rain. again.

the door of the rental closes shut with an automated and irritated “thwauclck.”

“hmph.”

he adjusts the tie hanging loosely around his neck, fidgeting the knot up, then down, then back up again. the way these newer auto-pods do practically everything for you, it’s impossible to even get in a strong, angry door slam any more.

fuckin’ liberals and their robots.

it’s one of those dreary days where the heavens and their angels piss down on you from absolutely every angle. no worth even trying to avoid it. let it soak in deep.
it was fitting, he thought. they met in the rain. she died in the rain. he might as well bury her in the rain – and the rest of them can blame this on him too – if any of them had even bothered to show their ugly, speckled faces. always there to criticize. always there to intrude. always there to be ‘concerned’. but in the end, she wasn’t worth the price of a plane ticket. in the end they really were all about themselves – something the two of them had argued over numerous times on those train rides back from the outer region of the Hemlock district. in the end all that arguing was for naught. in the end… shit. in the end it’s just the end.

he stops lumbering forward to rifle through his left pant pocket. the ground mushes beneath as his weight shifts. grasping the lighter between middle and ring fingers, he reaches up and inside his jacket to cuff a mashed-up pack of cigarettes. the wind was really howling now. squatting down to rest on the corner of a crumbling, barely legible tombstone surrounded by a dozen other crumbling barely legible tombstones, he clunkily huddles over to light the smoke amidst the barrage of oddly thick drops of rain.

on the carefully measured fifth try, the spark takes.

since the Imperial Monarchy outlawed the importing of any cigarette or tobacco product seven years ago, the government-produced products being made and distributed locally are severely inferior to say the least. either the tobacco is too heavy and the damn things wont stay lit, or they spray on too much chemical conditioner and the smokes burn down like wildfire. and since the ‘67 Imperial takeover of most of the farm land in order to provide housing and secure storage of the booming (some would say out-of-control) android population, they say the tobacco isnt even grown anymore. the dark rumor is that today’s tobacco is more or less a synthetic product – if that’s the friendliest way to look at it – the reconstituted by-waste of the android population, collected and exhausted out of the prison reservations and piped into an underground greenhouse that mixes those molecules with other molecules, and the resulting chemical seedlings are planted, fertilized and grown into a smokeable tobacco-like product.

that’s the rumor, anyway.

fuckin’ conservatives and their robots.

**************

he raises his head slowly, the taste of gravel and mushy flesh thick along his tongue. there is no sound. no sight but bright, excruciating white. he knows he isn’t moving, but can’t feel anything. a deep piercing buzz is alive within him, though he feels the sensation in a way not registered by any of the normal senses he’s familiar with.

“wha…”

slowly, after what seems like a agonizingly slow crawl of time, cloudy shapes begin to form in his vision. then, a feeling. he feels wet. an unexpected damp sogginess. still not registering the extent of what has actually occurred, he realizes – deeply more than consciously – that it’s raining. slowly he can feel the thick liquid drops burst and sizzle emphatically on his cheek.

but that’s all he feels. the mud, the rain and the buzz.

**************

they can’t make her swallow this pill. life or death, heaven or hell on earth, there’s nothing they have to threaten her with. nothing. nothing to raise a fear deeper than she already knows. anything they spit in her face would be an escape – and she firmly believes they know that.

why they thought her to be special, she has no idea. why are none of the others going thru this same horrific torture? or maybe they are. it has to be because of her ‘ability’. behind closed doors they proclaim it as a gift to the family – a chosen existence. she’s heard the greed in their excited voices. the greed that’s left her a life of muffled sounds and painfully unending dreams.

the dreams… oh, the fucking voices and the dreams.

the family she knows is not hers. the ‘family’ she knows would be the first to taste the end of her cold, serrated blade. this hell she was sold into is no more closer to a family than rats and birds.

there is a word for what she is. a name they call her when talking to each other with those big words.

“t-e-l-u-k-u-n-e-e-s-i-s-s.”

and the flower. what is this flower she keeps hearing in whispers from the other young ones? something about a sickness and a flower.

damn this place. the world she knows is a barbwired island of stone walls, electric shackles and seven years of mysterious, agonizing nothing.

**************

“we’re getting a clean reading on the brain scan, doctor.”

“thanks suzie.” the large man reaches up to flip a switch in the glowing console hanging directly in front of him. it makes a mild ‘thunk’.

“proceeding with neural upgrade implant on subject ninety-seven. this will be version five.”

“do you think it will take, david?”

**************

At some point after the last of the snow from the spring blizzard melted, my mom accused my dad of smelling like a skunk. It wasn’t the type of thing a wife says to her husband, spitefully. He just smelled like skunk and she thought he should know.

He could smell it, too, which only made things worse. Starting with the obvious, my dad chewed his way through potential culprits like a hungry caterpillar: replacing deodorants, swapping out one brand of hair tonic for another, divvying out his dry-cleaning to three different stores suspecting it might be a “chemical” issue. It got to the point that when we’d see him marching toward with that Here, smell this look, we’d fling ourselves out the nearest door.

For two solid months, we lived and breathed B-O, slowly breaking apart the model of our suburban existence, piece by stinky piece. At first, no one was allowed to wear perfume or cologne. Not even my older brother Craig, who’d moved out the year before and was only an occasional visitor to the house for free meals and laundry. Next, our friends were banned from hanging out after school for fear that it was something in their houses that sparked an allergic reaction in his glandular system. Finally, our mom started washing our clothes in a solution of baking soda, vinegar and ammonia — a particularly humiliating course of action that took its toll on our social standing at school. We became “those kids” who smelled like sour little homeless people. Eventually, our meals and junkfood were up for grabs. We stopped eating beef cold turkey. Waffled over white versus dark meat. And fish that was previously fried and delicious was now baked beyond recognition and served alongside piles of strange new vegetables like beets and kale, which could only be eaten by plugging your nose and swallowing them whole without chewing.

