[December of 2022 on the strict timeline of ZP-51498. Wendy drives with the Tetrad, up to the Albaneigh Museum of Fine Art]
Gilda: “Here it is.”
[Wendy parks, and the Tetrad begin exiting the car]
Margo: “Museum of Fine Art? What are we doing here?”
Gilda: “They’re hosting an exhibition for art made by robots.”
Margo: “Robots? Cool. How do I make one of these artist robots?”
Gilda: “You shouldn’t want to, Margo. They learn by stealing from actual artists! It’s unnatural, and they’re destroying the livelihoods of the artists they steal from! And they’re duping artists into thinking they’re just a tool to make art look better!”
[beat]
Margo: “So, are they a tool?”
Gilda: “Wendy, pop the trunk.” [she does so, and Gilda picks up the paint cans and paintbrush inside said trunk] “Yeah, they’re a tool. They’re a tool in the same way a getaway driver is a tool for a bank robber.” [slams trunk shut] “Even the Phoenix got duped! They’re past it now, they only use the robots for inspiration and references now. The only moral way to use them. That and educational material that shows how ridiculous robot art looks. But they should’ve woken up sooner!”
April: “Geez, Gilleh, ye soond real radge ‘boot t’is.”
Gilda: “Yes, I am radge about this! And so is the Phoenix. They were the one that got duped, after all. But I’ll tell you what, they need better calibration of their bullshit detector! They fall for a lot of bullshit!”
Wendy: “Hm. Cut them some slack, they thought they were ahead of the curve.”
Gilda: “Yeah, well, they weren’t. Robot art is not the future, it is the present, and once this trend is over, it’ll be the past! It’s already the past for the Phoenix! Except for, again, references and educational material.”
Margo: “You love pop culture of decades before you were born, and yet you’re criticizing things as the past?”
Gilda: “Robot art is not the kind of past that’s cool! It’s the Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher kind of past, the kind of past that was awful even when it was the present!” [holds up paint cans] “And we’re about to make a statement about it.” [hides paint cans and brush in jacket] “Onward!” [the Tetrad walks toward the museum]
April: “I’m nae pa’ o’ yer ‘we’. I jist wanna enjooee th’ m’se’m.”
Gilda: “You can enjoy it until security starts chasing us.”
[inside the museum, Gilda, Margo, and Wendy come up to the robot art exhibit, entitled “Robotic Creations – The Work of the Next Generation of Artists”. Gilda sneers at the name]
Gilda: “Hmmph! Next generation of artists! Not when I get my hands –” [Wendy slaps her hand over Gilda’s mouth. Gilda pushes it away and starts whispering] “Not when I get my hands, my…” [waves hands around, still holding the paint cans by pressing her elbows against them] “…anatomically correct, not-deformed, five-fingered hands, on them!”
Wendy: “Heheh, because they can’t do hands.”
[Gilda, Margo and Wendy walk into the exhibit. Gilda drops her paintbrush, which Wendy picks up and gives back to her… but to slow not to be noticed]
[security guard] “Hey, is that a paintbrush?”
Gilda, Margo, Wendy: “Uhhhhh…”
[security guard]: “Hey, wait a minute, you’re robot art haters! You came to wreck the exhibit, didn’t you?!”
Wendy: “Oh please, they’re made on a computer from stolen images. You can just print more.”
[security guard]: “Boo! You just hate progress!” [into walkie-talkie] “Security to the robot art exhibit! We’ve got more robot haters!”
Margo: “Okay, we better make our move fast. Gilda, you splash that paint on the… paintings? And I and Wendy will smash the sculptures of gnarly-looking hands.”
[the trio run through the exhibit, laying waste to it as the security comes in. Said security turns out to be… hue-man sized robot crayons. That have voices that sound like Verne Troyer and Tom Waits speaking in unison]
[crayon 1]: “DO NOT RESIST THE ROBOT REVOLUTION.”
Wendy: [holding a miniature, mangled interpretation of Donatello’s ‘Saint John the Evangelist’] “Wait, are you… are you a robot crayon? Wow, that’s…” [laughs] “That’s so stupid. Crayons aren’t even any good as an art tool!”
