Where have all the monsters gone?

Remember this?

 

Or this?

Seen much of Nessie recently? Nope, nor me.

I was lucky enough recently to chat to the extraordinary Colonel John Blashford-Snell, explorer, inventor of white water rafting and Operation Raleigh, and Honorary Life President of the Centre for Fortean Zoology. John has travelled all over the world in search of cryptids and has been successful in finding the fabled Andean double-nosed dog and the almost legendary giant elephants of Bardia, Nepal. He even had a go at finding Nessie a few times, including one using sonar aboard an airship floating slowly over the loch, but he didn't find the monster. We didn't have time to discuss it in any detail and he had no firm conviction as to its existence but it did set me off wondering ... where have all the monsters gone?

By coincidence, this cartoon panel appeared on the always excellent XKCD webcomic site. And it's true isn't it? Once upon a time there was a proliferation of fuzzy, indistinct photographs of UFOs, lake monsters, ghosts, yetis, sasquatches and bigfeet, and bug-eyed greys. And you can understand why; cameras were awkward, bulky. You had to load film into them and set f-stops and shutter speeds. And you had to focus the damn thing. It's amazing anyone ever got a photo at all. But, these days, we nearly all have point and click, autofocussing hi-resolution digital cameras and we all carry them around with us. They're even built into our phones, laptops and tablets. So there should be hundreds of new Nessie photos every year. And that's not counting CCTV, webcams and satellites photographing every inch of the loch from space. If Google Earth can get pics of Loch Ness like this ...

... pics so close that you can actually see the ripples on the surface ...

... why can't it capture a dirty great monster? Or monsters. After all, it's unlikely that Nessie, if she exists, is a lone example of her species. There must be a breeding population of these things.

The oldest possible 'sighting' of Nessie goes back to St Columba in 565CE who went out on the loch to admonish a 'water beast' that had killed a fisherman. Even assuming there was only a breeding pair there at the time, you'd have a pretty sizeable population by now, some 1,400+ years later. And even if that population had been denuded by pollution or changes in environment, those changes have happened only in the last 300 years, so the loch should have been swarming with the wee buggers in the centuries beforehand. To add to the weight of evidence against, we must also take into account that the most common theory about Nessie is that she's a 'living fossil'; a plesiosaur or some other long-necked animal that we only know of through the fossil record. As far as we know, the last of the plesiosaurs died out, along with their cousins the dinosaurs and pterosaurs, during the K-Pg Extinction Event. So, if a few survived and bred, they've had 65 million years to breed and multiply. Wouldn't the loch be teeming with them now? And surely they would have spread out? Loch Ness does connect to the sea and there's lots more food out there than there is in the loch.

Now, I realise that some people will point to the coelacanth, a bony-limbed fish that we believed extinct for 65 million years that turned up, alive and well, in 1938 and say, 'Aha!' But the coelacanth is a deep water fish whereas the sea reptiles were air breathers like whales and seals and had to keep returning to the surface. Surely there would be more than just a few odd, poorly described or recorded sightings?

Nope, the sad fact is that much as I desperately want there to be living prehistoric animals, all the evidence - or lack of it - amounts to a big fat nothing. Even with brilliant photoshoppers out there, no good photos - allegedly real or outright fake - have turned up in ages. And it's not as if the public's interest has waned - you only have to look at the press response to James May's Skegness monster hoax in 2012 to see that.



But let's not give up hope eh? We're discovering new species every year, some that we'd thought long extinct. Who knows what may turn up? Sadly, I doubt it'll be a plesiosaur. It's more likely to be something small-ish like the recently discovered Lord Howe's Stick Insect, one of the largest insects on the planet and believed extinct since 1930 ... until a small population turned up in 2001 living under a single shrub on the small islet of Ball's Pyramid, the world's tallest and most isolated sea stack.

Now, don't get me started on UFOs and little green men ...

101 People to Meet before You (or they) Die - Pilot Episode

Here's a little slideshow I've made of the pilot episode of 101 people to Meet before You (or they) Die. It was first broadcast on Resonance FM104.4 (London) on 30th April 2012.