But no matter what we did or how we did it, dad still smelled like skunk.

“Why are you punishing them?” Craig snapped one night at dinner pointing to me and my sister. “It’s not Sam’s or Spencer’s fault. You’re the one who stinks!”

“Damnit Cindy,” dad brustled ignoring Craig’s little show. “Are you using vegetable oil in there?”

“We’ve already gone though this, Mike. It is NOT the vegetable oil, remember? Don’t forget, you have an appointment with Dr. Gladweller tomorrow.”

“Gladweller? What’s the dentist gonna tell me?”

“Could be something in your mouth,” she sighed under her breath retrieving from the oven a baking sheet of Orange Roughy strips that had been reduced to leathery insoles.

My brother kicked me under the table. It was only a week ago that we’d been over to our cousins’ house and watched dad and his brothers get stinking drunk around a table of cards, which ended with dad telling our uncle to eat a shit sandwich. “Looks like the sandwich is in the other mouth, so to speak,” Craig cracked.

“You know, you’re a real wise-ass,” dad seethed. “You got that fifty bucks I loaned you last month? Cindy, no more dinners for Mr. Smartass over here. Gimme your plate.”

“That’s enough—both of you.”

“You know,” Craig added. “I read that a person’s job satisfaction can actually impact the body’s ability to produce certain phenomes.”

“Pheremones,” mom corrected him trying to shimmy a metal spatula under what was left of our fish.

“Yeah, pheremones. I saw it on 60 minutes. Harry Reasoner interviewed some guy in Japan who was talking about the impact his new job had on his body. His hair fell out. He developed cavities. Even grew an inch and a half. And the thing is, it all started —”

“You like teaching, don’t you dad?” I interrupted.

“I love my job, Spencer. Your brother is just trying to rattle me so his mother will give him his plate back—”

“I’m serious dad—”

“We don’t have to talk, Craig. Some of us can eat.”

After dinner, Samantha wiggled out from the table pumping her arm like a bird with a broken wing, and the three of us went upstairs to play Dungeons and Dragons in her bedroom.

“Why do you have to do that, Craig?” Samantha asked plucking her pet hamster Popcorn from his cage and flinging herself on the bed. “Dad says your on drugs again.”

I nudged the door shut with my elbow and wedged a towel under it so Popcorn couldn’t escape.

“Don’t believe everything dad says, Sam. Let’s play. I’ve got the new one, Spencer: The Gates of Death,” Craig said pulling a book out of his backpack. “You in Sam?”

“What if he has cancer?” Samantha whispered stroking Popcorn’s neck. “Maggie’s dad had it and no one knew until it was too late.”

“He doesn’t have cancer, Sam. I never finished the story at dinner tonight. Hey Spencer, get your characters ready. You’ll definitely want your first level Cleric for this. Okay. Now you guys have to promise not to say anything if I tell you.”

“I won’t.”

“Me neither.”

“Alright. Dad doesn’t have cancer. Not even close. I’ll tell you what he does have if you swear you won’t say anything? Not even to mom?”

“Craig, you HAVE to tell us NOW,” Samantha pleaded while Popcorn balanced on her shoulder.

“Samantha, you’re gonna  understand this better — since you’re a girl. Spencer, just try and keep up. That story I was telling you about, it was a special about people called her-maph-ro-dites,” Craig explained, slowly drawing out the long word as if it would take on some special meaning and stick in our brains. It sounded horrible.

“Shut up, Craig.” My face grew beet red.

“It’s okay Spencer. It’s not what you think,” Craig said making his way to the door. Samantha and I avoided looking at one another until he returned with a heavy volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

“Look here,” he said flipping to a page with a strange illustration of what looked to be a lop-sided door handle. “It says right here,” he continued reading, “a hermaphrodite is a person born with both male and female reproductive organs, and, let’s see, oh yeah,” he continued moving his finger down the page. “It’s a condition that affects 1.7 percent of all births. That’s almost two people in a hundred. Hell, you’ve got that many kids in your Freshman class, Sam. Two of your stupid friends are probably going through the same thing at home right now.”

“Oh my God.” I wanted to crawl into the Popcorn’s cage and hide under his wheel.

“Spencer, I’m trying to explain,” Craig continued. “The guy on 60 Minutes said he didn’t find out he was one until he was almost 50, when all those weird things started happening to his body. And you know what the very first symptom was?” Samantha and I were glued to the end of Craig’s finger as it danced in front of his face. “Do you?” There was a long pause. “Bee. Ohhhhhhhhh. You see what I’m sayin’?”

I was only 13, but already knew enough to know that when a person says, “Do you see what I’m sayin’?” they don’t have a clue what they’re talking about. But this was different; this was Craig. He was how Sam and I learned about most things worth knowing.

“Gross!”

“I’m not lying. It’s a symptom of something called bacterial vagoneeesis.”

“So dad’s not turning into a skunk?” I asked.

“Nope. He’s becoming a girl.”

Illustration by  Aaron Scamihorn

Leena’s booth is just below the ramp. Cars drive down the garage’s long incline and pass her booth every morning. She doesn’t see the sunrise over the incline. She barely sees the sky. If she were to bend down and squint her saggy eyelids, she might glimpse the pigeons eating bread crumbs, pedestrians smoking cigarettes, ambulances speeding across the street, maybe the busy intersection. In the late afternoons, the never ending lines of cars, coming and going, block her view of everything except her small glass booth. Fingers reach out driver side windows to push the red Take Your Ticket button. Hands reach out to give money and take change. Leena barely sees the faces behind the cars’ tinted windows. Everyone tints their windows nowadays. When she does see faces, she sees them partially. People say hello and thank you. Sometimes goodbye. Sometimes they just drive off.

