Why Animé Might Not Be the Best Medium for Blindsight...
Courtesy of Che Gilson, who brought you last month's Manga'ld Theseus crew, a somewhat-less-than-fearsome interpretation of the once-scary aliens in Blindsight. (Personally, I'd have liked the "weapons" illo more if the board had had a nail through it.) The existential dilemma of a nonsentient intelligence giving rise to a thought-bubble is left as an exercise for the reader.
Now I'm going to see Blade Runner. Ridley Scott promises this is the last time. It better be.
Labels: blindsight
posted by Peter Watts at
4:26 PM
16 Comments:
OMG! I WAS going to put a nail in the board but it looked stupid in the sketch so I omitted it in the color version! I was also going to give the camo'ed scrambler a giant sweat drop ala manga but wasn't sure the readers of your blog would get it.
Che
The sweat drop would have been great, but the board nail isn't vital as far as I see. Also, why wouldn't you want to see Blade Runner a 3rd - 4th - Nth time? :P
Amusing.
I'm just about to start learning to draw, so I can't produce any fan-art now, but I'll get back to you on that in a year. Exactly. Exactly one year.
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In my hemoglobocentricist imagination, everything to do with Scramblers is meaty-red.
Although the art itself is well done, IMO these just dont do Blindsight justice. It's a dark ,
nearly color-less story. Again I'm by no means putting these down, Im just more of the opinion
that a well represented scrambler would more closely resemble something out of HR Giger's head.
Something more along the lines of the creature in John Carpenters "The Thing". I find it hard to see scramblers depicted in such a humorous way.
David
Notate bene: Anime is a style of animation which originated from and is associated with Japan.
Animé is a pale brown resin used in perfumes and varnish, which is harvested from a type of South American locust tree.
I read Blindsight twice- and they are blue! And kinda light up like squid, the patterns move across thier skin.
I will say it was hard to get Photoshop to do a decent navy blue. Of course the saturation could be taken down to MAKE them grey/black...
Che
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Speaking as a carpenter, If you are a scrambler and you are going kick it old school then a 2x4 is where it's at! how-ever the 2x4 does need at least two 16d nails sticking out of the end of it in order to properly meet construction codes regarding the proper application of whoop ass.
Da' schmeef
Is this how scramblers should look then? Like blue blobs with tentacles coming out from every angle? Should they have suckers or those barbs like in the previous post? Other than a globular body and the arms are there any other organs (eyes?) or orifices on their surface?
How was Blade Runner? Can't be any worse than the drek that's out there. I would like to see SouthLand Tales even though it hasn't had very good reviews.
che -
your depictions of the scramblers are hilarious. thanks for the LOL.
peter -
if you have not yet seen 30 days of night, then you might want to do so, as it's a pretty decent vamp flick. dark, but not quite dark enough...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_botnet
VERY interesting.
Brian said...
The sweat drop would have been great, but the board nail isn't vital as far as I see.
Yeah, but it would've made a great Simpsons reference.
Also, why wouldn't you want to see Blade Runner a 3rd - 4th - Nth time?
I've already seen it N+1 times. I just wish they'd stop tweaking the occasional two-second scene and then expecting us to buy a whole new DVD
cow_2001 said...
In my hemoglobocentricist imagination, everything to do with Scramblers is meaty-red.
Children, children, there's no need to fight. Scramblers can be any colour you want them to be. Why do you think I put them in an environment called Rorschach?
David said...
...I'm just more of the opinion that a well represented scrambler would more closely resemble something out of HR Giger's head. Something more along the lines of the creature in John Carpenters "The Thing".
In fact, the images in my head are so close to Giger I hesitate to describe them further for fear of being out-and-out derivative. And "The Thing"— well, sure the sensibility would be similar, but the details wouldn't. No trio of slimy-dog morphs at the end, for one thing.
I find it hard to see scramblers depicted in such a humorous way.
Yes, well, I never expected them to be portrayed that way either. Then again, you know you've truly arrived when someone puts a spin on your stuff that you never saw coming. And I'm pretty sure Che has the requisite respect for the source material. She pokes out of love.
AR said...
Notate bene: Anime is a style of animation which originated from and is associated with Japan. Animé is a pale brown resin used in perfumes and varnish, which is harvested from a type of South American locust tree.
I did not know that. The apostrophe just seemed kinda necessary to provoke the "eh" sound at the end. But I guess that's not so.
Brenda said...
Is this how scramblers should look then? Like blue blobs with tentacles coming out from every angle? Should they have suckers or those barbs like in the previous post? Other than a globular body and the arms are there any other organs (eyes?) or orifices on their surface?
No no no. God forbid. These are caricatures. Like a picture of Prince Charles with Dumbo ears (well, bigger Dumbo ears). Even my PS rendition doesn't show the spikiness I envisioned for the tentacles. (Remember the book describes them at one point as a forest of writhing backbones?) Closest thing I could invoke here might be the tails of the drones in the Aliens movies.
Also, they have setae all over them. Think wiry bristles. And the whole body surface is a giant eye (or rather, a mass of simple pinhole-camera-type photosensitive pits). Orifices in crescents around the base of the tentacles.
Really, it's all described in Cunningham's first necropsy.
How was Blade Runner?
It was brilliant, as always. But I can't honestly say the final, definitive tweaks really changed the experience for me, except for one point at which dialog was tweaked to give Leon slave duties on some kind of "intergalactic" route, which I thought was a change for the worse. Unless I misheard it.
jmacclure said...
if you have not yet seen 30 days of night, then you might want to do so, as it's a pretty decent vamp flick. dark, but not quite dark enough...
Seen it. Even discussed it, in the followup comments to this post.
cow_2001 said...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_botnet. VERY interesting.
Isn't it, though. But we're still not at the literal life-form stage yet. It's still people-on-people. Things won't really take off until those fuckers start mutating on their own— but in that case they'll be off the leash and not following anyone's agenda but Darwin's, so I doubt the guys who want to make a buck off these things would ever give them that kind of autonomy. It'll have to be someone who just wants to kick over the anthill and see what happens. Just for fun.
I'd do it in a second if I had the skills...
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