The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Tag: Second-Interworld-War

  • Another propaganda poster

    As has been usual, this is another exhortation to “Work to Win”. My “study” of WWI and WWII posters indicates that almost all fell into the “Work harder” or “Buy more bonds” categories. True to form, this poster says, “Victory up here… begins down here“. Overhead are a Retro Rocketship and a DV snub fighter. On the ground, in a vaguely-factory-ish compound, is another Retro Rocketship. It’s not so easy to make clear that this one is being assembled or worked on. I put in a forklift and a repair bot, as well as a guy welding something to the periscope hatch. (He’s hard to see, on the top of the ship.) Actually, I had to go find models for almost everything, as I didn’t have a lot of industrial nick-nacks lying around.

    dug

  • New poster: Don’t Let That Shadow

    Another in the series, this one with the tag “Don’t Let That Shadow Touch Them“. This is based on one of the most effective WWII posters I know of, with the same tag but the shadow of a swastika. My job here was harder, in that I don’t have an instantly-recognizable symbol of the Martian oppressors. Instead I settled for a Martian war machine off-camera, with a low spotlight to throw a long shadow. I’m of mixed opinion on whether it gets across the shape but I like the atmosphere.

    I used the Poser standard figure “Ben” plus the Poser 4 girl. For no good reason I decided on only two children instead of three. The original had the kids playing with toys, so I used a Poser-standard cartoon character “Ginger” for a discarded doll. Ben, meanwhile, holds a scale model of an Avro Lancaster bomber. Technically, this is counter-factual to my timeline, as WW II doesn’t occur in the world of IW2. But surely some further development of the airplane will occur, and the Lancaster is not a wildly unusual design.

    Because most of my posters seem to exhort either “Buy War Bonds” or “Work to Win”, I decided to add something more. In this case, I mention the “Second Guardian Drive”. My nebulous assumption is that this is early in the war, when the humans are in the process of expelling the Martians from Earth. The “Guardian Drives” are bond drives to finance the outposts that will guard Earth’s orbit. This places this poster significantly earlier than, say, “Take the Fight to Them” or even “That You May Breathe Free“.

    Don’t Let That Shadow Touch Them

  • New Poster: Keep Us Flying

    Another in the ongoing series. This one reads “Keep Us Flying — Buy War Bonds“. The inspiration is a WWII poster with exactly the same wording. In the original, it’s a pilot wearing a parachute harness. (I’m assuming it’s a pilot. It could be an airborne infantryman, I suppose.) Using the by-now standard substitution, I put in a jetpack trooper. Exhorting people to buy war bonds is pretty much the major focus of war posters, apparently.

    I made one change. I didn’t like the blank background, so I scoured the Net for a free background I could use. (I found a site called stock.xchg, which has thousands of stock images [get it?], many of which are free to use.) I settled on a stirring sunrise sky, which I like quite a bit actually.
    Keep Us Flying

  • A complicated poster.

    Yet another in the series of posters for the newly-rechristened Second Interworld War. This one is inspired by the many different posters that had streams of planes passing overhead in a not-too-subtle V formation. The purpose was to impress with the sheer excess of Allied production. And of course, the exhortation to work hard and to invest in war bonds. My poster reads “Give them the Tools of Victory: Work to Win”.

    The Tools of Victory

    Executing this poster took quite a bit more work than the others; the gruesome details appear below the fold.
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  • War Between the Worlds, and its sequel

    I’ve been making posters that, I’ve claimed, were from the First Interworld War. I’ve decided that, “really”, they’re from the Second Interworld War. The primary motivation for the change has been the realization that most of my inspirations are from WWII, not WWI. Also, this allows me to imagine, vaguely, that H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds was the First Interworld War. Here’s what I envision:

    Wells’ Martians apparently did not have radio technology. It seems a pretty big lack, but who knows? Mars does not have a Heaviside layer, I believe, so the idea of long-distance transmission by radio might not have occurred to them. Also, there are signs that Well’s Martians were telepathic. If so, and if telepathy is not easily conveyed by electromagnetic fields, then they might never have gotten into that technology. If telepathy is then also short-ranged, we’d have the situation I want; to wit, that the Martians dying on Earth are unable to relay a warning about infection to the Martians at home. Since the Martians (justifiably) probably found it inconceivable that we resist their might, they might have kept chucking one or two cylinders a year as reinforcements, not knowing at first that the war was lost and later, not knowing why.

    So, for the next decade or two, at random times spaced by a few months, these engines of death would come down on Earth. The Martian within would extricate the walking machine, lay waste to the surrounding area, but then eventually die from the same disease that brought down the first. Along the way, the powers on Earth would get valuable experience and technology battling the lander and then trying to recover it. This allows me to leapfrog tech when I need to, and explains the follow-up.

    More below the fold.
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