Terry tells her to count bills before he leaves. She sits in her stool and counts each bill—a’deen, dva, tri, chetyre, pyat…She counts three times because last week she was short fifty dollars. After counting, she drops the money into Terry’s safe. Then she goes to the alley to take out the trash.

When Terry’s not looking, Leena draws angels on the yellow stationery. Drawing makes her smile, sometimes laugh. So many angels, so many halos, so many pages of bushy-bearded God smiling on His throne. The sun also smiles in her illustrations. She brings a childish but sad world to life with blue ink. Angels fly between Adam and Eve, little children dance in tall sunflower fields, and one fatter angel—an angel wearing the same CVS branded glasses as her own—sits on top of a cloud and waters Eden’s vegetation with her tears. The manager arrives at her booth to collect the receipts in the morning. He sees the drawings but doesn’t know what to make of them. Sometimes he collects and stuffs the notebooks in his drawer and supplies clean notebooks. Other times he throws the drawings in the garbage.

She’s not allowed to make phone calls. Terry says no cell phones. No Walkmans either, no personal radios, no Gameboys. Employees have to pay attention at the booth. Customers complain a lot. Their change is never given fast enough. Distractions are not the cause of Leena’s inefficiency, however. It’s the arthritis in her left pinky and the cheap CVS reading glasses that are bigger than her face. The manager keeps her because she works the lengthy hours, the early morning shifts and the late night shifts on weekends—the shifts no one else will take. She works on Christmas, New Year’s Eve, Memorial Day, Labor Day, her birthday.

On weekday evenings at ten, after filling out her time card and organizing the receipts, Leena walks up the incline. She smells the air of the city and waits at the bus stop. Often when the wait is cold, she opens her purse and plays with her little martian doll she bought from the dollar store. She makes it dance. She makes it touch its big, bug-looking eyes. She makes it pretend to cry, moves its arms up and down while saying waaah, waaah. She is not embarrassed to do this. She lost those feelings a long time ago. She’s always alone at the bus stop.

On the bus, she holds the martian with her arthritic pinky. She always sits by herself and watches cars drive by out the window. The world, even in the quiet night, is always in a hurry.

Her apartment is small. She has a living room, which is also a bedroom, a kitchen, and a bathroom. She keeps lots of dolls. Oil paintings of angels are scattered over her coffee/dinner table. She usually comes home after the long days, boils tea, and micro-waves frozen ground beef. She doesn’t have a television. Sometimes, after eating, she shakes the Santa snow globe her son gave her for Christmas many years ago. She was thinner then. Her hair was darker. She used to move around. Now she’s stuck to her couch. She’s always sitting. Sitting and growing fatter. Her hair is turning orange and gray. Her sight is diminishing. Her teeth are turning yellow, her skin paler. She’ll stare at herself in the mirror on nights she recollects her youth. She smiles and then frowns in front of the mirror. Smiles and frowns. She alternates smiles and frowns for minutes on end before brushing her yellow teeth. She then stares closer. Her chin vanished long ago. It’s been replaced with the flabs of bad food and age. There’s another wrinkle on her eyelid. She turns off the lights and sits on her couch and breathes a deep sigh. Every day is the same. Leena pushes buttons on her register, draws her pictures, organizes her receipts, rides the bus, and eats her frozen meat before going to sleep.

She’s lost track of how long she’s worked in that little booth. The days are so slow. Every day is a new eternity. The years were unkind. Life was unkind and unsympathetic. Customers come and go, as does the money. There is no smell inside the booth. The acrid gasoline fumes are not even able to penetrate the glass booth. Leena draws her pictures and gives change at the same time. Eventually, her illustrations become less detailed. She takes money and gives money. In her free time, she rests her hand on her forehead, her eyes wide open and aching.

The Take Your Ticket button beeps. Cars honk. The register opens and closes. Customers get grouchy. The manager yells. Pennies fall to the ground. Change clinks and clanks inside the register with every push and shove of the drawer. The stitching is coming off of the martian inside her purse.

She sits at her coffee table on her birthday. The midnight shift has ended and she rewards herself with a gas station cupcake. She puts one candle inside the purple frosting and blows it out. Her martian, with one eye remaining, sits on the chair across from her. Leena stares at her cupcake for minutes, perhaps hours. She never eats it. She sighs and goes to sleep.

The garage is empty the next evening. She works the all-night shift. For the first time she considers leaving early. It’s eleven. The garage is lifeless. Terry left. Why can’t she leave? What’s the point of staying? Her thighs are glued to the tattered stool. Since she missed the bus, she now has to walk until she finds a cab. Her eyes are itchy. The clock hits two and she sits in her seat, tired, eyes still open.

At three, she faces her register. All the numbers. All the time. So many numbers. So much time. Gone.

At the instant the clock hits four, tears pour down Leena’s face. She cries so hard, cries, cries, cries for no reason and every reason. She screams and kicks and punches the glass and the register and the stool. Papers fly, the register crashes to the ground, the stool unscrews and breaks in two. Leena wails with all her voice, all her being, and all her soul. She loses her breath but the tears continue falling and watering the little booth.

The clock hits seven. Terry will arrive. She cleans up, puts the register back in its place, screws the stool back together, leaves her booth, and walks up the incline. Her shift ends.

She witnesses the sunrise. Even behind the tall skyscrapers, God finds a way to make the sunlight reach her eyes.

Farhad Anwarzai Farhad graduated from Butler University with Highest Honors in English. At Butler, Farhad served as an editor for the undergraduate literary magazine Manuscripts. He also founded Archives, Butler’s humor magazine. Additionally, Farhad has won several awards for his writing and was twice named one of the Top Ten Most Outstanding Students at his school. He will spend the next year applying to MFA programs in creative writing and doctoral programs in English literature.

