Mistodon: We don't share much of his work, but this is a #HighResolutionGraphics screen by #Thanatos, previously known as #GrimReaper, a man who for years helmed Mist Classic's "#VGA" department. When he applied we'd honestly never seen anything like his work before, and he kept us guessing, submitting screens by the pound (even moonlighting with the #Odium crew to vent output we were unable to accommodate) in every style under the sun, sometimes leaping forward in presumed creative breakthroughs, sometimes sending in tragical creative failures that were DOA. At the time we didn't understand the huge variance in his work, but as time went by we began seeing echoes of it out in the wild and coming to the understanding that our VGA department head was an inveterate remixer, sampling imagery he encountered in the world and cooking it with Photoshop filters, transformations and generated content until it was sufficiently altered for his purposes. 🧵

There wasn't a method to his madness, he just threw it all at the wall in volume in the hopes that something would stick. Kudos to him as an information anarchist freed from the chains of the capitalist copyright system, but... by underground artscene standards, plagiarising content created by others was considered "ripping", one of the major taboos of our community. (This taboo wasn't in effect when you were reproducing panels from Spawn comics, you just didn't need to credit them because everyone already knew where they were was from.)

This image isn't a great example of his faux pas, as I believe he may actually have drawn the outlines of the eagle in this piece, "Morph"; the rest of it was blanks to be filled in by the computer. (Not a sin in itself; artpacks commonly hosted garage raytraces and fractally-generated landscapes.) ...

Rather, I took this piece, which was included in the M-9801 artpack collection released a quarter-century ago this month, as an opportunity to explain why we have passed over so much of his other work. His omission was conspicuous.