The concept for the show is that we introduce you to some of the world's most extraordinary people: explorers, scientists, artists, philosophers etc. The pilot episode focuses on Venezuelan discoverer and encyclopaedist Charles Brewer-Carias: a man who has led nearly 300 expeditions; has discovered over 100 species new to science; who may have found the world's oldest organism; and claims to know the location of the semi-mythical El Dorado. He is also, allegedly, the person upon whom the character of Charles Muntz (in the Disney/Pixar film Up) is based ... though he isn't a baddie.

Running time 60 minutes with musical interludes by Emperor Yes. Presented by Dan Schreiber. Written by Stevyn Colgan and Dan Schreiber. Music by Ash Gardner and Hugo Sheppard of Carl and the Saganauts. Produced by Dan Schreiber and Ash Gardner at House of Strange Studios.

 

This is a pilot and, as such, something of an experiment. We have already established that interviews by phone are problematic and that the show is better suited to a 30 minute format. But what do you think? We'd be very interested to hear your views. And your suggestions for people we should interview.

Never quite getting to the Alien Planet

I made a very good find today ... the entire 90 minute Alien Planet documentary.

Back in the early 1990s, I had (yet another) near-miss with a book project. A great friend of mine, John Coppinger, is a sculptor. He's the man who made Jabba the Hutt for Return of the Jedi and you've seen his creatures in many, many films. Here's John (far right - beard) on set and me with Jabba's face before painting:

Anyway, he and I had the idea of creating a book in which we visit alien worlds and meet creatures that have evolved to live on those worlds. The idea was that we would make the book educational; by showing how creatures have evolved elsewhere we could mirror how life has evolved here. The gimmick was that John would actually build the creatures (this was before CGI). So we put together some sample chapters and a few photos and illustrations like these:

And we got a bite! Dorling Kindersley liked it and negotiations began. Via them, John and I also ended up contributing some content to a Channel 4 Equinox show on aliens and I got to chat with people like Dougal Dixon and Professor Jack Cohen - the alien guys in the UK. Things went along merrily for a while ... but then the guy at DK we'd been dealing with jumped to another publisher and the lady who took over our project dropped it as she didn't believe in it. To add to our problems, the film Stargate appeared and effectively used exactly the same idea we'd had of a kind of 'subway' network of gateways allowing people to jump from world to world. And so the book died. That's the way things happen sometimes.

Then, a few years later in 1999, the BBC launched the groundbreaking Walking with Dinosaurs show and John was involved in sculpting dinosaurs for it. And we wondered whether it was worth pitching the idea of a 'Walking with Aliens'. After all, we had all of the research done and we'd designed the aliens. I also contacted a brilliant Australian artist called Alex Ries and asked if he wanted to be involved if we got it off the ground. You can see some of his extraordinary alien design work here. Here's a sample:

However, the BBC told us that they were already working on a 'Walking with Aliens' project with Dougal Dixon so we backed off. And that was that for the project. That said, whatever the BBC was planning didn't happen and the series never got made. However, on the other side of the Atlantic, the Discovery Channel was doing something along the same lines. They'd decided to make a CGI show based on the fantastic alien designs and illustrations of Wayne Douglas Barlowe.

Barlowe has designed creatures for many films. For example, he worked on both Hellboy films and designed the wildlife for Avatar. And, in 1993, he wrote a book called Expedition; a lavishly illustrated guide to the wildlife of another planet called Darwin IV. I have a copy and it's a staggeringly lovely thing. And it was this book that Discovery brought to life. I watched the show when it was on and loved it. I even bought the DVD. But now you can watch it all here for free. Enjoy!

P.s. I still have a great alien book project if anyone wants to publish it ...

Jabbagpuss (and Princess Madeleia)

A new painting, just completed. This one was just screaming to be done. One day I happened to notice that Bagpuss, the eponymous hero of Oliver Postgate's lovely old TV series, is about the same shape as Jabba from Star Wars. That made Madeleine the rag doll his slave girl. Professor Yaffle and Gabriel the toad became mercenaries. And the mice on the mouse organ became snacks. It seemed so right. So I doodled it.

It seemed to work! And as there was space on the far left I also added a froglet and Mr Pogle from Pogle's Wood.  So, here's a stage by stage guide to how I painted it (click on pics to see larger versions):

It's my small tribute to the late, great Oliver Postgate who made my childhood - and the childhoods of millions of Brits - so much lovelier.