But it is not apropos at all.

A day earlier he had sat on their yellow velour couch and gazed at her pitifully as she tried to cheer him up by improvising a tap dance. Her sweetness made him feel even guiltier than he already felt. He told her to sit down.

“I love someone else,” he said plainly. He expected her to begin sobbing or to explode in a rage of anger. She did neither.

“Please leave,” she said quietly.

“Look, I feel like we should talk—”

“Leave now, please.” She stared hard at the floor.

He left. He got into his car and drove directly to the home of the other woman. That night, he had sex with the other woman four consecutive times, allowing himself to be wholly consumed by the dopamine buzz that comes with first-time intercourse.

Late the next morning, he drove back to their apartment. As he drove, he rehearsed what he would say to her. “We grew apart.” “We both saw this coming.” “You have to admit you were unhappy, too.” When he arrived, she wasn’t there.

The places where her things had been were occupied by something that made him feel profoundly sad. Drawers hung half-open in the bedroom. The mattress was stripped of the bedspread and sheets. The artwork had been taken off the walls, leaving behind bare white rectangles, terrifying in their emptiness.

They had lived together for six years. Now, he realized, they didn’t.

He called her and got her voicemail. He called again and again, and got the same result. He dropped his phone, gripped by a strange panic he never saw coming.

He ran. He ran out of the apartment, down the stairs, through the foyer. He stopped running when he reached the sidewalk. He tried walking down the street, to nowhere in particular, like an ordinary person having an ordinary day. But the sidewalk swayed and buckled beneath him. He stopped walking for several minutes, waited out the wooziness, and went back to his apartment.

He went into the kitchen and turned on the radio. “Misunderstanding” by Genesis was playing. He looked around.

She had taken all of the dishes, exposing the floral wallpaper that lined the shelves inside the cabinets. She had taken the spice rack and the mustard-colored plastic containers that had held thee sugar, flour, and coffee. She had taken the wooden breadbox engraved with the word “Bread.” She had taken the microwave oven.

She had not taken the barbecue sauce jar. He had bought it for her at a thrift store as a gag gift a couple of years earlier. Barbecue sauce had been a lighthearted bone of contention between them. He loved it; she had no use for it.

The jar looked like a miniature brick barrel with a wooden lid. When you lifted the lid, a brush was attached to the bottom. “We use this to paint our food delicious,” he used to say to her.

Now he is holding the barbecue sauce jar in his hands. He is overcome by the reality of each discrete new moment. He is trying to use the power of his mind to make all of the missing things, including her, reappear and return to their rightful places.

“I’m Not In Love” by 10cc comes on the radio. He tries to isolate and separate the individual parts: the liquid synthesizer; the hazy smear of overlapping background vocals; the rich, disconsolate lead vocals. But they keep snapping back into place. “So beautiful,” he mouths silently.

He is sitting on the linoleum floor. He cradles the barbecue sauce jar in his arms. “I’m Not In Love” continues to play on the paint-splattered Magnavox boom box. It’s at the part where the English woman says, slowly and softly, “Big boys don’t cry, big boys don’t cry, big boys don’t cry.”

Matt Gonzales Like all self-respecting English majors, Matt graduated from college with no intention of getting a real job. Instead, he traveled to South Korea, where he taught English to kids for a couple of years. After returning to the states, Matt did time as a waiter and a fundraiser for Citizens Action Coalition before finally landing his first writing gig as an ad copywriter at a small firm in Muncie, Ind. In the following years, Matt attended graduate school to study digital storytelling at Ball State, wrote lots of music criticism for Popmatters.com and Indianapolismusic.net, and launched his own webzine, Hoosier Logic. In 2005, the Indianapolis Star hired Matt to write for INtake Weekly, where he became a columnist and a blog editor, and was recognized by the Society of Professional Journalism for his long-form writing. Matt stuck around at the Star just long enough to realize the newspaper business was dying a slow, grisly death, and, in 2008, he jumped ship to the advertising business. These days, Matt spends nearly all of his free time making a fuss over his new son, Oscar.

Last year a festival debuted in Cleveland, Ohio. Weapons of Mass Creation. They’ve brought together a community of 20 speakers, 20 bands and 20 designers to set up camp and do their thing over the course of two days. Bands and designers from all over the country and talks on graphic design, art, entrepreneurship, leadership and more.

Via WMCFest.com:
WMC Fest is a fest for those who live to create! A weekend community event taking place in the Gordon Square Arts District on Cleveland’s west side. It was founded by Jeff Finley of the Cleveland-based creative agency Go Media. Only in its second year, it’s already generating lots of buzz within the creative community.

We are thrilled to announce that among some truly inspiring names including Mig Reyes (Threadless), Mikey Burton, Aaron Draplin (Draplin Design Co.), Alex Cornell (ISO50) and a whole slew of others, Ferocious Quarterly’s Nate Utesch will be representing among the 20 designers selected for the festival. He’ll be stocked with a handful of limited prints, FQ issues in the plenty, and maybe even a couple surprises.

The best part: we’re giving away 2 sets of tickets to the fest! If you live in or around the Ohio area, know somebody who does, or maybe you just wanna take a road trip, email us at hello@rocious.com and they’re yours! Easy as that.

Learn more about Weapons of Mass Creation Fest at WMCFest.com and be sure and check out all the speakers, bands and designers involved. It’s going to be a tremendous weekend and we’re excited to have Nate in the mix!

Edit: Tickets have been claimed! Thanks for the responses and interest in going to the fest. For those that missed out, you can still nab tickets here. And if you “share” the WMC goodness on Facebook or Twitter, you get 25% off your ticket price. Pretty awesome.

