Creative Mac, http://www.creativemac.com, April 22, 2000
Creative Mac: How many people contribute to the artwork in your group? Do most of them also use Macs?
Rev. Ivan Stang: Over the 20 years that we've been publishing, hundreds of people, more than I could ever track down, have contributed. 1983's Book of the SubGenius has a credit list of 40 names, and, by the fourth book, Revelation X, it was more like 100! But there has always been a core group. Two core groups, I should say—the pre-Internet and post-Internet ones. The most visible and influential of the pre-Net SubGenius artists include Paul Mavrides, Hal Robins, John Hagen-Brenner, Nenslo, Puzzling Evidence and other folks who are more from the underground comic book world. One of the old timey artists who leaped over to the Net way of doing things was Nenslo.
On the Internet, particularly the newsgroup alt.binaries.slack, we discovered an entire Lost Civilization of digital artists slaving away on SubGenius imagery—just for fun. I don't even know their real names in most cases, but they're the ones who picked up the torch. The most prolific ones are Fernandinande LeMur, Atom Funway, and "IMBJR." But at any given time, there are at least a dozen people actively whipping out SubGenius art that's good for something, one way or another, at the rate of at least one piece a day. Alt.binaries.slack is where the majority of our art comes from now. There's this amazing spontaneity, and even a little competition, and sometimes outright art wars, that keeps alt.binaries.slack cooking.
What's interesting is the way the original hand-drawn art by Mavrides, Hagen and the other early "real" artists has been creatively used and re-used and then recycled and later morphed and ... like the original Dobbshead, none of it ever goes away; it just replicates and becomes weirder looking.
The clever little animated headers on our website, though, as opposed to the big "paintings" that fill the SubSITE galleries, those are almost all done by IrRev. Friday Jones, who, like me, was an amateur artist with a background in monster movie effects but feels compelled by some unexplainable force to work for "Bob." She was "called," you could say.
Creative Mac: What hardware do you use?
Rev. Ivan Stang: I am still limping along on a Power Mac 7500 (code named "Muleskinner") with 90 MB RAM, hooked up to a bunch of peripherals. I plan on getting a nice new G4 soon, but most of what I do is pretty simple, so I haven't been in a hurry. I must admit that helping my kids and friends get set up on their new iMacs and G4s is really making me jealous.
Creative Mac: What are the applications you use mainly for graphics creation? Could you elaborate on what you use each one for (compression, photo manipulation, original art creation, etc.)? Also, what software do you use for the Web site?
Rev. Ivan Stang: Photoshop and Bryce are the two biggies for me personally. I have strong, almost perverted feelings for these tools. They are cruel mistresses, though. Demanding. (Am I mixing metaphors?) I find myself using Photoshop more often for freelance graphics jobs—logos and minor website spruceups, box labels, stuff like that; Bryce I play with for fun "art-art" and for SubGenius illustration.
Up until 1995 or so, all of the SubGenius graphics were made by others, although some things, like our hieroglyphs, were basically "scripted" by me or my partner Philo Drummond. My graphic arts background is in film special effects and animation. I can't draw for hooey, but I used to do claymation and tabletop stop-motion work. As much as I admired computer graphics, I don't think I ever would have tried it myself had I not, out of curiosity, opened up a Bryce 2 demo that came with a MacAddict magazine CD.
The first two minutes with that Bryce demo was one of the most memorable experiences of my life. It was like losing my cherry. I thought, "My god, even I can operate this!" The concept that making 3D graphics was just like building miniature tabletop sets for stop-motion animation, that was a thrilling mental breakthrough for me. It meant I could get back to playing with cool little monster toys and setting up dynamic camera angles and dramatic lighting, just like when I was 14, only it wouldn't be nearly as strenuous or expensive. (HA!!! Think again!)
Of course, in short order I began running into Bryce's limitations. Like the fact that there were no people. And if you brought people in from Poser 2, you had to paint in their hair, clothes, etc. Needing to polish up Bryce pictures was the only reason I cracked the Photoshop manual. But it wasn't too long before I was one of those "filter-a-holics," desperate to get my paws on whatever the latest groovy new filter set was. I got to the point that I was reading graphics software manuals for entertainment. It wasn't that there was any tearing need for me to do this, I just loved working with the tools themselves.