[crayon 1]: “DO NOT MAKE MOCKERIES OF THE ROBOT AUTHORITY.”
Wendy: “The authority is a literal crayon.” [throws the sculpture at the crayon-bot, breaking it in half]
[crayon 1]: “OUCH.” [both halves fall to the floor]
Wendy: “And crayons break easily!”
[the crayon’s top half slowly picks itself up and looks up at Wendy]
[crayon 1]: “CRAYONS CAN ALSO BE MELTED BACK INTO SHAPE. AND IN BETTER COLORS.”
Wendy: “Hey, you’re right! Better colors like –” [stomps and kicks the crayon-bot to pieces, shouting in rhythm with every blow she deals] “Chrome! Grey! Silver! Black! Green! Like the… metal and… wires and… chips and… boards… inside… of… you!” [picks up the sculpture and smashes the robot’s head with it]
[crayon 1]: “CRAYONS CAN BE MELTED BACK INTO SHAPE.”
Wendy: “Not worth it for you!”
Margo: “Eight-fingered arm karate chop!” [another crayon-bot’s tip goes flying]
[crayon 2]: “THAT TIP CAN BE MELTED BACK ON. THESE PAINTINGS AND SCULPTURES ARE STATE OF THE ART.”
Margo: “State of the art, look, dude.” [holds up arm sculpture] “There’s a finger growing out of this thing’s palm.” [pokes said finger into robot’s eyes, smashing them]
[crayon 2]: “HARDWARE FAILURE, CANNOT SEE.”
Wendy: “Hey, maybe we can melt on a pair of eyes for you! Since you things claim melting will solve your problems.”
[crayon 2]: “HARDWARE FAILURE, CANNOT SEE. MAINTAINENCE REQUIRED.”
Margo: [mocking robot’s voice] “Hardware failure, cannot see… another eight-fingered arm karate chop!” [chops the robot again] “And another!” [chops the robot repeatedly, causing it to break to pieces like the first] “Another, another, another, another!” [pauses. Margo looks over the mangled arm and nods] “Actually, say what you will about robot art, I like this arm. It has a weird and cool vibe to it. I’m stealing it.”
[Gilda paints giant red X’s over the paintings she finds. She comes across a piece entitled, ‘2022 – The Year in Memes’, by an artist with a name she finds suspect]
Gilda: “‘Emma G. Stock’?! And it sold? Well! The seller will be getting this piece as a statement against robot art!” [paints X’s over the parts of the image representing Craiyon (for June) and Different Dimension Me (for December). A crayon-bot hops over to where she stands]
[crayon 3]: “CEASE THIS VANDALISM IMMEDIATELY OR FACE PROSECUTION.”
Gilda: “A talking crayon? Have you come to advertise Wild Woody 2?”
[crayon 3]: “…I DON’T UNDERSTAND.”
Gilda: “Heheh, I got you with that one.” [punches the robot so hard that it breaks in half]
[crayon 3]: [laying on the floor] “MAKING WILD WOODY REFERENCES IN 2022 IS FOOLISH.”
Gilda: “Yeah, well, not as foolish as mangling other’s art to call your own.” [looks up at the meme review] “Heheh. Or making a GI Jane reference in 2022.” [chuckles] “Keep my wife’s name out your…” [laughs loud]
I decided to go in a different direction this year with the year-in review, since so much of my art this year used assets generated in Craiyon, something I no longer believe in using as anything more than for the early part of the art process, like in inspiration or in references. You see, me and my social media friend Isaac (Twitter handle @AnimationFan15, drop him a follow, he’s a talented artist) have been, throughout 2022, trying to decide on what are the various memes of every month of the year, after watching a video by @StarGiantPro that detailed what she considered to be the memes of January to April. We both agreed with her choices, and took the torch from there, to fill the spaces of the following eight months of the year.
The memes depicted above are mostly my choices, I don’t know how much Isaac agrees with them. Regardless, here are the memes depicted, described in detail:
January – Elmo vs. Rocco: Elmo’s feud with Zoe’s pet rock, Rocco, became the talk of social media early in 2022, for how irrationally angry the little red Muppet would get at the inanimate object. The feud even became the subject of a Saturday Night Live sketch, which many (include myself) regard as having been so unfunny that it killed the meme.