Dalek Relaxation Tape (for Humans)

Typical brilliance from Peter Serafinowicz.

The other paintings in the set ... so far

These other two paintings I did last year involving children's book or TV characters thrown into unlikely scenarios. here we see Piglet as Conan the Barbarian and Major Clanger as John Connor, defending his world from the machines.





Am now working on a Captain Pugwash/Moby Dick mash-up and a portrait of Jabba the Hutt ... as Bagpuss. Watch this space for updates ...

Looking for love? May as well use a telescope

I've previously discussed the subject of life elsewhere in the universe, at some great length, on this blog. For a quick re-cap, here's a piece I did on the Drake Equation and the Fermi Paradox. Here's an article on why we shouldn't be looking for life as we know it, and here's a an essay on the unlikelihood that any aliens we meet will be humanoid.

Looking through my folders of notes and articles today I found this story:

Love in London is as rare as finding aliens

by Rebekah Curtis (editing by Paul Casciato) January 19th 2010 (Reuters)

'Peter Backus, a teaching fellow of economics at the University of Warwick, has calculated that he has a 0.00034 percent chance of finding love in the British capital using the same Drake Equation scientists use to determine the potential number of extra-terrestrials in our galaxy.
American astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake devised his namesake equation in the early 1960s.

The 31-year-old Backus -- who lives on a narrow boat in central London - is not even that particular about his ideal match, requiring only that she be a London-based female, aged 24-34, with a university education. 'I am not trying to be an elitist or anything, he said about his educational requirements. 'Everyone has preferences. I just think we would have more in common.' Further reducing his chances, he has estimated he would be physically attracted to just five percent of the women meeting all these criteria. This means there are about 10,500 women in Britain who tick all the boxes for Backus, he said - just above the 10,000 potential communicative civilizations that could exist in the Milky Way according to the Drake equation. So just 0.14 percent of Londoners and 0.017 percent of the British population meet Backus's own requirements, he said.

However, you also have to factor in the personal tastes of the eligible women too - a relationship takes two. If Backus's dream women are equally as fussy as he is, his chances of finding someone who will return his affections plummets to just 0.00034 percent. 'There are 26 women in the UK with whom I might have a wonderful relationship. So, on a given night out in London there is a 0.00034 percent chance of meeting one of these special people,' he said. 'That's a 1 in 285,000 chance. Not great'.

But love can still defy the odds right on your doorstep. Since writing his paper on the equations of finding love, Backus has started dating his neighbour, Rose. She meets his age requirement, has a university degree and also lives on a boat.'

Which means, I guess, that the universe is capricious and doesn't bow to mathematical probabilities. Against all the odds people do find love, people do win the lottery and maybe, just maybe, the universe is teeming with life.

Cartoon by me, circa 1992.

365 Doodles - Day 362

Now that Christmas Day has passed us by with a safe margin, I can show you some of the commissions I did for people as presents this year. I'll start today with this one, a full blown painting. The brief was simple enough: 'Something involving aliens and caravans.' Here's what I came up with. As always, click on the picture to see a larger version.

365 Doodles - Day 327

As today's theme is Barsoom, it seemed only right to include some of my own art. Here's a green warrior I drew somewhere around 1977/78 ...

And a much more insect-y version from 1981:

Maybe it's time for a new Barsoom doodle?

Welcome to Barsoom

While researching the previous post I came across all manner of images portraying the world of Barsoom, Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars. I thought I'd share some of them with you. Some I like, some I don't but they're all bursting with energy and passion. Everyone loves illustrating Barsoom. To start off, here's one by Joe Jusko:

Then we have the great Frank Frazetta:

And two by Michael Whelan:

Next up we have Jeff Nentrup:

And some internal illustrations by the wonderful William Stout:

I could create a whole blog just of illustrations of Barsoom ... but, thankfully, Damon Orrell has done it for me. Go visit his Art of Barsoom blog. It's a treat!