Jim Walker is a writer and artist who works in poetry, drama, journalism, collage, sound, video, photography and art as social practice. He’s based in Indianapolis, Ind. He helps with two non-profit cultural organizations: Big Car, an arts collective and gallery, and Second Story, a project for young writers. He is the lead artist behind the Made for Each Other community art series.

Ross Shafer is a Visual Communications student at Herron School of Art & Design in Indianapolis who lives by the motto: We Choose to Go to the Moon. “That challenge is exactly how I want to live my life as a designer. I want to challenge myself to create things that we’ve never seen, go above and beyond all expectations, and in a way, Go to the Moon.”

I distinctly remember my first experience with Jeff Lemire. I was just starting to get into comics and my buddy Ty was being gracious enough to loan me a gigantic stack of books that I could take on tour with me. He was picking out some classics like A Contract With God, DC: The New Frontier, Scott Pilgrim Vol. 1, and others and I saw on his book shelf a light-blue hardcover book called Essex County. The book just looked great from the outside and I flipped through it and asked, “Can I take this too?” He said that he had not actually read it yet and was obviously a little bit hesitant to let me have it because of that, but again, being the gracious friend that he was, he allowed me to borrow it.

What I found in the book was surprising. Glancing through it, it seemed like a book that was sparsely laid out, yet smartly drawn with a northern rural focus, but I obviously did not know how well it would be written. Let’s be clear, it is absolutely smartly drawn and it does certainly have an unmistakable northern rural focus, but what I was not expecting to find was the depth of heart it contained and the complexity of real emotions that requires. The book chronicles a small town in Canada and a few of the stories contained therein; the further the roots go down, the greater the yield.

After realizing I had found one of the best cartoonists around, I was obviously very intrigued when I heard that DC’s Vertigo imprint would be releasing his new monthly comic called Sweet Tooth. Suffice to say, I was won over by that title as well. The deciding factor which sold me on the post-apocalyptic mystery? The surprising and unmistakable presence of heart.

I recently got the pleasure to chat with Jeff a little bit about his work and what drives him as a cartoonist.

The book will be released at San Diego Comicon 2012. It is about 1/2 way done. As of the moment I have over 100 pages fully drawn and inked and the entire script is done as well. I really floundered on that book for most of last year as I was learning to juggle all of my DC and Vertigo commitments, but things have settled down and I’ve found a new work routine that allows me to get a significant amount of work done on the Welder each week.

I get up early and get to my desk as soon as I can. I work best in the early mornings. I check email and then get to the drawing board. I spend about 8 hours a day drawing and usually take a day a week to work on scripts and other non-drawing commitments.  The best part is being able to do what I love every day.

Definitely a seized opportunity. I would never just write DC or Marvel characters. It would not satisfy me creatively. Even if I was drawing them too, I would still yearn to do my own stories.  For me doing Superboy and the other DC books are a fun side-gig. A nice way to take a break from my creator owned or indie stuff, but my personal work will always be my primary focus.

That depends what day you ask me.  Most days it is just a fun experience. I don’t mind the editorial involvement. I like working with my Superboy editors, they are a lot of fun and after spending so much time alone, it’s nice to collaborate. And whenever things do start to feel a bit “restricted”, I just remind myself that I have Sweet Tooth and my other personal projects where I get TOTAL control and can do whatever I want. So, working with the DC editorial staff to make sure my version Superboy still fits within their larger universe can be fun, if you accept it for what it is and remember to be flexible.

The key is to try and infuse it with as much of your personality as you can with it still being their Superboy. It’s a fine line, but one I’m getting better and better at walking.

Film certainly influences my sense of pacing and composition, especially in my earlier work, but more and more I’m leaning towards finding new ways to use the aspects of comics that are unique to the medium, to tell my stories.

I can’t really get into too much detail on how I select what I show and what moments I draw because those decisions tend to be very instinctual…not intellectual. It’s not something I tend to approach with a method of any kind, I just let the comic play in my head from beat to beat and sketch it down. It’s a very natural process and one that it’s probably best not to analyze too much.

Essex County- David Gordon Green
Sweet Tooth – David Lynch
The Nobody – The Coen Brothers

There are so many talented people do so many amazing comics and each is so different from the other in terms of subject matter and approach. It’s hard to pinpoint one movement or one publisher because the variety of excellent work is at an all time high right now.

To me no one is doing better genre fiction in comics than Jason Aaron on Scalped, Darwyn Cooke on his Parker books and Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips on Criminal. No one is doing more exciting, experimental and audacious superhero comics than Grant Morrison.  And then in the more independent side of things there are so many wonderful voices new and old creating such a huge breadth of great work…Matt Kindt, Lilli Carre, Chris Ware, Seth, Emi Lenox, Jim Rugg, Gipi, Jeff Smith I could go on listing names forever.

I never really thought it was possible to make a living doing it, et alone a very good living like I am now. But there were different stages along the way. When I won the Xeric Grant to publish my first GN LOST DOGS I felt validated. What I mean is that I had spent years drawing all kinds of comics no one had ever seen and for all I knew they were worthless to any one other than me. So when I won that it was like an outside source finally saying, no this is good, keep going.

Then when Top Shelf agreed to publish the first Essex County that was another step all together, Now I had a “real” publisher accept me, and not just any publisher, but one who published a very high quality level of cartoonists. At that point I figured I would be able to keep doing work and at least it would see print and get distributed. I still didn’t expect to make any money, that was until the DC COMICS/ Vertigo stuff happened…then I was making an actual page rate that I could live off of. That’s when everything changed and I was able to quit my day job at last!  But still, I thought it was a temporary thing. Even when Sweet Tooth started I felt it would only last 9-12 issues before getting cancelled. But when the sales figures and critical response started out so positively, and just kept growing I knew I might be able to relax a bit and get used to working as a cartoonist full time.

