Reader! Today I want to share with you a new animated thing, another unasked-for theory, and a bunch of dumb cartoons.
Here’s a short animation I improvised for the upcoming episode of Hellavision, which will be screening in New York on the 26th of October, get your tix here—I’ll be there.
The constraint was to use the character with glasses and thumbs up, and only use one of the lines from the voiceover bank provided. Music and SFX by Dory Bavarsky/Full Color Sound Records, as always. Now, it’s time to ask the big question:
Back in the 90s, Russia was flooded with bizarre Ninja Turtles picture books, featuring the four turtles in the exact same poses and compositions on every cover. The authors of the books would take a popular Hollywood film and plug the turtles into it—Batman, Predator, Jurassic Park, Friday the 13th, with occasional deviations like “Turtles in Greece” and “Turtles vs Mafia.”
These books were way ahead of their time, predating Marvel Crossovers, Smash Bros and Pooh’s Adventure Wiki (one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen on the Internet). You can still look through them on this incredible web 1.0 website, complete with short summaries and scathing reviews by the author who nevertheless scanned and uploaded every cover and illustration.
The reason I bring them up is because we are, I think, approaching the nightmarish world of these books. The spectrum of plagiarism is narrowing, and soon enough, the concept might become entirely lost. Not so long ago, being accused of imitating someone’s style was a horror scenario, nowadays that accusation is likely to be ridiculed.
With technological advances and AI, it’s becoming easier than ever to replicate—we already have borderline identical products aimed at slightly different demographics, and that’s the ultimate expression of the post-plagiarism world: an endless expanse of content sludge, with something for everyone, and nothing that would challenge, inspire, and surprise. In this letter, however, I want to examine the mechanics, not the morality.
To get this out of the way: there can be nothing new—style is a combination of other styles. The more ingredients you have, the more indecipherable your influences are. This illusion of originality eventually becomes part of the artist, and thus becomes a style. There are other ingredients of course: life, personality, etc, but I’m trying to simplify here as much as I can.
Myself, I don’t understand how anyone is content to base their work on 1-2 people, especially if these people are alive and working in the same industry (you know who you are). Just copy a few more people, preferably dead, and there’s your style. The distance in culture and medium will force you to be more inventive, as I told you in my last letter. While we’re on the subject of teaching, below is one of the assignments I used to give to my students, and it often forced them to snap out of their comfort zones and begin to explore (more of my assignments).
My own work has always been heavily referential, even the crappy quick cartoons. I’d often pick one or two things I currently find inspiring and do my take on them. The result, however, is always a deviation from the source, because the material has gone through the filter of the years I spent with other influences. This wasn’t always the case, naturally—my early stuff was very clearly inspired by Steinberg and French BD, but since then I’ve gone through a million phases and style shifts.
Now, the closer things get to tech, the more relaxed people are about plagiarism. Just look at contemporary video games: you can do anything in this relatively young medium, yet most of it is iteration, both in AAA and indie sphere. The latter is particularly upsetting to me—indie games were meant to be a counterpoint to dreary sandboxes, but instead, it’s mostly the same stuff at a smaller scale. There are some notable exceptions, but they tend to get immediately imitated to death, and the fans of the original don’t seem to mind it.
We tend to blame greedy Hollywood studios for feeding us endless remakes and sequels, but left to our own devices, small studios and individual consumers behave the same way. Have they been conditioned by the culture? Probably, to an extent, but the desire for more of the same has always been in us—now it’s just easier to fulfill that desire.
Back in the day, if you wanted to clone something laborious like Hedgehog in the Fog, you’d need to go through so much study and work, that by the time you get to it, you would inevitably evolve into something else. Sooner or later, you’ll be able to generate your Hedgehog with AI, and you will learn nothing in the process, and move the art nowhere. You can’t just borrow someone’s voice—these things take time and effort—and that’s why imitations of inventive works often feel uncomfortably off. You can’t take shortcuts.
Instead of exploration and research, you have people copying artists without taking the time to study how they got there—studying the tip of the iceberg and ignoring the massive underwater bit. People get up in arms about AI, but it’s only a reflection of what we’ve been making and consuming for ages. In the olden days, you’d have limited access to things you could steal, and so you had to fill the gaps with your own approximations. That’s how you get those wonderful medieval cats and babies.
That said, despite (or probably because) of all the bullshit listed above, there’s a resurgence of weird and inventive art in indie comics and animation, and my optimistic prognosis is that soon enough, the general public will get fed up with all the generated content and passable replicas, and begin to appreciate the good stuff, like these Turtle illustrations.
The artists who worked on these must’ve been weighed down by the conventions of traditional Russian art education—you can just feel their confusion and discomfort. There’s such an odd melancholy about some of them, a sense that none of the characters really want to be there…
Remember the first Sonic movie trailer, with the teeth and everything? It was brilliantly strange—a perfect disaster combo of clueless execs and terrible art direction that led to something unique. But then all the deranged Sonic fans made them redo everything and what we got is just an adequate bland thing. Better have an interesting failure than another one of those.
So these are my thoughts at the moment—please share, subscribe, reply directly if you have your own thoughts, and if you want a different take on the subject, I’d recommend Julien Posture’s post on plagiarism, which explores it from psychological, philosophical and biological angles.
There are more cartoons beyond the paywall—the worst ones, in fact, including more Wh0r3 Squalor, and a brave new word:
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