Adding to the mystique in an odd way, both movie franchises have been subject to many rumors and difficulties over the years. There’s the famous Predator 3 screenplay by Robert Rodriguez, for example, that might’ve made a truly amazing film. Not to mention fans who want a third Predator featuring Arnold and other old pals—or rip-offs like Alien vs Hunter, which features a very tired-looking William Katt, former star of the TV series Greatest American Hero. If you haven’t seen this movie, you really need to at least sample it; it’s possibly one of the worst movies ever made (check out that old-timey deep-sea diving suit used by the “Hunter”).

Meanwhile, Aliens 5 has been stuck in development hell, leaving only the hybrid Aliens vs Predator franchise to fill the void, the first movie a cheesy but entertaining cold-weather adventure movie and the second largely set in the sadly generic (and murky!) sewers of a Colorado town.

As for the books, Jeff’s Predator: South China Sea is out this month, as well as Brian Evenson’s Aliens: No Exit. So, to mark that release, we thought we’d offer a contest for io9 readers. Both Jeff and Brian had to pitch Dark Horse their novel ideas, so now it’s your turn, just for fun. It’s Halloween, after all.

So: Write up your own short Predator or Aliens pitch in comments. Limit it to a paragraph or so. You can be serious or funny. You can only enter once. The deadline is midnight EST next Friday, November 7. We’ll judge the contest. Check back Monday, November 10, when we announce the four winners. Each winner will get a Predator figurine/ink stamp and copies of both Predator: South China Sea (signed) and Aliens: No Exit.

Have a great Halloween!

“Harlan Ellison’s story ‘“Repent, Harlequin!”’ Said the Ticktockman’ was (and is) a favorite story,” Wu says, not surprisingly. “It has this vision of a futuristic city, all regimented, people on moving sidewalks like Twinkies on conveyor belts in a Twinkie factory. And then — suddenly! — this trickster dumps jelly beans — jelly beans! — by the thousands and millions, into the gear works. All these colors and flavors raining down from on high, making everyone laugh and giggle and hoot like children. It gums up the gears and throws everything off schedule — but for the first time in ages, it makes people feel alive. That’s what I want to do with my art, my writing, my life — help people feel alive.”

Wu says that some of his artwork springs from “finding a weird connection between two seemingly disparate things. Example: H.P. Lovecraft wrote these horror stories about Cthulhu, who’s a squid-headed demon-god, the ultimate evil... And then there are cats. And if you’ve ever lived with someone else’s cats, you know that, despite their irresistibly cute behaviors, they can be messy, lazy, self-indulgent, dangerous, vicious little nuggets of evil. Thus, I bring you... CATHULHU! You have no idea what a thrill it is to bring that piece to sci-fi conventions and show furries in full-on cat costumes and have them laugh and give me a thumbs up. That’s the best. Makes everyone happy.

“That’s what I want to do. Another example: Once I mentioned on my blog that there was LOLspeak version of the Holy Bible. So the part in Matthew about the Devil tempting Jesus becomes something like: Basement Cat tuke Jebus to teh mountain, n showd Jebus all teh orsumness of teh wrld, srly.’ N sed, ‘All da base r belong 2 u if u am mai BFF, kthx.’ But Jebus sed, ‘STFU Basement Cat, R U DUM. Ceiling Cat am mai BFF cuz he am teh 1337!’ Den Basement cat wuz pwnd....This LOLBible is the craziest thing, like a jellybean from the sky, and after I blogged about it, I got the best comment evar: ‘You give me the will to go on, Frank Wu!’ And that’s the best reason to create stuff.”

It should come as little surprise, then, that Wu’s art is “purposefully eclectic—people have told me that they wouldn’t have known all these pieces are done by the same hand unless I had told them. Led Zeppelin took influences from multiple sources — folk, reggae, blues, heavy metal, middle-eastern music. I want to do the same, because you never know what art style will be appropriate for what text. I don’t do the same style for every story. One story by James Van Pelt was more bucolic, so the style of Julia Margaret Cameron’s old photographs worked. But if I’m doing dinosaurs playing guitar, then a style like glam rock or Abba concerts is better. I love all sorts of art—da Vinci and Michelangelo, and the nameless artisans who churn out faux icons for tourists at the base of Greek monasteries. I did the cover for the Klingon translation of the Tao Te Ching, and I borrowed the style of ancient Chinese landscape artists like Meng Chiao.”