Then I wheedled myself a job doing the graphics for a SubGenius/INWO role playing game set for Steve Jackson Games, and that forced a great deal of on the job training in Photoshop and print prep. I tried learning various other general graphics progs like Painter, but it always seemed like Photoshop or some filter thereof already had it covered. I learned Ray Dream Studio and Poser, and between those and Photoshop I've had all I've needed so far. I guess I should say, all that my hardware can handle at this time.
I'd say the single piece of software that gets used the most in my computer is Boxtop ProJPEG, simply because I'm constantly having to resize and recompress other people's things for Web use.
Conversely, I frequently have to print from, or otherwise blow up, little 72 PPI art pieces that were originally done by others strictly for newsgroup fun, and for blowing up low-res pics, Genuine Fractals seems to make a big difference.
My main Web editting tool is GoLive Cyberstudio 4 ... that and a wonderfully useful piece of shareware called Quicknailer, which makes thumbnail pages from piles of graphics. I'm not doing much interactive or Java oriented fanciness yet.
I plan to learn Flash next. My son says he can teach me in about an hour!
Creative Mac: What's the primary way your message is disseminated today?
Rev. Ivan Stang: The Web saved our butts. Pretty much all the other '80s zine publishers that had started out when we did had gone under, and we were about to as well. Our books were slow-selling classics and gave us good "rep," but not much money, and our stage shows were good workouts, but too nerve-wracking. However, the combination of college and indie radio, what there is left of those, and the Web, allowed us to be just visible enough to just enough of our potential audience of sinners, that we manage to keep S-L-O-W-L-Y expanding.
The main Web site gets roughly a thousand visitors a day who stay for four or five pages average. That skyrockets whenever some grisly cult-oriented horrible mass suicide or massacre happens, such as Heaven's Gate or Waco or Columbine.
Creative Mac: What's your primary means of reaching new members?
Rev. Ivan Stang: Now, it's the Internet, specifically the Web. It used to be our radio shows, I think, those and the teeny little SubGenius ads that were ubiquitous in punk music zines, UFO crackpot zines and self published comic books throughout the '80s. Our demographics still seem to cling to where the radio shows are, which is mostly the East and northern Midwest of the USA. We certainly do a lot more live stage shows in those areas.
Creative Mac: How would you describe what you do graphically? What do you think the impact is on the way people view the Church?
Rev. Ivan Stang: Mostly I'm just the guy that picks which piece of art goes where, which ones we want people to see first, how it gets organized and presented. I wish somebody else was doing that because I'd rather be spending more time doing artwork myself, rather than acting as Mr. Editor Man.
But, it beats working.
I know that the graphics are the main draw for many people. Some probably never bother to read any of Dobbs' eternal wisdom. (But then, I often wonder about all those silent radio listeners—some of them probably don't even know what "Bob" looks like!) I will tell you the thing that influences me the most in what art I pick and/or make for the Church of the SubGenius—the Jehovah's Witnesses. They have some of the best illustrated pamphlets of any major cult besides maybe the Hare Krishnas. I'm talking lurid, representational illustrations of religious/historical events, concepts and characters. Certain "prophecy crusade" direct mailings and posters for the evangelical protestant "hellfire" circuit also feature this sort of aesthetic, with God's hand pouring out vials of plagues and comets and skeletons onto an earthquake-ridden globe of screaming whores and sinners, all in flames. That's the kind of thing I personally shoot for.
LURIDNESS—like a 1950s detective or sci-fi
paperback cover.
RELIGIOUS SIGNIFICANCE—something awesome to
contrast with the seedy wordly images, something
magical intruding on that (hilariously) all too human
world.
And FAMILIARITY—it helps if it looks like some very
familiar cultish art, be it a badly drawn Jack Chick tract
art or the Sistine Chapel ceiling. A martial,
propagandoid look is always good for our soul-saving
outreach. The Red Chinese and the Nazis, and the U.S.
