Though the whereabouts of the criminal mastermind known only as The Penguin are unclear, he has not taken responsiblity for the giant rubber duckie which is currently sailing around the world. It showed up in Hong Kong yesterday, and is reported to be the work of an artist named Florentijin Hofman. The duckie (as yet unnamed?) is is 46-feet-tall and 55-feet-long. Also, no word yet if a giant Ernie is lurking somewhere beneath the waves. (Via Inhabitat.)

Your collection of daily offsitle links are like taking a giant bath with monsters and includes more inflatable objects, confirmed mutants, who the REAL Batman is, and more!

[Read more]

We’ve recently started a series of blog posts over at Torbooks.co.uk aimed at shining a light on various aspects and roles of those of us involved in Team Tor at Pan Macmillan. To give you, the reader, a greater insight into how the book you so lovingly place on your bookshelf, got there. To help kick things off I’ve written a brief piece about what it is I do as the Editorial Director of Tor UK. Apart from, obviously, drink coffee and read books all day!

My job is two-fold, one to find, buy, publish and represent authors of quality speculative fiction—the other is to build and develop the imprint brand of Tor in the UK.

[Read more]

Though it will still feature the iconic Mary GrandPré lightning-bolt logo, new U.S. paperback editions (from Scholastic) of the Harry Potter series will feature different covers starting in September. The new art is from Kazu Kibuishi who designed the covers for the graphic novel series Amulet. Kibuishi was initially hesitant about the project as he is a big admirer GrandPre’s work. Ultimately, though Kibuishi tried to evoke classic covers of literary novels as well as pay tribute to the Harry Potter series, saying: “I tried to think of classic perennial paperback editions of famous novels and how those illustrations tend to feel.”

The new cover for Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone is the only new cover that has been released so far. What do you think?

[Via The Mary Sue & NPR]

Every wanted to have a CHILLING ADVENTURE? Are you trapped inside of an AMAZING STORY? Do you enjoy putting the words “FROM OUTER SPACE” after even the most mundane phrase? If the answer to any of these questions was “yes” then the Pulp-O-Mizer is for you! This website lets you create your own custom pulp magazine covers, complete with awesome spaceships, space-people, planets and more! We did one quickly for Stubby the Rocket and will likely do several more before the day is out.

Check out Pulp-O-Mizer here.

What if the various Marvel films like Spider-Man, Iron-Man, or The Avengers featured the comic book characters the way they actually look in the comics? Artist Butcher Billy tackled that question with awesome results. There are a lot more images here, but below are a few of our favorites.

[More images]

We saw these beautiful book sculptures over on The Mary Sue, but they were created by artist Wetcanvas and can be seen on DeviantArt. There are loads more over there, but we included a few of the genre ones here. Above is Harry, Ron, and Hermione sculpted from the pages of Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows. Check below the cut for The Millenium Falcon crafted from the pages of Heir to the Empire and James Bond from the pages of Casino Royale.

[Book sculptures below]

I was at a reading for Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan when he mentioned off-hand that it would be a trilogy… with an illustrated guide to the world he was building, in the style of the Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to the Fantastical World.

Now, there are a lot of reasons that I liked the Spiderwick guide—I’m a big fan of Tony DiTerlizzi, for instance—but the deep reason is that I’m gonzo for apocrypha. Those sorts of bits and extras that deepen worldbuilding, whether they are art books like Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Art of the Animated Series or in-world mythology like The Tales of Beedle the Bard. The icing on the cake with The Manual of Aeronautics is that Keith Thompson does the art for it, as he did for the series.

[A review]

Back in January, over in my Genre in the Mainstream column, I wrote about how great Miranda July is and why fans of science fiction and fantasy should love her. (The Future is a great movie. Her short stories are awesome!) As a response to this, artist David Antonio Perezcassar created this awesome illustration of Miranda July as Boba Fett. Thanks David! Check out his whole portfolio here.

The question is this: is Miranda July becoming Boba Fett or is Boba Fett revealing herself to be Miranda July?

Ryan Britt is the staff writer for Tor.com.

The newest installment in Aqueduct Press’s “Conversation Pieces” series is Birds and Birthdays, a collection by Christopher Barzak that revolves around “Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, [and] Dorothea Tanning: Three of the most interesting painters to flourish in male-dominated surrealism.” Birds and Birthdays is a strange and powerful meditation in the ekphrastic tradition on three particular paintings by these women—“The Creation of Birds,” “The Guardian of the Egg,” and “Birthday.” The volume closes with an essay, “Re-Membering the Body: Reconstructing the Female in Surrealism,” that considers the history of these paintings, their artists, and Barzak’s own position as a male writer listening to and refracting these women’s artistic visions. Two of the stories have been previously published and are reprinted here: “The Creation of Birds” in Twenty Epics and “The Guardian of the Egg” in Salon Fantastique.

[A review]

The landing of Curiosity not only resulted in the world being stricken with Mars fever, but also some beautiful red planet themed art! NASA approached artists Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick to create striking images about Mars. The result was a series of beautiful and evocative pieces of art. Our favorite one is above, but the whole gallery is worth checking out.