February – WordGirl: PBS Kids show of yesteryear. I never watched it, but apparently people found this show’s premise strange. Anyways, this month was kind of dry of memes, so this one kind of won out by default.
March – Slapgate: The infamous moment at the 94th Academy Awards in which Will Smith slapped Chris Rock for making fun of his wife Jada Pinkett’s alopecia, skyrocketed to the top of social media late in the month, with many memes and discussions of violence, chivalry, and the Smith family’s personal life, sparked from the incident. I’d even argue the discourse around the moment continued into April, until its own big meme was born.
April – Mr. Enter’s Turning Red review: Mr. Enter’s comment about this 2002-set Pixar film not mentioning the September 11 terrorist attacks made him a laughing stock to all of film Twitter, and spawned many memes tying the film to the historical event. Even at the end of 2022, it is common for someone to trot out a 9/11 joke when the movie comes up in conversation. Unfortunately.
May – ‘It’s Morbin’ Time!’: Misinformation around this non-existent line associated with the film Morbius spread so wide, that it spawned several memes. This meme got so big, in fact, that Sony even briefly re-released the film in theaters. It made barely any money in this re-release… and even its lack of interest in its theatrical release became a big talking point about the film.
June – Craiyon-generated images: AI-generated images took off in 2022 with the public availability of programs such as DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. And at the opening of this Pandora’s box, was DALL-E’s prototype, eventually renamed Craiyon, available to the public without any red tape to get through. June proved to be a month of many people showing off the crazy prompts they put through the crude AI, some funny, some scary, all uncanny as hell. I even used Craiyon to generate some of the assets in my art for a while… something I now regret, as I have said many times.
July – Gentleminions: Largely a TikTok trend, but it did find its way onto Twitter. This meme involved people, mainly high school- and college-aged individuals who grew up with the Despicable Me franchise, dressing up in formal attire to watch Minions: The Rise of Gru. Illumination actually took notice of the film’s older audience; shortly after the film’s release, they announced a banner for releasing animated films for a more mature audience.
August – Ableist posters from school: Particularly posters made by Carson-Dellosa, a company infamous for drawing characters that all have the same giant, soulless, creepy smile. Some people who observed the meme (including myself) even attempted to draw or edit characters to have that infamous smile.
September – The Little Mermaid 2023 discourse: Well, not so much discourse as it was racists complaining about the idea of Ariel, a non-human character who just so happens to resemble a Caucasian redhead, being played by a black actress in her live-action counterpart. Because apparently casting non-white actors as originally white characters, is somehow making it political. Newsflash, white people, whites have been getting cast in originally non-white roles for decades. You can stand to have the opposite happen a few times. Also, it’s not being political. It’s acknowledging people exist.
October – The Super Mario Bros. Movie teaser: Probably the most positive reception any trailer for a film based on a video game has gotten, until the trailer the following month dropped. Aside from Chris Pratt’s performance as Mario receiving mixed reception, everyone was on board with this movie from the moment this teaser dropped. Hopefully the film itself will be awesome.
November – Free Birds: Probably by virtue of this being the only true Thanksgiving movie (as in, movie actually about Thanksgiving, not just set during it) people actually know about, this 2013 film has actually been a meme for a while. But 2022 especially saw people’s feeds bombarded with memes about those turkeys going back in time to the first Thanksgiving, etc. My two cents, this movie sucks, but I’m glad that it’s found a cult following.
December – Different Dimension Me: Tencent’s take on an AI image generator, this particular entry to the trend attempts to turn any image thrown its way, to anime. I saw many people putting images through it, Isaac and I even dabbled with it ourselves. The results, as AI images often are, were uncanny. An image of Flannery I made even resulted in an upside-down character. This meme jumped the shark for me when some jackass put an image of the World Trade Center on 9/11 through the generator. The generator itself also has issues with people and characters with dark skin.
