It’s become clear that I’ve mis-tagged some of these, and I thought it was about time — 1/3 of the way toward a book! — to collect them in one place.

More below the fold.

• “Don’t Let That Shadow…“
• “It’s a Swell Rocket…“
• “Keep Us Flying“
• “The Tools of Victory“
• “See Action Now!“
• “Take the Fight to Them” (revised)
• “Invest in Invasion“
• “…That You May Breathe Free“
• “Take the Fight to Them” (original)

Researching for this(!). I came across a great book called You Back the Attack — We’ll Bomb Who We Want, billed as “remixed war propaganda”. An artist named Micah Ian Wright took World War II propaganda posters (some from the Bad Guys) and reworked them to put a Bush Jr. spin on them. It’s snarky, obnoxious, and really hilarious — though sobering in a way, too.

As a bonus, Mr. Wright included all the original, unmodified posters as an appendix. So it’s easy to see how these were used and how they could be used. I expect I’ll be pulling a lot of inspiration from this book. The first such brainchild is offered below.

It’s based on a WWII poster that read, “Invest in Invasion … Buy War Bonds”. The graphic was a rugged airborne trooper in the doorway of a plane, gritting his teeth and getting ready to jump. Many parachutes dot a darkening sky. This immediately struck me and I knew I’d have to make an analog. It’s a little tricker than it sounds, because of course I’d have to set the sci fi background explicitly. The 1940s artist could assume the viewer would know what an airplane was and why someone would be jumping out of them.

Luckily, I have in my Poser inventory the “rocketship Mongo”, which became the carrier vessel. Hiding the door and positioning a Michael 3.0 soldier there gave me the airborne ranger I needed. Of course, this being pulp science fiction, I couldn’t use anything as prosaic as a parachute; so I used a jetpack instead. I face my first issue there, as the jetpack wings were way wider than the door. The wings can be folded up (thank you, creator of this object!) but then it looks a lot like a guy about to jump to his death.

So then I began to cheat. After positing “Alex” in the door, I cloned him and placed “Bob” out in the air. Bob’s wings are extended and the jetpack lit. Then I put a duplicate of the rocketship up and to the left of the original. I had to show the entire rocketship to the viewer, of course, to establish the scene. I added some more clones of winged troopers to take the place of the earlier parachutes and to set the scale.

I kept the text virtually unchanged (“Invest in Invasion — Buy War Bonds”) but supplemented it with the tri-ship logo of the Transplanetary Expeditionary Force and the slogan “Third Transplanetary Liberty Drive”. To top it all off, I rendered with a transparent background and overlaid it all on a picture of the night sky.

All in all, considering it took only a couple of hours to make, I’m pretty happy with it. Now I need to start thinking about the next one…

from a war that was never fought. I haven’t really decided if all of Mars is noxious (in this reality) but since Well’s had “the Black Gas”, I figure the TEF had better have gas masks. And while it might seem unthinkable that women would carry arms in Victorian/Edwardian society, it’s a fact of the 20th century that major wars break down mores, and a truly interplanetary war fought with turn-of-the-century technology would conceivably accelerate that process. Plus, I needed another model.

So I haven’t stretched my creative muscles very much lately, and I’ve been looking for something to do. Playing around with Poser and some models I got from the Net, I decided I was going to make propaganda posters from the First Interworld War, loosely conceived as the follow-up to H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds. I know it’s far from unique but it struck my fancy and I’m going to try my hand. The first, very rough, effort is below. The tagline is “Take the fight to them… Sign Up For The Transplanetary Expeditionary Force”

I’m certainly open to suggestions for future posters. Right now, all I have is the image of a man or woman in Vitcorian space gear and gas mask, with the tag “He risks breathing poison… So you can breathe free… Support the Third Planetary Bond Drive”.