This is a new version of one of my old digital pieces. It's based on a panel from a 1959 comic book story by Otto Binder and Sid Greene called "Warning From One Million B.C." which I read (avidly!) as a kid in the early 1970's.
When I came across it again in the late 1990's (see below for a pic), I was struck by the (hopefully) inadvertent racist connotations that had crept into it over the decades. Terms like "racial doom" and "black blight" certainly hit the ear differently than they would've in the 1950's, and the drawings of the butterfly people themselves reminded me of representations of East Asian people from popular Western culture of that time (without even mentioning the skin colour choice).
I restaged the image in 1999 as a photocollage using digital photography of toys and models, but the undercurrents of the source were mostly lost and I was never happy enough with it to bother finishing the background.
Time keeps on tickin' though. I came across the image again recently and thought how the theme of "racial doom" resonates even more strongly today, from the "Great Replacement" theories animating anti-immigrant nationalism across the world to the plummeting birth rates undermining everyone's retirement plans.
And needless to say, I'm also struck by images of scientists working to save us all at a time when multiple existential crises are erupting from our use of technologies (including AI, which powers the software I used to make this work).
With all this in mind, I made the new version more dramatic (and maybe a bit more Weimar Republic) by troweling on some Expressionist painterliness.