I've waited a lifetime for this film

2011 has been a poor year for genre films and what has made it to cinemas has been almost universally not great. So 2012 will see a glut of eagerly awaited films such as the Avengers, Ghostbusters 3, Men in Black 3, Wanted 2, The Amazing Spiderman, The Dark Knight Rises, Dredd, The Hobbit etc. In amongst them all are the two films I'm looking forward to most. They are both scheduled for release in March. The first is Aardman's new feature Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists (see here). The second is John Carter. And I can't tell you how long I've waited for this.

Well, I can. And I'm going to.

As you know, I grew up in Cornwall during the 1960s and 70s. This was, of course, pre internet and mobile phones. There were no computer games and only three TV channels. From the age of 11 I went to school in Helston, a smallish town off the tourist trail that boasted one bookshop, a John Menzies and a couple of small tobacconist/newsagents. There are no motorways into Cornwall - the M5 starts and ends in North Devon - and the dual carriageway A30 and A38 are relatively modern. To get to Plymouth (in 'England' as my elders would have it) meant a 70 mile drive along single-lane A roads and windy B roads stuffed with caravans and tractors.

So, it's maybe not too surprising that we were a bit behind the times down there. Punk came and went when I was aged 16-17 and hardly impacted on us at all. Life of Brian was banned by all of our local councils and we had to go to Plymouth to see it. US comics rarely got to our shops and, if they did, they were sporadic and the chances of reading the complete run of a story were slim. Instead, I bought them for the artwork alone. There were no rock concerts (no venues nearer than Plymouth Poly) and more male voice choirs than you can beat away with a stick. Which is why, when I did discover something fantastical and exciting and mind-expanding, I leapt upon it like a starving man on a pasty.

The impact that Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars books had on me as a young teenager is beyond enormous. I was immediately sucked into the world of Barsoom with its tall six-limbed green Tharks, multi-legged Thoats and Calots and bloodthirsty predatory Banths. There was an entire dynasty of characters to follow; John Carter and the Princess Dejah Thoris, their children Carthoris and Thuvia, Ulysses Paxton and more. Carter was heroic, chivalrous and brave, Thoris was lovely, noble and wise. The monsters were great, the stories were fabulous and Burroughs create an entire world that - if not very convincing or even biologically practical by modern standards - was coherent and well thought out. The John Carter books became my 'gateway drug' into  more serious sci fi like Frank Herbert's Dune and Asimov's Foundation books.

Being very art-fixated I always loved finding new interpretations of Barsoom. There were Bruce Pennington's and Richard Clifton-Dey's iconic paperback covers. There was Rodney Matthews' interpretation of the massive elephant-like Zitidars. Frank Frazetta, Richard Corben, Michael Whelan and Boris Vallejo all had their goes too (the Frazetta covers were amazing) and so did many others. Some were amazing, many were less so but I loved seeing them. I've peppered this post with some of them.

And, all the time, I waited for Hollywood to catch up and make the John Carter film. The Star Wars franchise came and went and the tall gangly cloners of Kamino reminded me of the tall green martians while the arena scene on Geonosis was so reminiscent of Carter's adventures. Burroughs' books inspired a generation of visionary film makers. Avatar showed just how far the CGI envelope could be pushed. Its floating mountains owed much to Roger Dean and its multi-legged Direhorses were Barsoomian Thoats in all but name. There was one pretty abortive attempt to actually make a Barsoom film in 2009 with a straight-to-video release called Princess of Mars starring ex-porn queen Traci Lords but, otherwise, Hollywood wasn't playing. Until now.



That's the trailer for Disney's John Carter, directed by the guy who directed Wall-E, Andrew Stanton. And music by Peter Gabriel - my favourite singer of all time. That has to be a sign, surely? It looks great. And yes, I understand that changes will need to be made to suit 21st century scientific convention and sexual politics but as long as they keep the adventure and the romance and the thrills intact, I'll be happy. A few stills and some concept art from the film have recently been released including the city of Helium, a 'White Ape' and a green Martian, probably Tars Tarkas:

I said at the start that I'd tell you how long I've waited for this film. It's been 40 years. I was 10 when I got my first copy of A Princess of Mars and I still have it. Some of you weren't even born when I first read it.

So please Mr Hollywood, I've waited this long. Make it worth my wait.