And now, with so many irons in the fire, from indie books, to Vertigo to writing DC stuff, I finally feel that I’ll have a career in comics that will be able to sustain me for years to come.  And that was all in about a ten year period. It didn’t happen overnight.

Actually the backlash of the book getting voted off so early was so huge that  the popularity and sales of EC skyrocketed, It became more popular in many ways than most of the books that went further in the competition, so it all worked out.

I underestimated the effect the competition would have when I first found out I had been shortlisted. I can’t tell you how many thousands of people have read this book now, who would never have considered reading a graphic novel before Canada Reads.  There were certainly a lot of great cartoonists, Canadian and otherwise who paved the way, but Essex really was a “breakthrough” book here in terms of the mainstream literary audience.

[Editor’s Note] Although Essex County did not win the Canada Reads competition initially, it did end up winning the People’s Choice Award of the competition by capturing more than 50% of the people’s votes.

There are a few artists who really had a profound influence on me aesthetically and in terms of how I approach being an artist and a storyteller, but none have made a bigger or more lasting impact on my life than David Lynch.  I could go one forever as to the reasons why, but if I were to boil it down, the instant you see or hear a single second of one of his films you instantly know it is a David Lynch film. His fingerprints are on every frame of film, every second of sound design…you instantly enter another world, his world and his mindset.  And you always know he is following his own path, never letting the work suffer or become watered down from any outside influences.  That’s the kind of artist I strive to be.

Do it for yourself. You have to love doing it. There is no end goal…no prize at the end of the road…the work itself is all that matters. Do the work because it’s what you HAVE to do when you wake up in the morning, not to get published, or to have fans or to have some bullshit movie made out of it.  Making a living in comics is a nice benefit, but I would still be making the same books on my own if I weren’t getting paid to do it.

We’ve officially launched a new section of our store today.

Limited edition prints.

Some of the talented artists we’ve collected for our books have been so kind as to commission their work to help keep our publication alive. Limited edition prints and posters—made by them, shipped by them and sold right here through us.

To kick it off properly, our own Indiana cohort, Shaun Malinowski (1/3 of the illustrious print collective, Sweet Tooth, and the full-time operator of the one-man design & illustration shop, Good Stuff), is offering up a limited edition, 2-color print of his piece from the issue No.2 blue book. “Welcome to Cleveland.” Check out some in-process images below and consider supporting both Good Stuff and Ferocious by purchasing a print!

the voices always seem to get louder as the day creeps toward night

calling them voices may be the wrong way to describe it… more like a continuous series of piercing tones of chattered consciousness at their loudest and most inaudible level. inaudible but so fucking clear.

most people have thoughts and inner conversations. this was nothing of the sort; but then, using the term ‘person’ to describe her was already playing it pretty loose.

* * *

she scoops the dangling strands of hair out of her eyes and turns into the sun to glance both ways before crossing the speckled, trash-strewn concrete. it’s windy. about three hours till dusk. she gracefully side-steps a fast food burger wrapper blowing like a tumbleweed straight out of that old High Noon movie she saw at the old archival film theater. she loves those old westerns. back when exploiting and killing everyone around you could at least be morally justified in some twisted way.

“honey, always look both ways before crossing the street”, a soft and muffled motherly voice registers in her memory awareness, the rhythm chiming like the tune of a long-forgotten cartoon theme song. it’s a voice she doesn’t know but knows so well.

it’s friday. the first day of her work week. at least she thinks that it’s friday. she has to stop for a minute to make sure a day didn’t forgivingly pass her by. since the Imperial Queen instituted the two-day national sabbath, it’s easy to lose track sometimes. the law passed a year ago was supposed to help ease the tensions of an over-worked, over-burdened society – the common man works four days a week with three days of rest and leisure. however the Queen intended that two of these days be set aside as holy days requiring attendance to the government-sponsored mass. yeah right. two holy days? that was their first mistake.

well, more like the 9,876,321st mistake, but who’s really counting?

a siren wails longingly in the near distance. a series of honking horns indicate that people are either too slow or just don’t give a shit to get out of the way of the oncoming death bus. she checks her watch. already ahead of schedule, though there’s no real schedule to keep. like most weekends, fate will decide where she ends up. she picks at the leftover scab of a cut on the back of her right hand.

fate. what an annoyingly human concept.

walking briskly past the tattered storefronts and dusty neon signs silently screaming for indulgence in whatever pleasure they might have on hand to subdue the mindless heaps of flesh who might wander close enough to be caught in their glowing trap, her gaze rarely raises from the pavement. only sixteen human cycles young, but she knows their ploy and every angle they can throw at her. shit, she could walk into that corner bodega right now and sweet talk the shop owner outta a weeks worth of pay without even flashing a lick of skin. and credits no less, not that soon-to-be-useless paper money the old hags are still clutching on to like it’s some sort of prized justification of their very existence on this damn rock.

they say the androids have a much faster mental development than genetically-pure humans. the brain-wigs and proud supporters of technological advancement point to this evolutionary moment as a crowning achievement in the progress of human conquest. while the doom-sayers stand at their pulpits and news desks sweatily heralding in the demise of the human empire with each new organically grown circuit that receives it’s first electrical charge.

she just wants to fill her stomach and not have the next string of weekend tricks bruise up her face to an unrecognizable pulp.

the thing those preachers and politicians and pussy-shits don’t seem to understand is that she bleeds just as they do. more in fact, due in part to the lack of developed android healthcare and the niggerish way they look at her when she attempts to get medical assistance from a human clinic. and sometimes just because slicing some flesh and feeling alive can be a sultry one-in-the-same experience for a throwaway who needs something – anything – to cling on to.

