The cynical among you might call it “The most stupendous animatic of all time!” but – as can happen – the cynical among you would have gotten it wrong.

That’s because Doctor Professor’s Thesis of Evil is meant to be a motion graphics film: it’s not an approximation of a full motion movie. I’ve mentioned this project before and just as I did then I have to stress how the excellent lighting and artful use of motion graphics make Doctor Professor a real treat to watch. The filmmakers chose a limited medium and then they just plain hammered on those limitations until they’d turned them into strengths. Which is, after all, what you need to do.

I missed the announcement that the film was complete, in early December. Unfortunately I’m also missing the finished film – it’s off on its adventure at the film festivals. So if you happen to be in Norway on January 17-22 you ought to do what I’d do, which is to hike over to the Tromsø International Film Festival and catch Doctor Professor’s screening there. It’s already been shown at the Helsinki Short Film Festival and, following that festival’s first showing, in theaters across Finland. But I guess we both missed that.

In the meantime, enjoy this teaser trailer. There’s another one over at Doctor Professor’s Web Site of Infamy, which is a name I just made up.

I kneel beside the guy and look at the wires. Each wire is as black and as thick as the one that goes from your radio set to the wall. Dozens of these wires snarl around each other, and they drip something green I do not touch. I think the green drips must be the dead guy’s blood, and this raises serious questions about the guy’s place of origin. I have seen several persons with holes of this nature, so I know what most citizens have in their stomachs. It is not black wires and green blood.

James Alan Gardner’s A Clean Sweep With All the Trimmings is a science fiction story told in the manner of Damon Runyon, in a Prohibition era New York whose ever-lovin’ guys and streetwise dolls find themselves inconvenienced by spacemen from Jupiter, maybe, or maybe from someplace that is farther away than Jupiter, and anyway is even stranger than the interest (or interests) of J. Edgar Hoover.

It’s a wonderful romp and you can read the whole story on the web at Tor.com.

In the distant future, humanity will be annihilated by its greatest creation: a half-mad, living computer called… ILLUSIONOID!

Hidden on an abandoned moon post, a lone survivor sends cryptic messages backwards through time, desperate to warn of the deadly danger to come. Will you heed these warnings?

Move a little closer to your Time Radios. That’s it: just like that. Good. For what you are about to hear may change the future… and ultimately spare Mankind from the monstrous menace of… Illusionoid.

Part Satellite of Love, part Twilight Zone, and part An Evening at the Improv, ILLUSIONOID is a bi-weekly (fortnightly?) series of podcasts in which Paul Bates, Lee Smart and Nug Nahrgang take a strange, inspiring title and run with it for a few minutes of demented improv claiming to be a cautionary broadcast from the Last Man in the Universe. They solicit for titles on their Facebook page and now, since they’ve just discovered my Pulp Sci-Fi Title-O-Tron, they may be using that for inspiration, too.

I can’t wait to hear what they make of something like Shadow of the Accountant of Doom or The Astronomer That Misplaced the Galaxy.

The language may not be entirely safe for work (depending on where you work; sailors are probably going to be fine). But with that caveat, go forth to the Illusionoid web site and sample tales like "Whither Saturn?" and "Time Goat". And if you happen to be in Toronto on Sunday evening there’s a live recording session at Comedy Bar.

I can’t say it’s unique, because even if I ever knew that Berni Wrightson never did another science fiction story that would have been so many brain cells ago that there’s no way I could remember (hey, it was the ’70s). But at Golden Age Comic Book Stories you can see what has to be a very rare thing – Wrightson’s best known for his horror comics, after all, so the space suits and interplanetary rocket in "Breathless" are a real rarity.

One thing I really love in this one is the way he’s spotted his blacks and used rim lighting in a very Wally Woodish way, while the inking is still that nice juicy Wrightson brushwork.

This story first appeared in a magazine called Web of Horror in 1970. I don’t remember ever seeing that one (or I’d have been reading it) in what I do remember as racks full of Warren’s Creepy and Eerie.

Over at The Intrepid Engine, an unattributed matte painting was a mystery that was happily solved with Tineye’s excellent image search tool. Tineye examines an image and returns a series of matches from the web: it’s a great way to re-identify some of the countless pictures on the web that have lost their makers through thoughtless reposting.

And this turned out to be a very happy find. It was the work of Yanick Dusseault, production artist, matte painter, and now an art director at Industrial Light and Magic. The image at the right is a part of that original mystery picture; it looks a lot like Gotham City in Christopher Nolan’s Batman films. Curiously, those films don’t show up in Dusseault’s extensive credits – even though The Lord of the Rings, Gattaca, Pirates of the Caribbean, Revenge of the Sith, and a gazillion other amazing films do. So go figure.

But anyway it’s inevitable that the image above is the one that grabbed me, since I’m always up for The World of Tomorrow.

In my entire life there have been only twenty seconds when I wanted to work in film, and I got over it immediately. But I always enjoy the work that these folks do, and here, especially. Dusseault’s gallery is a wonderful, ongoing body of work.

About all I found to like in the Star Wars prequels were the matte paintings and complete shots of the cities; that and, okay, the one scene where Obi Wan used his Jedi trickery to convince a lowlife to rethink his life (there was a whole and much more interesting movie in that single scene, I thought). It’s a pleasure to get a peek behind the curtain at one of the people who brought those places, and others, to life.

Okay, this is clearly what I need, because simple obsession and tunnel vision still don’t quite get me where I need to go.

