in Sudan, during which time Ma-Ti was killed. However, no one will dispute that, towards the end of his sabbatical, a sudden and inexplicable chain of deaths among military leadership on both sides of the Sudanese conflict, followed by the sudden rise of a unitarian democratic socialist movement funded by a previously undiscovered and seemingly inexhaustable diamond supply, ended the atrocities there for generations to come. Kwame's leadership style is now cold, patient, and decisive. He doesn't trust Wheeler, but he needs his power and his ring.

Gi has become possibly the strongest of the planeteers, has the rising waters seem to have instilled a new power to her abilities, despite the increase in pollution. However, this new strength is difficult to control, and more than once Gi has drowned or desicated a target in a fit of blind rage. She also remains the most educated and physically fit of the group. It's only too bad that Linka still hasn't noticed how attractive she is, and that for all her knowledge she can't find a way to make her.

Wheeler seems, on the surface, to be the least changed of the Planeteers. While the others can only long for their innocent selves, Wheeler is just as cocky, wise-cracking and spirited. He asks fewer questions, sure, and his use of Fire seems both stronger and more controlled. Wheeler was de facto leader during Kwame's abscence, and during that time the team took a more... direct approach to problem-solving, destroying factories, wiping out mining operations, disrupting shiping lanes, kidnapping heads of state. It was that latter tactic that bothered Ma-Ti the most, as he was asked to use his powers to persuade important congressmen and other leaders to the Planeteers' way of thinking. It didn't work, because Ma-Ti wouldn't go far enough, not as far as Wheeler wanted. When their base was discovered, and the Feds tried to rescue the kidnaped officials, Ma-Ti was the only one that didn't make it out of the fire, and no one knows where the ring of Heart went.

And then there's Captain Planet. Kwame avoids calling him as much as possible these days; even he doesn't like the results. It can still be done, and despite Gaia's abscence and the decayed state of the Earth, Caps is still stronger and more powerful than anything on this planet.

But when there's a ring missing, Captain Planet lacks that element.

These days, Captain Planet has no heart.

EDIT: When I wrote this I had no clue that Micheal Reeves wrote a script for a "dark" Captain Planet. From the interview:

"Regrets: Last year I wrote the script (based on a story by Nick Boxer and Mario Pilusio) for a revisionist look at Captain Planet. It was going to be a theatrical feature, called simply Planet, and it was a good 180 degrees different from the TV series. It was quite dark, set in a post-apocalyptic future, and I think it was one of my better efforts. Everyone seemed to like it, but it got lost in the shuffle when Turner and Warner Bros. merged. A pity -- I think it would've turned some heads."

Nothing's new under the sun.

What a horrid holiday, huh?

So, I don't really have a new line of greeting cards. Cth'ulhu Cth'ards was my own little April Fools joke, as evidenced by the series of links at the end of yesterday's post. All references revolved around the creations and companions of H. P. Lovecraft, an influential American author of horror and sci-fi stories.

My apologies to those who congratulated me on the new gig - to be fair I fully confessed to anyone that did, because I think pranks lose their flavor when you drag them out.

Now, if anyone wants to commission me for a series of Lovecraft-inspired greeting cards....