passing through the alley on 27th between the old boarded up sporting goods store and peterson’s meat market, a purple blur of a young boy who looks to be no more than seven darts blindly, arms flailing, from the brick passageway. the force of their collision drops them both to the pavement.

for a short second she considers to simply lie there. life is more soluble when lying on the dirty ground – no further to go, nowhere else to sink to.

picking herself up and glancing over at the young out of control thing, she sees why he was in such a fever. a pair of larger kids were lurking in their direction. one like a shirtless fire hydrant, with dark crimson lacerations marked across his upper body and sullen eyes two sizes too big for his head. the second, almost as tall but half as wide, dirty dark leather tightly clutching his entire body. she sees something shiny and sharp with a hint of splotchy red hanging loosely from his left hand. her nose practically burns with the stench of violence dripping from them half a block away.

“get the fuck back here, ya limey runt!”, seethed out the fire hydrant. they’re inching closer, but seem to be taking their time, almost as though thoroughly savoring the slow methodical build-up to catching their prey. glancing from the distant end of the alley back down to the crumpled pile of torn clothes and hair lying there on top of her shoes, she feels a hot surge of energy, snapping her awake from the foggy pace of the previous three hours.
“c’mon, get up!” she grabbed the arm closest to her and lifted the boy up so hard and fast that it was kind of a wonder the limb didn’t break right off.
without another word, they both quickly spun in the opposite direction and sped off so quickly – the concrete metaphorically bending and twisting beneath their feet. the pair in hunt only took this as a welcome challenge – in true form, the chase seemed more enjoyable than the catch.

twisting and dodging between cars and auto-pods parked haphazardly along 27th, they sprint, her mind racing to quickly evaluate the situation and analyze their most likely option for probable escape. the whirring blur of surrounding brick and glass seems to close in on them the further they run. ahead, an automated garbage collector slowly snakes it’s way down toward the intersection. she can feel the tailing threat closing in.

peering up across the intersection in mid-stride, she spies the rusty ladder of an old fire escape drooping lazily within reach. if they could just make it there, hop the dumpster, climb up and maybe pull the ladder up behind them, this whole thing would be over. the damn kids would lose interest and this little shit would be safe. and if they continue to pursue, at least she’d have the upper ground.
at least in theory.
clutching the tiny paw of the boy even tighter, feeling her chewed-up nails dig into his sweaty palm, she tugs him toward the intersection.

for what seems like an eternity they continue to sprint, her bag rhythmically jostling against her hip. the garbage collector clanks and buzzes with the satisfactory sound of emptying the final disposal can of the block. despite the muffle of the wind rushing around her, the sounds feel so alive.

just a few more seconds now…

Illustrations by Eric Stine

And so Lily was the only one willing to go with Angela when she said she wanted to explore, look for survivors, and photograph the world that everyone else had left behind. “We’ll be back before winter, don’t worry,” Angela said, as if this wasn’t the biggest adventure of her life. “Of course,” mumbled Lily, trying to remember why she had agreed to go and wondering if there was any graceful way of backing out.

They were six weeks in and the RV had finally broken down. It had been brand new, right off the lot. Angela had turned the one bedroom into a darkroom and the two ladies spent the better part of two days mounting a snowplow to the front of the RV. They drove slowly at first, shoving cars gently off the highway, but after a few weeks, the reality of their situation set in and they started having fun, making a game of it, seeing how far they could fling the cars that lay in their path.

It didn’t take Lily long to fall in love with her friend. She had never been interested in women before, but she had also never carried a hunting knife on her hip before. Everything was changing. And then everything changed again with the failing of the RV.

It didn’t come as a complete surprise when the engine refused to fire up that morning. It seemed like more and more of the things they had taken for granted had been failing. First it was the developing chemicals in the darkroom. They just wouldn’t do what they were supposed to do. Angela found some fresh stock in a small camera store, but that went bad within a few days. Then it was the rifle shells. At first, only one out of every forty or so misfired, then it was one of thirty, a before too long, it was every other. Now they were lucky to find any at all that worked. Then the RV died. Their home. Their fortress. Gone.

The only sign over the last two weeks that she was upset was the occasional missed photo op. Once they were walking along a highway in what had once been Illinois and they saw a white, picturesque, two-story farmhouse with an airplane sticking out of it. It was as if a naughty giant had planted it there, it was so perfect. Angela just stared at it and gritted her teeth. “THAT’S they very thing I came out here to shoot. Abandoned momentum.”

Lily felt rather useless the entire time they had been living out of the RV. But now that they were traveling on foot and camping under the stars, she felt that she had something to offer. Her father had always wanted a son, but was not at all disappointed that his only child, a girl, had taken to the outdoors as naturally as any boy. She could fish and she could build a fire. She could even build a very passable shelter out of a few sticks, some rope and a tarp. Angela’s approval was worth the nasty insults she had received from her more feminine peers as she was growing up.

A month after abandoning the RV, Lily and Angela were sitting on opposite sides of the fire, having just given up on a rather silly argument. It was an unavoidable hazard when traveling great distances with another person. Three perch lay in the remains of a smaller fire a few feet away, inching their way toward perfection. Lily leaned over the perch to turn and season them. Over her shoulder, in an attempt to put their argument behind them, she said, “I don’t know why I never cooked like this before. Just the thought of fast-food makes my stomach churn.” Angela made a gagging noise. Lily laughed but when she looked up her smile fell away and her blood turned to ice. Angela wasn’t joking around. The noise she had made was sincere. Lily watched, frozen, as something thick and dark sprayed a stain across the front of Angela’s shirt. Blood was cascading from her throat.