On the SF side, Wu has “run the official Frank R. Paul website for ages. He essentially invented sci-fi magazine art in the 1920s — he was the first guy to ever paint a flying saucer, first guy to paint a space station, the first guy to ever make a living drawing spaceships. Think about that. At a time when the world was shocked that a guy could fly solo across the Atlantic, at a time when most Americans didn’t own a telephone or a flush toilet, he was painting covers with spaceships that could traverse the galaxies. Wow.”

Wu admits that his hyper-enthusiasm for almost everything he does has its downsides. “Sometimes I defeat myself. I get so psyched up about doing an acrylic painting that I rush through it. And voila! It’s done. I scan it and email it to the editor, who loves it and then sends it off for printing. Then I look at it again a couple days later and realize... oh, it wasn’t really done after all.”

He also wishes he received more book cover assignments that included “spaceships, robots and aliens. That’s why I got into this field in the first place. Why I loved crappy old TV shows like Lost in Space and Thunderbirds and even that craptacular suckfest The Starlost. The stories and dialog and acting sucked, but my gosh the spaceships, robots and aliens were magnificent!... Where the freakin’ monsters at [these days]? Gimme some drooling tentacular horrific monstrosities, baby! When was the last time someone wrote a novel starring a cool-looking robot? Somebody, anyone, quick, write me up a novel wherein the world splits open and nasty ickalicious alien jaws of doom with big T. Rex teeth rise up from pools of boiling hot magma ringed by rows of human skulls, with techno-dinosaurs with freakin’ lasers on their freakin’ heads jumping around fighting... I dunno... polars bears of death with numchucks and laser-cannons! I’ll do THAT for ya. It’d be awesome.”

Currently, Wu is spending a lot of time, as one does, working on a film about a giant space chicken...

Frank Wu on His Giant Space Chicken:

Last year I unleashed upon the unsuspecting world the Director’s Cut of my animated short, “The Tragical Historie of Guidolon, the Giant Space Chicken.”
It’s about a giant space chicken making a movie about a giant space chicken. He has delusions of grandeur — he thinks he’s a Shakespearean tragic hero, when really he’s just a giant space chicken. His girlfriend Trisuron is a giant space Triceratops and his pals are a giant space jellyfish and a giant space octopus. Together they destroy cities and make movies.

And now we’re expanding that ten-minute short into a full-length animated movie. The short was hand-drawn, but there were a lot of flaws. The characters didn’t move as smoothly as we wanted, and there were inconsistencies in their look from scene to scene.

So that’s where computers come in. Instead of hand-drawing frames, we’re making 3D computer models of the characters. We had no intention of competing with Pixar —which is impossible — so we’re using a process called “cel shading” or “toon shading.” This is what they do in “Futurama” whenever they show the spaceship or a cityscape. These are all 3D models that are then squashed down, with just the outlines and a few other lines and solid blocks of color without shading. They look hand-drawn (the characters themselves are hand-drawn). We’re going to do something similar — 3D animates the main characters, and then hand-drawn some minor characters and all the backgrounds.

(At this point I should give a shout-out to some of the people who are actually doing this work at my direction: Jonah Gray, the main animator, Shon Mitchell, who’s making some of the models, Suzanne Rachel Forbes, who’s done a ton of art, and Brianna, who’s the technical wizard and director’s confidante.)

The whole film is incredibly time-consuming, and I pretty much expect to be working on it just about every day for a looong time. But I’m hoping that in three years or so, everybody reading this will be able to enjoy on a screen (big or little, we don’t know) the new adventures of Guidolon, the giant space chicken!

[Frank Wu]

Whether it’s work for shows like “Lost in Space” or his wonderful “Starcatcher” painting, created for a show at the Dorothy Circus Gallery in Rome Italy, his SF art has a kind of charming retro feel. It’s the future brought forward from the 1950s, but without a Jetsons vibe—which might just mean that Jasinski buys into the idea of playfulness more than some.

Jasinski tells us:

I grew up in a musical family. Music tends to be a natural and easy subject for me to include in my visual artist. Beyond subject matter, I think music influences my art in how I try to express the color, rhythm, and pattern in some of my paintings. Music is the most abstract art form, yet most of it is so easily accessible and emotion-relevant to us humans. I'd like to capture that in paint.

