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XXX-Day 2000-2001 Calendar picture. Click image for larger view and discussion.

Creative Mac: How many people contribute to the artwork in your group? Do most of them also use Macs?

Rev. Ivan Stang: Over the 20 years that we've been publishing, hundreds of people, more than I could ever track down, have contributed. 1983's Book of the SubGenius has a credit list of 40 names, and, by the fourth book, Revelation X, it was more like 100! But there has always been a core group. Two core groups, I should say—the pre-Internet and post-Internet ones. The most visible and influential of the pre-Net SubGenius artists include Paul Mavrides, Hal Robins, John Hagen-Brenner, Nenslo, Puzzling Evidence and other folks who are more from the underground comic book world. One of the old timey artists who leaped over to the Net way of doing things was Nenslo.

On the Internet, particularly the newsgroup alt.binaries.slack, we discovered an entire Lost Civilization of digital artists slaving away on SubGenius imagery—just for fun. I don't even know their real names in most cases, but they're the ones who picked up the torch. The most prolific ones are Fernandinande LeMur, Atom Funway, and "IMBJR." But at any given time, there are at least a dozen people actively whipping out SubGenius art that's good for something, one way or another, at the rate of at least one piece a day. Alt.binaries.slack is where the majority of our art comes from now. There's this amazing spontaneity, and even a little competition, and sometimes outright art wars, that keeps alt.binaries.slack cooking.

What's interesting is the way the original hand-drawn art by Mavrides, Hagen and the other early "real" artists has been creatively used and re-used and then recycled and later morphed and ... like the original Dobbshead, none of it ever goes away; it just replicates and becomes weirder looking.

The clever little animated headers on our website, though, as opposed to the big "paintings" that fill the SubSITE galleries, those are almost all done by IrRev. Friday Jones, who, like me, was an amateur artist with a background in monster movie effects but feels compelled by some unexplainable force to work for "Bob." She was "called," you could say.

Creative Mac: What hardware do you use?

Rev. Ivan Stang: I am still limping along on a Power Mac 7500 (code named "Muleskinner") with 90 MB RAM, hooked up to a bunch of peripherals. I plan on getting a nice new G4 soon, but most of what I do is pretty simple, so I haven't been in a hurry. I must admit that helping my kids and friends get set up on their new iMacs and G4s is really making me jealous.

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