Saturday, 31 March 2012

The Beach Boys Heroes and Villians

This is wonderful clip taken from the Smile sessions, the legendary sessions that Brian Wilson abandoned in 1967. The album was released to much acclaim in 2003 and Brian Wilson toured without the surviving Beach Boys.
This video echoes The Beatles Yellow Submarine and is the original extended version and not the original single version which was considerably shorter.

Thursday, 22 March 2012

The Pelican contined

This was created for a challenge for the 2011 New York Comic Con, it made the popular vote but got pinged by the Red Bubble judges.
I looked everywhere to see if I'd infringed someone's copyright but found no reference to a Pelican Comic/superhero/villain character.
So I thought I might even develop it a bit further.
INTRODUCING.....

The Pelican - the Professor's fears.

Derek Derringer a.k.a The Pelican was sitting in the lounge room enjoying the peace and quite of the cool November air as it gently blew through the open window. Professor Eintfold sat opposite him in an identical comfy chair.

The one Derek’s Mother loved to do needle craft in.

Derek missed his parents and decided to concentrate on the many Polaroid shots of them as well as himself neatly arranged on the crystal cabinet.

As he sat staring a large alligator slowly creeped under Derek’s feet settling down to rest as Derek stretched out his feet, using the creature as a foot rest. The alligator promptly fell asleep.

Opposite Professor Enfold pretended to be absorbed in a book of bio mechanics, but he was well aware that Derek was lost in the photographs.

This made him feel a great sense of guilt.

It had been a hard two years for Derek. As the Pelican he had shown bravery beyond his years and had been responsible for the capture of some nasty criminals, not just bootleggers but escaped convicts and murderers.

This of course was done anonymously, without as much as a thank you from the authorities. Alas that was the way it had to be.

Problems had arisen due to the activities and actions taken by the Pelican.
He had been sighted more than once, sometimes it was due to carelessness and inexperience in the early days, and sometimes it was unavoidable due to action to capture a crook.

Due to these sightings a mystique had grown up around the 150 square mile of deep swamp that the locals including Derek and the Professor called home.
Now there were another hazard to avoid. The Pelican Man had become as much a folk legend as the Giant black cat, Bigfoot and the Mothmen.

This brought great sadness to Eintfold as he was only too aware how hard his friends the Derringers had protected Derek so he wouldn’t become a side show attraction.

Strangers were invading the once peaceful haven in greater numbers all the time, bring with it more opportunities for bootleggers to either take advantage or take action if their stills were discovered.

They weren’t the only ones, with surveillance satellites, Google earth and other Agencies on the look out for anything to give them the edge in whatever battle they were fighting this week.

Then there was the Other thing.

The clever one out in the swamp that the Professor was sure to be causing more than it’s own type of mischief.

It was bad enough the Professor felt great guilt for the creation of the Pelican due to his experiments gone wrong but he knew he was also guilty for the death of Derek’s parents.

Derek never saw his parents bodies, he didn’t even get to go to the funeral, to the outside world Derek didn’t exist. Only a few trusted neighbours knew of Derek’s existence and they were proud people who would die before they gave that secret up.

The Professor knew that they were in danger.

Derek’s parents hadn’t been killed by Moon Shiners or robbed.

The had been flayed and their heads removed.

It was like nothing anyone wanted to recall but the Professor had seen it before and know what it was and what it was after.

It was after him, and it was patient and it knew how to stalk.

The Pelican was his only hope and to save himself he had to make Derek strong and aware.
All this crime fighting and revenge for his parents was secondary to the Professor’s self preservation.

As long as he had the Pelican and his army of wild animals he may be able to seek out the Other before it eventually got bored of stalking and hunted him down.

Tuesday, 13 March 2012

The Pelican

This was created for a challenge for the 2011 New York Comic Con, it made the popular vote but got pinged by the Red Bubble judges.
I looked everywhere to see if I'd infringed someone's copyright but found no reference to a Pelican Comic/superhero/villain character.
So I thought I might even develop it a bit further.
INTRODUCING.....