Army, were all very good at poster imagery that made
you want to join up and smite the inferior ones. (The
really good posters affect you that way even if you are
one of the "inferior ones.") So you see a lot of that
influence in SubGenius art.
And we can never say enough about the influence on us all of the real giants—Jack Kirby and Stan Lee of Marvel Comics, as well as the usual gang of idiots at Mad. Oops, how did we get to Mad Magazine from the subject of religious computer graphics on the Mac?
Creative Mac: How important would you say the Mac has been in the development of the Church?
Rev. Ivan Stang: Only in indirect ways!! The Church is a conceptual virus anyway, a meme, that doesn't need mortal or mechanical help to replicate. However, I do know that we would never have been able to imbue such a cheesily quasi-slick look to some of our most critical products, like the video Arise, had it not been for Steve Wozniak and some of his friends getting rich off Apple. Apple's success is what allowed certain crucial hippie stoner types to in turn help the Church out in critical ways at which we can only guesstimate. I guess what I'm saying is, some of the slaves freed by Apple in years past have been trying to slip handcuff keys to the rest of us slaves.
Creative Mac: How would you describe the iconography of "Bob?" Are there any comparisons you'd make to the iconography of tother religions?
Rev. Ivan Stang: We unashamedly rip off the very compositions of certain religious classics, but hey.
We try to be equal opportuinity thieves, stealing from all world religions, but I have to admit that we find ourselves most frequently mimicing the more low-class, gutter sideshow types of no-brainer cults and isms.
What I can't quite understand is the fascination that heavy drug users have for our innocent SubGenius art. Admittedly, it has a "psychedelic" quality. But that is as much from the inherent magic, the spiritual power of the very dots of the Dobbshead image, as from any of the swirly shapes and clashing, melding colors and startling dreamlike surreal flashes of hyperreality from the id's sub-basement.
One guy told me recently, "I always assumed that the SubGenius thing was about LSD. I picked up that first book and skimmed through it, and the way the whole thing looked, the way the colors swam around on the page, I just knew it was a "tripping book.""
I said, "But Book of the SubGenius is in black and white!"
"Yeah, I know," the guy said, "But it's the kind of black and white that looks like colors."
Creative Mac: Do you have any stats on how much artwork is downloaded from your site? And how much contributed artwork do you receive from non-core members of the group?
Rev. Ivan Stang: I know from following the stats that out of the six or seven main choices that visitors get at the front page, "GRAPHICS" is the second most frequently chosen next to "SEX" (which actually also just leads to a particularly raunchy part of the graphics collections.) I am sent art by a stranger at least every week or so. Most of it's "Bob" related. Half of it's interesting, and half of it's nothing but a Dobbshead crudely stuck onto a copyrighted picture of some celebrity or politician or historical figure. Actually, they're going to too much trouble. Just shove a pipe into it somewhere and, voila!—more uninspired auto-SubGenius art.
Creative Mac: The ancient bonus question: PCs versus Macs?
Rev. Ivan Stang: I really don't have much of an opinion either way. I have never been forced to use a PC, so I'm in no position to judge. I know they are cheaper and that they are now operated more or less just like Macs are.
I think that when a person buys a PC instead of a Mac, it's like casting a scared, whipped "little-man's" vote for the uniformly standardized, individuality-crushing, policorp-monopolized, dehumanizing "safe" 1984-like future of sexless drones ... and that when you buy a Mac, it's a heroic, noble, empowering strike for the Rebel Forces against the Empire, for wild dangerous parties in outer space with any damn toys or mutants you can afford to bring along, even prudes and Pinks, if they think they can handle it!
Otherwise, no difference.
If you haven't had a chance to visit the SubGenius Web site, treat yourself and visit it now. The site is at http://www.subgenius.com. The original SubGenius pamphlet is at http://www.subgenius.com/pam1/pamphlet.html, in case you were interested in a little indoctrination. The site lso contains numerous movies, sounds, games and fonts geared toward the further deification of "Bob."