Technology and fantasy can be the same thing in Jasinski's work, the confluence expressing his unique sense of humor:

I love technology and gadgets. I do a lot of music using my computers and other electronic devices. I think this interest does filter into my art but in a sort of juvenile way. I try to use the modern world or even the ‘future’ as a source of puns... and humor in case you don't find [the] puns very funny.

“Rise Above Your Station,” in which angels carry an astronaut above a mob of either cheering or dangerous robots, provides a good example of Jasinski’s approach. It has a whimsical aspect, and it makes you laugh, but it’s also a somewhat unsettling, strange image.

In terms of SF influences of the literary kind, Jasinski’s are fairly conservative:

I would have to Isaac Asimov is probably my favorite science fiction novelist. I especially like his "Robot' novels and how he uses a science fiction background to explore a lot of interesting philosophical ideas about freedom, choice, and what it means to be human.. But for SF art, “It could only be Syd Mead. That guy is a genius from another world. I wish I could draw like him.

As for what separates SF from Fantasy, Jasinski says, tongue firmly in cheek:

Science Fiction is geeky. Fantasy is nerdy. I think I am a bit more geek than nerd...

In his other life as a musician, Jasinski is a member of the Remix Artist Collective (RAC), who “create re-interpretative rock/electronica/dance remixes for musical artists” in a way known for its emotion and playfulness. The RAC has done remixes for bands like The Shins, Robbers on High Street, Block Party, and Tokyo Police Club. None of the four members of RAC, including Jasinski, have ever met each other—another sign of the changing dynamic in the creative world.

Currently, Jasinski is working on a piece for a Star Wars art book and a solo show coming up in 2009.

You can check out his art and his music here on his site.

When he paints the Creature from the Black Lagoon, you can feel the wattles. When he paints Godzilla, you can smell his breath. An amazing commitment to detail, along with an understanding or empathy for his subject matter, seems to fuel this ability. For Eggleton, though, this approach didn’t come easy.

He said:

For years I did this airbrushed stuff...ick...what was I thinking? Nothing in life looks airbrushed. So I dropped that for health reasons (the fumes) and my lungs and breathing got back to normal and I started real painting as in showing more brushwork and not being shy of it. I used to work in acrylics and basically it was like painting with plastic. I decided to make the jump back into oils. And it looks better, and I veered into fantasy heavily and then came back and applied this romantic vision to the SF work. Who wants to see things as they are? We want to see them as we dream them to be.

Use of space is also important to Eggleton:

My paintings deal with scale. It's why I can paint a colossal space-scape and then, Godzilla or something like that. It's all about scale and size. Think about it. I like big things next to little things. The human race is a speck in the universe. But an ant colony is small next to us. Everything is relative to scale. I tend to like to try something different with each job I do.

As for technology, Eggleton’s relationship with the modern world is a complicated one:

The American fascination with technology as fashion statement scares the bejeezus out of me. To be honest, not the devices themselves but this need for people to had said devices because they have to feel "up" on things-consumerism. And they have no clue about it...And thanks to technology we have the problems that go with it. People sit at computers and don't get out, they gain weight and have health problems—why actually walk to a store when you can have something delivered after ordering it online? The recent film Wall-E is just fantastic and, eerie in it's ballsy comment about what happens when we leave earth a junkpile, thanks to the Big Box Mart consumerisms, and go off into space and then with technology waiting on us hand and foot, we become fat,couch-bound,calcium deficient blobs!!! If anyone has not seen this film it makes a frightening comment on what is to come, if we don't look out. And you gotta love Pixar for having the cahoonies to put out a kids’ dystopian SF film!

Keeping it “old school,” Eggleton contributed to a film by Norman England called Invasia. Several of his creature designs (exclusively showcased in the gallery) were created by the same people who “made the suits for several of the last Godzilla films.” The idea behind Invasia is to create a 1950s-style film with parasitic creatures invading Japan “via these kind of evil ‘grey’ guys and their servant aliens. I was floored when I saw what a cool job Shinichi's shop did with the drawings.”

Upcoming for Eggleton is a kids’ book called If Dinosaurs Lived in Our Town. He explained:

[It's] written by my wife, and I worked with Cortney Skinner on the art. It's half traditional, half digital aimed at the four-to-eight year-old set. The result of the pieces looks spectacular. This'll be a BIG book next Spring from Sterling/Hollan Publishing and Barnes and Noble. I also have a few other things I am working on that you'll hear about soon. The idea is to keep re-inventing and not falling into a rut or people being able to say ‘Oh he just does...’

See more Eggleton in his online gallery.