NorsePlay.

These are more visuals screengrabbed from The Viking Myths TV series I mentioned last week : I really like the graphical minimal linearity of the first one, while the second one draws together more common-ish depictive elements seen from some books, comics, & videogames where we can hear the cosmological voiceover about The Nine Worlds, which probably was precisely happening as this was onscreen, but the little differently coloured worlds are expressively distinct, and the strange Urnes-style vining in the not-snake-but-snake shapes as a frame are a neat synthesis of Nordic designs layered atop a much later romantically painted tree background. When I last mentioned how A.I.'s being tasked to tell the Norse Lore, I think these illustrations are great example of how artificial intelligence can visually NorsePlay things (like the Odin on laptop via my prompts in this post ) in variant ways we might not have thought to present them before in the last 800+ years of retellings sinc...

Buried deep within the obscure streaming app Xumo, I ran across a French-produced 2024 CE 10-episode voiceover documentary-styled series called The Viking Myths . While there's a whole list of animators in the credits, as I watched the first episode there was an artifice to its style, a sort of motion-comic storyboard presentation, and an artistic lack of fine details with far more easier choices of solids and simple lines in many instances. When we talk about the uncanny valley of A.I. being unable to replicate the natural/creative aspects of humanity, this show has a possible tell of artificial generation to it. While that simplification attempts to err toward the iconic, much like Jeffery Alan Love's cut-out silhouettes with texturing/spot colour illustrations for the Candlewick Studio's 2017 CE edition of Crossley-Holland's Norse Myths , it feels like a workaround to just get something finished. Maybe that leaves fill-in-the-blanks for the viewer's imagination ...