[Via Wired]

Already over 3,285 paintings, swedish artist Anders Samsell plans to eventually render all of Blade Runner. This is 12 minute video is just the preview. (via BuzzFeed)

[Full video below the cut]

It took me a moment to figure out exactly what made Ratatouille my favorite Pixar film. Sure, the conceit of an anthropomorphic rat whose great desire is to be a Parisian gourmet chef is darling, and I love to cook, but this is Pixar here. About half of their films have brought me to tears... and Ratatouille isn’t even one of those. Actually, Ratatouille sort of makes me want to dance after I watch it, or maybe sing, or compose sonnets in pig latin.

And then the obvious hit me: Ratatouille is the only Pixar film that is simply about art. About being an artist, developing as a creative force, and discovering your life’s passion.

And about exactly how painful it can be to allow yourself that.

[Dirty apron, clean sleeves]

What will the year 2999 look like? What will it sound like?

That’s the creative catalyst behind The 2999 Project, a multimedia time trek to the end of the 30th century. Canada’s King Deluxe record label called on electronic and dubstep artists to a create a soundtrack for the year 2999, then asked a selection of visual artists to illustrate the tracks.

[Read more...]

There is a belief out there that perhaps the Internet is overly lousy with lightsabers. And maybe there’s a bit of overkill on the whole goofy Dinosaur thing too. However, sometimes the execution of Dinosaurs+lightsabers is so perfect that it nearly makes you weep. Or something. In anycase, we love this and think you should too. Artist Sam Nielson says it came from a dream. Here’s a section from his explanation on his blog:

But when I looked back, there was the Tyrannosaurus, soaring over rock formations and bursting through cliffs as it flew after me. And no matter what I did I couldn’t stop him. My brain kept coming up with new powers, each of which the T-rex countered with a power of its own.

For more like this, check out Sam’s website at Sam’s Tasty Art.

Everybody has a favourite superhero. Whether you love the vulnerability of Batman, Superman’s struggle with what it means to be human, or Spider-Man’s fight for Mary Jane, it’s easy to connect with these super-powered humans (well, human in most cases!) and recognize that despite their superhuman abilities, they’re as damaged and vulnerable as the rest of us.

And that’s what makes these paint splatter portraits (which are actually produced digitally) by artist Arian Noveir so wonderful; not only do they look great, but they manage to capture that unguarded side that so many superheroes possess. They’re a beautiful, subversive look at the traditional hero-figure.

[See more splatter paint superheroes]

The Book of Ballads is a collection, published by Tor in 2004, of the Charles Vess comics put out by Green Man Press in the nineties, plus a few new additions. Written by authors most commonly engaged with fairy tales and the mythic, from Neil Gaiman to Ellen Kushner to Emma Bull to Jane Yolen and onward, these comics put narratives to classic ballads — and then Charles Vess illustrates those narratives. It’s a gorgeous, thick book, at once scholarly and speculative, at once art and text, that has a direct connection to the classic ballads collected by folklore scholars and popularized in the last few centuries.

The introduction, written by Terri Windling — who certainly knows her way around a fairy tale or a ballad — is dense and quite chewy with scholarly detail and background on the ballads contained in the book, and also some that aren’t. The endpapers include a discography of performances of the ballads, by various artists and in various modes. These bookending documents lend an interstitial, genre-defying quality to The Book of Ballads that’s further increased by the intertextual nature of the ballads themselves.

[Onward]

“When the going gets Weird, the Weird turn Pro.” —Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, gonzo journalist

“…now is the time to revel in the macabre.” —Carrie Ann Baade, surrealist artist and guest curator of Cute and Creepy

For the past few years, it seems that the Weird have been taking Dr. Thompson’s advice, especially when it comes to the visual arts. In 2010, Tim Burton’s retrospective at the New York Museum of Modern Art became its third most-attended show in its history (Matisse and Picasso hold rankings first and second). Then, earlier this year, the Boston Athenaeum presented a very thought-provoking exhibit on the work and genius of Edward Gorey. What better way to bookmark the year than with Florida State University’s Museum of Fine Arts fall exhibit: Cute and Creepy?

[More info below the cut]

When you hear “suspension of disbelief,” what do you think? Do you think, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that it is a willingness to fall into a “poetic faith”? Maybe Coleridge is not your thing, and Wordsworth is more on the right track with “…to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural.”

Whatever your take on it is, at the end of the day you are basically turning off a little logical piece of your brain and allowing the excitement of the fantastic to take you away. We may not realize how often we do this already in our everyday lives, but from the book you are reading on the train to work to the magician using a little prestidigitation to pull a coin out of your ear, we frequently suspend our disbelief for just a moment. Even though we logically know our protagonist is not real or that we most certainly did not put that quarter in our ear for safekeeping, we allow ourselves to be pulled in and enjoy the moment.

[Read more]

Man in the Frame: A satire on bureaucracy by a master animator living in a country reputed for it. (10:27 minutes)

The Hand: Trnka was a master of puppet animation, in this film he takes a look at authority. (17:55 minutes)

[Watch the films after the jump]