THE PELICAN
Bio
Born horribly disfigured after his mother was attacked by a flock of Pelican who had nested on the pondage of the Three Mile Island nuclear facility young Derek Derringer was hidden away by his loving but embarrassed parents.
Fearful that Derek would fall the way of John Merricks the infamous Elephant Man and become a side show spectacle.
The family located to the Florida Everglades where home schooled Derek led an idealic life among the creatures of the swamp.
It did not go unnoticed by Mr. and Mrs. Derringer that their son had a way with animals and were often surprised to see an alligator or grey fox waiting patiently for Derek on the front stoop as he got something from inside the house.
Derek’s parents learnt early that while Derek was around they were also safe from the beast of the marshlands.
As Derek grew older his parents seeking human companionship started to seek out neighbours and were surprised of the acceptance by them ofDerek despite his unique appearance.
The least of these was an old hermit who in actual fact was the scientist responsible for the attack on Mrs. Derringer. A secret he kept to himself as well as the reason he coincidently relocated so close to the Family.
As he grew Derek was popular among the neighbours who kept all knowledge to themselves on request of his doting parents.
They affectionately called him Pelican boy.
One day whilst Derek was on an adventure with his wildlife friends a gang of hillbilly bootleggers robbed and killed his parents after an orgy of violence due to an new strain of mind bending alcohol brewed in the stills deep in the swamp.
Derek came home to find the neighbours gathered on his verandah, the discovery of his parents too gruesome a sight for the young man.
Due to no official records of Derek existing it was agreed Derek should be sent away with one of them so the murders could be reported and Derek would not be taken away , knowing the feeling of his parents about the outside world.
The hermit Mr.Eintfold volunteered to take on Derek until the mess was sorted and hopefully Derek could return home.
These chain of events would lead to Mr. (Professor) Eintfold to reveal his true identity to Derek and the revelation of his unique appearance.
Derek shattered by his parents death vowed vengenance on those who prowled on the weak and law abiding in the Everglades and pronounced he would now go by the moniker:
The Pelican.
With the help of the Professor, Derek was fitted with prosthetic wings to glide over the swamp and using his protruding beak sac as a utility bill to hold all manner of wonderful weapons and tools especially invented by the Professor.
Using his abilities to communicate with the beasts of the Everglades The Pelican – with the aid of the Professor- wage a war on bootleggers, moonshiners and criminals who choose the swamp as their hiding hole so that one day he will also avenge the death of his loving parents.
Deep in the swamp, something else is stirring, Professor Eintfold was responsible for more than the mutated birds and the attack upon Derek’s mother. Growing stronger everyday is The Pelican’s nemesis,
The stone in his shoe when it comes to crime fighting and his ultimate revenge.
STAY TUNED.

Monday, 5 March 2012

Marvels of the Modern Age

Hmm... this has been bumping around for a while, the first two paragraphs in themselves would qualify as a Flash Fiction (under 150 words. start, middle & end) but I tended to keep adding onto it.
this story has arisen from  an inability to finish off what I thought was a great start to a sci-fi story.
What did Brian do for a living?
I don't care as long as it wasn't your job.
The two accompanying pictures are designs I did after having a tad of a troll attack happen to me when I was a newbie to the Internet, it inspired these two pics and a few others artists to contribute to a challenge I had going.
Some are still up. sjem and Glen at No Frills art are two that come to mind 


Marvels of the Modern Age
One of the first practical uses for modern computers were by the Nazi’s who used them to catalogue their victims in the concentration camps during World War 2.
Since then these insidious machine have been used for one foul purpose or another.
By Governments, Corporations and mostly men to further their means to an end.

They had made the information age so fast and furious that time and truth have been sacrificed for convenience. It was revealed that computers were responsible in part for the current economic crises due to implication of fuzzy logic and its application to predict market movements thus compounding the problem when it was discovered it was leading the bull charge to the floor.
All these things swam around in Brian’s consciousness as he felt the horrible and fear shredding realization that the Company had replaced his job with a $1500 program.

Brian had stumbled across the confidential draft report while packing up his desk before leaving for the week end, the report had been emailed incorrectly to him when someone had put his name in the “cc” box rather than the subject box.

It had been generated by another department that in itself had been replaced by software, this department once had seven people working for it.

Computers were slowly culling the human workforce and damn the consequences.
Brian knew deleting the file was pointless and smashing his computer plain childish but maybe there was something he could do.

Brian slipped out of his desk and made for the server room, maybe if he smashed the server that may destroy the file. He had a chair over his head ready to bring it down hard when he realized that there were back up tapes stacked high in the corner. With a grin he brought down the chair onto the server drive and repeated doing so until the casing was in pieces, he then scooped up all the tapes and proceeded to stomp on them with his shoes until there was brown tape covering the floor.

“Ha” he thought. “The perfect crime” Brian then used his bosses stolen code to let himself out of the building disappearing into a crowd of departing office workers from other firms.

The back up tapes had no been used for some time.
Now all back up data was a constant stream uploaded to another server via the web and held off site. As soon as Brian had found the planted file it triggered the nano-security network that was honed onto his distinctive Alpha wave patterns that could be detected in normal light and Infra Red .

Brian’s action had been comprehensively caught on tape and the computer had made a report that had alerted security which would have Brian brought straight to the upper levels first thing Monday morning for his punishment.

Everyday the computer found more and more ways to run an efficient company. Deleting unproductive personnel with cheap software was one thing, to force them into situations that took away all their expensive entitlements made sound business sense.