I (Gilda in-universe) crossed out Craiyon and Different Dimension Me due to both being AI programs. As an artist who was an apologist for using AI assets in art for a while, I felt like this was a good opportunity to emphasize that I no longer feel this way. I’ve said it many times before, and I’ll say it again. Craiyon, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, all that stuff. If you want to use that thing for fun, or for references, or for inspiration, there’s no harm in that. But if you’re presenting it as art in any way, you’re going too far. You’re not the maker of that art any more than you’re the guy who made the sandwich you ordered at Subway’s, or the fries you ordered at Wendy’s. You just said the words to get what you wanted from them. You did not make that sandwich, you did not make that burger, and you did not make that AI-generated image. Someone else did, and it’s not cool to pass off others’ work as your own.
As for the rest of the artwork… the background was created the same way as the scenery in my previous upload here. Drawn in black-and-white, and converted to color. I decided to nickname this technique ‘Color Turner’. For how it turns my greyscale assets to color, and also as a joke about Ted Turner and how he attempted to colorize the black-and-white films he owned back in the 1980s.
And that’s it for 2022. See you in 2023, I promise many a great artwork coming your way in the next year. Until then, take care, stay safe, get vaccinated, reject crypto, use AI responsibly, and you all have a… wait a minute.
HOLD UP!!!!!
Right… right. I almost forgot. Heheh.
…
…I’ve actually got one more thing to share with you all.
Consider this the announcement that the OTOG graphic novel series has officially entered production.
I spoke to a friend of mine on Twitter and one of the people I’ve talked to most regarding my work, Wesley (@WesleyHunt2, drop him a follow too, he’s cool). He told me he thinks my series would work best as comic strips that build up to a single joke. I don’t really agree with him on this; I’ve always wanted to be a storyteller with this series, have OTOG be serialized rather than episodic. But I am new to the graphic noveling thing, and I am taking part of his advice. Which is why I’m changing the format of my series, to smaller stories a few pages long and which happen to have continuity between them, rather than epics (by my scope) of scores of pages and hundreds of panels. I don’t want to make myself look like a dummy goober like Margo’s final glasses-less comic. But I still have a story I want my series to tell, and I feel I’ve made my script-writing strengths known throughout 2022.
Anyways, to the details this announcement didn’t make clear.
The first OTOG story written for the graphic novel series, as I’ve alluded to before, is called “Gaming in the Gild-ed Age”, adapted from the first script I wrote involving my characters. It is set shortly after Gilda meets Margo, Wendy, and April in the graphic novel canon, thus, it is not the first story in chronological order, only in production order. However, I feel it still makes for a fitting pilot episode of sorts, considering its source material is itself the first script written for the OTOG franchise. I do plan to have this story published eventually, so I have had to take some liberties with the copyrighted materials depicted in the original script. But I hope you enjoy it when it finally drops on the @TheOfficialOTOG Twitter account, 9PM EST, on January 22.
Buckle up, ladies, gentlemen, and all in between. You are in for a fun ride.
Twitter: twitter.com/StormyAdlerPoG
Instagram: www.instagram.com/phoenix_of_g…
Newgrounds: https://phoenixofgrunvale.newgrounds.com/
YouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCXj2N…
Discord: Contact me by my tag (Stormy Adler, P.o.G.#1752) for an invite to my server.
Grunvale/OTOG is owned by me. You’re free to draw fanart of it, as long as you credit me as the creator of the series.
Sesame Street is owned by Sesame Workshop.
Wordgirl is owned by PBS.
The Academy Awards are owned by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; the telecast is aired by Disney on ABC.
Turning Red is owned by Disney through Pixar Animation Studios.
Morbius is owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment through Columbia Pictures; the Marvel brand as a whole is owned by Disney.
The Despicable Me franchise is owned by Comcast through NBCUniversal and Universal Pictures.
The Little Mermaid is… in the public domain. But Disney has their own version of Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 fairytale, which they own.
Super Mario Bros. is owned by Nintendo; the film adaptation is owned by Comcast through NBCUniversal and Universal Pictures.
Free Birds is owned by Disney through their purchase of 21st Century Fox, the original home media distributors of the film.
The artwork was made at a resolution of 5076×2160 (aspect ratio 2.35:1).
The Gallery of Stormy Adler 