I recently got an e-mail asking about whether or not I'm selling copies of it. I hate telling people that I'm terrible at setting aside time to print and sell my stuff, so I've decided to start putting up books on my blog along with my normal jib-jab.
When people at the cons point to Nuclear Twilight and ask about it, I usually tell people that it's the biggest downer in the world. In the last page it says that it was made after visiting the Hiroshima Peace Museum in Hiroshima, Japan. One of the first moments that I shared with Mako's family was at the spot in Hiroshima where only 300 meters above, the bomb exploded. Her father made sure I knew the importance of the spot. It hit me like the moon crashing into the Earth. I couldn't shake the dread for a while and I had to somehow work it out of my system.
Nuclear Twilight was that catharsis.
I made this book when I was mainly working in my old C++ Graphical Programming manual, so there's a ton of text all around the images. Sometimes the text helped the story at almost a scary level. I don't do too much of this style anymore, I work in this manner when my main focus is illustration though.
The main focus of this book was how shitty I felt that as a nation we had done this. There's a ton of stuff that our American history books don't tell us about the choice to drop the bomb. Like, the fact that it was never debated whether or not it was going to get dropped, it had been carefully planned and cities were off limits to fighter bombers. We wanted the cities to be pristine so that we could later evaluate the damage in the clearest manner, but... that's another discussion for when I return to Ukashima in 2011 and wrap up that whole project. There should be a new Processing after that...
2 comments:
Oof. That stuff always hits hard. Reminds me of Barefoot Gen, such a brilliant series.
I don't know how I never flipped through this at a show. Wish I had. Maybe b/c I knew I couldn't own it, but that's a silly reason not to at least look.
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