Vintage Dinosaur Art, maybe: De dinosauriërs (Kennis Compact)

The concept of “bad art” has been occupying my mind lately, for reasons that will hopefully become clear in due course. Bad palaeoart, especially. It is my firmly-held belief that even the shoddiest work made by human hand has infinitely more value than any image artificially created by a learning, plagiarizing algorithm. No matter how many works by Tony Gibbons and F. John we have to plough through on these pages, this will still be essentially true. All contributions to the beautiful twin human endeavours that are art and science are, ultimately, worth it. Therefore, I think the time is right to introduce you to a book that has been waiting angrily on my bookshelf for a long time, whispering to me in accusing tones “are you really sure?”

This is, bar none, the worst dinosaur book I have ever seen. I cannot think of anything that comes close. Everything I ever hated or been sniffy at in any dinosaur book is all concentrated here. Every choice made every step of the way during the production process has been the wrong choice. It is truly remarkable. Look at that mess of a cover and you might know what you’re in for, but this isn’t the half of it.

Let’s start with the liner notes, or lack thereof. Nowhere does this book say who the authors and artists responsible were. All it gives me is a link to a website that no longer exists. Everyone involved has washed their hands of this. There is no one I can hold accountable. I will therefore accredit all the words and images to Alan Smithee. It doesn’t even say what year the book dates from, so I don’t even know if this counts as vintage or not. The presence and quality of the CG material suggests something produced around the turn of the millennium, but who can know for sure?

The images come in two delicious flavours: hand drawn illustrations and CG rendered images. The CG renders are ungodly, the hand drawn ones merely bad. Look at these iguanodons, with the overlong arms and crooked feet and tails. I don’t think our Alan Smithee spent more than an hour on this, it looks simply unfinished. The mess inside of the nest is nearly unreadable, but we can just about make out the eggs and the youngsters. But most off-putting of all is the face, with that toothy grin and those near-human eyes communicating a fundamental wrongness. Feast your eyes, this is the best illustration in the book. All downhill from here.

Take this Rexy. It looks like it’s been startled by a mouse. The body isn’t awful, but the feet and head are all wrong, and they are wrong in ways that look amateurish. We’ve seen so many artists struggle with dinosaur feet, but the way the artist copies the left foot from the right is very blatant. I know this is the most trite criticism of art possible, but I’m quite serious: a child could have made this. This is something you produce as a young learner on the way to becoming an artist, not something you’d actually want to see published.

The Dilophosaurus fares marginally better, by virtue of probably being traced over from something better. But what’s up with that head? The artist must have taken one glance at one example and completely misinterpreted the way those crests work. This is how you get Oloroceratops! It betrays a very lazy approach to dinosaur reconstruction, the illustrator really wasn’t trying very hard.

The illustrations are pretty rough, but the CG images are truly brain-meltingly bad. I love Walking With Dinosaurs as much as anyone, but if it had one drawback it’s that the dinosaur books were getting overrun by CG rendered images in its wake. I’m easing you into it with this Styracosaurus, which at least vaguely resembles an animal.

Here. Another example of just how shoddily put together this book is. Many of the illustrations are placed smack-dab in the middle of the page fold of what is a book with thick pages, which means that you cannot make out the face here. This is the worst example, but not the only one. When it comes to the quality of the text, the words are serious, too difficult for children to understand and full of spelling errors. There’s no authorial voice whatsoever. This means you can’t even defend this book as something “meant for children” (as if that’s any excuse). No thought went into this, no love. 

But hey! We still have a CG Ceratosaurus we can look at instead! Look at this blob. Is this ripped from some early nineties video program? Whatever it is, it looks like puke. Not only is the rendered animal horribly misshapen and unreadable, the colour is very ugly, too. And look at the size chart silhouette above, which shows the outline of a Knight-era dinosaur.

There’s just no way this made it into a serious book. It’s not even that all the details are wrong, though that skull is particularly terrible. This is just far too ugly, far too amateurish, far too ridiculous to be used as a reference. And they forgot to translate the German word for “skeleton” into Dutch. No love.

Nope. Nope. Nopenopenope.

Again, I have no idea what year this came out, so I can’t place the quality of the CG-rendering in its proper context here. Maybe this looked cool at the time, maybe it didn’t. But making a nice CG Deinonychus doesn’t just take good rendering software. It takes someone who knows what a bloody Deinonychus looks like. I’d break this down, but… there’s too much here. The rubberband limbs, that don’t seem to be attached to the body. The claws that seem to be glitching out of existence. The awkward mouth and painted-on eye. If you ever run into someone who just can’t accept that feathered dromaeosaurs can look scary, show them this.

My goodness, it never ends! Lest we think the 2D illustrations are at least somewhat better, our Alan Smithee brings us something like this. I don’t know what’s worse: the hands or the face. The stoner grin and the bleary eye so high up the face that it seems to be in its crest. The hastily drawn pointy nails. What I find truly frustrating is that this Alan Smithee is not a completely untalented or incompetent illustrator. With a little more effort and reference material, and placed in a book that took itself less seriously, they could have actually produced something nice-looking and fun in a naïve way, something on the level of Susan Steere. Instead we’re looking at images barely good enough for the silliest kids book in a book with hyper-serious text.

What else do we not like? Sibbick ripoffs? No worries, we’ve got Sibbick ripoffs, too.

Here’s something at least interestingly bad: an appearance of the quadruped Spinosaurus, last seen, I believe, in Caselli in the 70s. That means this book probably came out before 2003 when Spinosaurus made an appearance in the JP franchise. Images like this, that apparently confused Spinosaurus with Dimetrodon, would occasionally pop up in works that were, let’s say, rather unconcerned with complete scientific accuracy. Although the idea of a quadrupedal Spinosaurus never completely went away, I bet this was one of the last times it ever looked like this. As far as Alan Smithee’s illustrations go, this is one of their more competent works. They like big, humanoid eyes in this book.

And I’m out of nice things to say again. Look at those fingers! All I can do is just look and point and feebly protest. It won’t help. Nothing, ultimately, matters. This uncaring world keeps turning, rewarding evil men for their evil deeds, crushing everything of beauty under its feet, and churning out horrible dinosaur books to the sound of weeping and the gnashing of teeth.

How often do you run into a book that challenges the way you think? It’s happened to me in a positive way with Beasts Before Us. This book, so obviously put together with an absolute minimum of effort and love, challenges my firm belief that all palaeoart is valuable. Maybe I can still get myself there, by invoking the laws of opposite forces. If the works of, say, Douglas Henderson occupy one end of the great palaeoart bell curve, surely something must exist at the opposite end? This book exists to bring balance to the world, in a Taoist way. So yes, we have found value here. We’ve found rock bottom, just so we know where it is, and you know what? It’s still better than AI art.