Miscellany.

. Tony Millionaire, comique artiste extraordinaire, has just released Der Strewwelmaakies, his third Maakies collection (and the followup to When We Were Maakies and The House at Maakies Corner.) If you've never opened your town's local independent-press news-rag and have thus deprived yourself of the chance to experience that which is Maakies, you could do worse than to pick up a copy. Unless you have an aversion to drunkenness, bodily excretions and the nautical life, that is.

. Electric Tiki is releasing a limited-edition 3-D sculpture (a full dimension higher than the two you are currently experiencing reading this!) of Ragnar's "The Maltese Chimp" - in four delicious flavours, no less. There's nothing like a drunk monkey harrassing a hot skeptical chick to liven up your work-station. You lily-liver.

. Displaying depths of hitherto-unknown hipness, "Weird" Al Yankovic has hired a number of very cool animators to create videos
for many of the original songs on his recently-released album, Straight Outta Lynwood: Bill Plimpton tackles "Don't Download This Song", John Kricfalusi and Katie Rice accomplish the astonishingly unlikely and "sex up" Weird Al in the video for "Close But No Cigar", and the kids behind Robot Chicken try their hand at "Weasel Stomping Day". All of these videos (and more!) are available on the DualDisc edition of the album currently for sale on Amazon, along with a Dolby 5.1 mix of the entire album. Sweet, sweet parody never looked, or sounded, better.

Miscellany

Kentucky Art*O*Mat Machine
designed by Laurie Russell

First up, a shout out to For Crumb's Sake, my esteemed roommate's blog. Tim blogs about indie music, hipster culture, local politics, and self-drawn comics starring anthropomorphic turtles. Tim claims that For Crumb's Sake is "1 & 1/8 more fun than a shovel museum," but I've been in shovel museums, and I think he's underestimating their ability to entertain and, might I add, to educate. I'd put the ratio at closer to 1.09:1, myself.

I don't know much about David Normal, but "The Bicycle Ride", his short animation paying tribute to the very first acid trip, is hilarious, disturbing, and about as close to an authentic bad trip as you're going to get short of renting "Faces of Death 8" and dropping a postage-stamp-sized tab of blotter.

Art*O*Mat is a clever public-installation\kitsch-art\commentary on our culture of instant gratification, comprised of a group of artists who obtain dozens of old cigarette machines, modify them to distribute small works of art rather than cancer sticks, and then re-distribute them in art galleries, public libraries, coffeeshops, and museums. You can check this list to see if there's an Art*O*Mat near you - sadly, the closest one to me is in Tacoma, and I NEVER go to Tacoma. But maybe I'll have to start, now.

Jim Woodring

I apologise for the lack of updates over the last week or two, and I have no excuse other than the fact that I've been very busy and very disorganised. With luck (and maybe some concentrated application on my part) I'll be able to stick to my 2-3 posts-per-week schedule, because God knows, there's enough going on to justify it.

Pictured above are forthcoming figures from Press Pop, based of course on Jim Woodring's Frank, Pushpaw and Pupshaw from his long-running and wonderfully weird "Frank" comic. I first encountered Frank about ten years ago, when a girlfriend who was taking a course in Comics As Literature lent me her "textbooks". I remember spending hours sitting in a park on a warm May morning, endlessly fascinated by Woodring's wordless, Dali-meets-Felix-The-Cat illustrations. Even now, I can't help but be amused by Frank's constant hand-to-the-mouth shock as he encounters a parade of bizarre entities, whose occasionally bad-acid-trip appearances run perpendicular to their oftentimes friendly temperaments.

The figures above will be available in June, and while colour versions are currently available via the Press Pop website, I think I'll hold out for the monochromatic ones. After all, the comic is published in black and white, so why should the figures be anything other than that?

Cheap Paper Art

"Link"

"Not All Your Ideas Are Good"

"It's Okay, He's Canadian"

"Time To Do Something Stupid"

"Dying Is Awesome"

Over at Wonderland, Alice has posted a nice little review of the work of one Kelli Nelson, and, given the connection between her work and my last post on 8-bit art, I thought I'd pony up with my two cents. Kelli has a unique artistic style and a quirky sense of humour, which in my books is an unbeatable combination. She is also responsible for a number of self-published comics which are available for purchase via her website, and not a few mini-comics and weekly comics, all of which can be viewed and appreciated online for the low, low price of free.

Winsor McCay

Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend

(Click image for full-size)

Winsor McCay is best known as the creator of the turn of the century strip "Little Nemo in Slumberland", in which a young boy has surreal nightly adventures in the land of dreams. What he is less known for is his concurrent strip "Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend" ("Nemo" ran from 1905 to 1914, while "Rarebit Fiend" ran from 1904 to 1913.) While "Nemo" was, for all its disturbing and occasionally violent imagery, ostensibly a children's strip, "Rarebit Fiend" was firmly directed towards adults, and seems bizarre and edgy even in comparison to today's bland, content-regulated funny-pages fare.

Each "Rarebit Fiend" strip is highly formulaic. A semi-realistic situation is set up, which escalates over the course of seven or eight panels into pure surrealistic chaos - until the punchline of the last panel, which is always the same: the protagonist of the strip wakes up in bed, looking stunned and sheepish, swearing off "welsh rarebit" (or simply toasted cheese) before bed for good. Within this formula, however, McCay (who was forced to use the pseudonym "Silas" by the editor of the Herald, wherein his massively successful "Nemo" strip appeared and his real name was practically a brand name in and of itself) was given free reign to be as strange and imaginative as he wished, and "Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend" is full of Masonic rituals (see above), people growing antlers, fat jockeys crushing their horses, dead stoles coming back to life, and so forth.

"Little Nemo" was, without question, one of the first truly important newspaper cartoons (the first being "The Yellow Kid", published in the late 19th C. ) and it continues to have a phenomenal impact even today, on everyone from Matt Groening to Neil Gaiman - McCay set the stage for cartoonists to develop their own unique styles of illustration and storytelling, and the strip was of a consistently high quality from beginning to end. "Rarebit", on the other hand, tends to be a bit more uneven; it possesses a decidedly sketchy and compulsive quality, as if McCay were throwing each strip together in the middle of the night, inspired by his actual dreams.

Currently, there is no comprehensive collection of McCay's "Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend", but Dover has recently reprinted their 60-page trade paperback, which is worth picking up from from Amazon or your local retailer for the price alone. Dover has also re-released their "Little Nemo" collection, but it too is unfortunately incomplete. The best and highest-quality "Little Nemo" collection is the out-of-print "So Many Splendid Sundays", but until Sunday Press decides to release a 3rd edition, we'll have to content ourselves with the Dover collection and the McCay retrospective "Daydreams & Nightmares" (which is an excellent book in its own right, I should point out.)

Little Nemo in Slumberland

(Click image for full-size)

Brandon Bird

King of the Cage

Those That Bind

Cash Comics

If his artwork is any indication, Brandon Bird resides in an alternate universe vastly superior to our own, where Bea Arthur wrestles velociraptors, Star Trek Captains are the subject of Renaissance spectacles, and Johnny Cash is a comic book superhero. Bird is like a pop-cultural reference clearinghouse. His website is a better introduction to his work than I could ever be, so if you have even a shred of love for Christopher Walken, Chuck Norris or Jabba The Hutt, you owe yourself a visit.

Link to Brandon Bird's website.

(All images © Brandon Bird 2006)