A short article at A Great Disorder about Hugo Gernsback’s peculiar invention for screening out, um, everything, with the judicious application of absolutely mad science. Or anyway, mad ironmongery. Did you get that? Hello? SCREENING OUT EVERYTHING! HEY! I’M TALKING TO YOU!

Via boingboing.

There’s a long standing feature over at the Whitechapel Forum in which artists each do a "remake/remodel" of an obscure (or even a well known) character from the history of comics and genre fiction. This week it’s Spurt Hammond. Yes. You got that right. Spurt Hammond.

You should know in advance that there will probably be no spurt joke left unturned and if spurting phallic symbols upset you, you probably shouldn’t look… but on the other hand you might ask yourself just how symbolic a phallic symbol is if it never, ever… well… spurts. Food for thought.

But I digress: the whole reason I even mention this is that I was so taken by this non-spurting, nearly non-phallic drawing by Tim Hamilton, who’s also the illustrator of the recent graphic novel version of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Our steampunk Spurt here seems to travel by airship (which is always a plus) and the rendering has a slightly scratchier than Moebius flavor that I really like.

And if you’d like to understand what on Earth the original Spurt Hammond was all about, this link probably won’t really help; but it’s a snarkily-commented version of an original Spurt story from Planet Comics in 1940.

Mister Doortree has been at it again at Golden Age Comic Book Stories with two collections of pulp magazine covers by Frank Tinsley and a cast of several.

This time I’m not digging the cover paintings themselves; these have me admiring the typography of the titles. Lovely stuff, especially this one from the first bunch and, in the second batch, The Whisperer.

The first collection is here; the second collection, here.

In what is certain to be the coolest Kickstarter project in Renaissance Florence – and maybe in history – Dave Yoder is raising funds on behalf of the National Geographic Society to non-destructively peer behind the Giorgio Vasari mural in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio to determine, after 35 years of mystery, whether there truly is a mural by Leonardo hiding behind it.

This excites me because for me, as unlikely as this sounds, it’s personal.

Anyone who ever studied Renaissance art has always known that Leonardo was commissioned to paint The Battle of Anghiari on the walls of Florence’s council chamber. That’s no mystery, because every other Italian artist who could borrow a mule headed up there to watch. They sketched it, they talked about it, they wrote about it; Leonardo’s own sketches for the mural, and the many sketches by admiring painters, have left us no doubt that the painting, probably unfinished, remained on the Palazzo Vecchio wall for about forty years before it was covered by Giorgio Vasari’s still-surviving fresco.

It was back in 1979 that I first read about new evidence that suggested Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari was still there, under the Vasari. I was preparing for a trip to Europe and I fully expected that by the time I got there, Vasari’s painting would be rolled up on a huge aluminum cylinder – because you really can remove a fresco that way – and that The Battle of Anghiari would be peering out from behind it… and I’d be able to get a glimpse of the lost da Vinci.

(So, okay, I was a little optimistic. It was only a few months, after all. The thing is that as indebted as we are to Giorgio Vasari for his Lives of the Artists, one Vasari painting is about as significant as 1/1000 of a da Vinci sketch. That sounds excessive, but Vasari himself might have agreed with me.)

Fortunately for everyone, there weren’t any sledgehammers lying around when I got to the Palazzo Vecchio and found to my complete astonishment that nobody was doing a thing about it.

Thirty-odd years later, that seems to be changing. There’s a strong possibility that before Vasari painted his own fresco he raised a curtain wall in front of the da Vinci, to preserve it; we now know that he did exactly the same thing to protect Massacio’s Trinità in Santa Maria Novella.

The Battle of Anghiari, considered by the painters of his own age to have been one of da Vinci’s greatest works, may have been sitting untouched and in complete darkness behind Vasari’s brick wall since 1563.

And that’s where Kickstarter, bless its little fund-raising heart, comes in: there’s a plan underway to use gamma ray photography and, I kid you not, a small particle accelerator to look through the Vasari, through the wall it’s painted on, and back behind it to take a photograph of the original wall – to examine its pigments, so they can be compared with those that da Vinci used, and hopefully even to create a visual image of the painting that may be there. Without a sledgehammer, or a giant aluminum cylinder.

They want to take a photograph through the wall. I am amazed by this.

The project’s goal is $266,500 – and those funds, if successful, will be used like so:

In the middle of his reminiscences of the pulp magazines of the ’30s and ’40s, Frederik Pohl has started to tell us about his memories of the illustrator Hannes Bok – and I have to admit that although I like his work, till now I knew practically nothing about him.

Bok was a contemporary of the inhumanly skilful Virgil Finlay; but while their rendering styles had something in common there was no commonality at all in their very different visual imaginations. Bok is strange and stylized and curious; Finlay is elegant and, I suppose, more accessible.

This comes at an appropriate time for me: I’ve just finished a greyscale illustration for a tale in Starship Sofa Stories #3. Working to greyscale was challenging, much as shooting a film in black and white is challenging – I had to make even more persnickety adjustments to my lights and materials than I usually do. But I found that I loved the result.

I keep looking at that picture and wondering whether I’ve found the solution (or part of one) for a project that’s been going in and out of the Idea Closet for years now. Grey is…. tasty. I’d forgotten.

Anyhow, here’s to the mysterious Hannes Bok. I think now that every time I recall my days of hitch-hiking to the art shows at science fiction conventions, I’ll think about him, too – some things never change!

Now continued in Part Two.