“Angela? ANGELA!” Lily reached her friend in time to catch her as she fell sideways. She pressed her hands to the cut, which was deep and stretched from one side of Angela’s throat to the other, but it was no use. Angela gasped and choked and finally closed her eyes and was gone. Lily knelt over her friend, shaking. Blood dripped from her fingers and the perch continued to sizzle in their embers. Something rustled in the shadows at the firelight’s edge. Lily’s hand went immediately to her knife, but as she pulled it from its sheath, it slipped from her bloody grasp. As she leaned over her friend’s body to recover the knife, she heard heavy footsteps pounding across the packed dirt, racing away into the night.

A combination of grief, rage, and confusion twisted inside her belly. The smell of blood, human waste, and burned fish filled the air. She did not sleep. When the sun rose, Lily began collecting rocks from the riverside, as big as she could carry. She wrapped Angela in a blanket and built a rough cairn over her body. By the time she had finished, it was late afternoon. Nevertheless, she packed what she needed into her knapsack and set off in the direction of what she now thought of as home.

In the dying light of the day a mournful figure stood beside Angela’s grave and wept even more bitterly than Lily had.

Illustrations by Nate Utesch

In two and a half hours

Charles Keller will be crushed

between the driver’s seat and dashboard

of a Monte Carlo he was planning on trading in

for an electric Leaf.

He’ll burst open in the pleasant night air

and spread over the engine block like hot apple pie.

How will he be remembered?

By the retired geologist who bought the last round

and poured him into his jacket

he’ll be toasted as the one who never quite returned to earth

from his final mission to the stars.

For the unlucky lady who twisted him around the bar

he’ll be one of the good ones who got away.

To the daughter who turned a cold shoulder

he’ll skip silently into a low orbit.

And for the family of the boy who borrowed his dad’s big Buick

and promised to be home by nine

he’ll be forever cursed as the Astronaut Junkie

who drilled a hole in the universe

the night he broke their baby in two.

Poor Charles Keller.

Poor poor Charles Keller.

Illustration by Aaron Scamihorn

Purple Halves is nearly upon us! We took some photos as the first of the sheets for the “Red Book” came off the press. Sadly, the photos here represent only a fraction of the work being printed in Issue 2, but it wouldn’t be much of a teaser otherwise!

If you’ve been anywhere on the tubes of the interweb recently, hopefully you’ve been introduced to the Lancaster, PA based illustrator/designer, Scotty Reifsnyder. We recently stumbled upon his new self-initiated letterpress project, “Heroes of Folk” and have been smitten with his work ever since. His attention to detail is top-notch. Quirky geometric shapes and juxtaposed figures, cobbled together in just the right way to create a level of stylization that still seems to not lack any amount of emotion. They’re gorgeous to say the least. He was kind enough to answer a few questions as we picked his brain on the backstory for this incredible collection.

My biggest influence for this series was my Dad. We’d talk about projects all the time he thought I should pursue. He always felt the best stories and heroes were already created. Having that seed planted in my mind I thought it would be a fun challenge to kind of put my own spin on classic characters of Americana Folklore. My father had a great collection of old country and folk records that really helped me envision an old American aesthetic. Some select songs that were about mythical/folk heroes were tunes like the Wellington’s Davy Crocket, Jimmy Dean’s Big Bad John, Roger Miller’s Oo-Dee-Lally, & of course Johnny Cash’s John Henry from his Folsom City Blues Album. I would listen to this music while illustrating. Tried to match the timeless quality and texture the music seemed to have in these cards.

Sure it’s always sketch, sketch and then sketch again. I like to refine my sketches quite a bit before I move on to the computer. I also like to work with pencils, charcoal & watercolors. It assures a nice looseness and movement to them I just can’t replicate on the Mac.

I contacted the owner/creative director of Two Paper Dolls Vanessa Kreckle last Spring and explained to her what I wanted to do and right away she was pretty excited. Vanessa is passionate about design and illustration so she was on board right away. Once I had a few cards designed I headed down to their shop and was introduced to head pressman Scott McClelland. Scott and I had to stay in close communication to ensure the prints were right. This was one of the most complicated letterpress jobs he ever did and it was my first stab at the letterpress medium so it took some trial and error on both our parts. They say your work is only as good as it prints and without Scott’s assistance these wouldn’t have turned out nearly as strong.

It was pretty daunting. I had an hour commute via Amtrack train at the time so I was able to get allot done on the way to work & coming home but after doing a 10-12 hour day of illustrating in another style it was mentally tiring. My wife and I just had our first child this year too so that added to the fatigue. Still after I finished the first two Heroes I knew this series had potential to be something special and that always gave me extra motivation to work into the night. Headcase has it’s own amazing aesthetic and style to it so to work on something in my own personal style was exciting.

I was 5 years old and my Dad took my brother Eric and I to see Star Wars. Like every other kid who saw that film for the first time I thought it was the most visually stunning thing I had ever seen. It inspired me to constantly draw Light Sabers duels and Storm Trooper battalions much to my teachers dismay. My work would eventually evolve from comic book style storyboards and I would find a real affinity for American Modern designers and Illustrators of the 1950s and 60s the likes of Saul Bass, Jim Flora, Andy Warhol, Paul Rand and Alvin Lustig.

It was with the Bailey Design Group outside of Philadelphia. A small branding and packaging firm. After working there for 3 very long years of doing work I’m not really proud of so I applied to graduate school graduated and got a job with my mentor and former instructor Paul Kepple at Headcase Design. The experience at Bailey did teach me allot but most importantly I became proficient in Illustrator and using the pen tool. Working with Paul taught me so much in the way of refining a object to it’s simplest form and almost making a piece of art iconic which is really what most illustration of the early 50s and 60s strived to do.

Yes. I got my BFA in Illustration and design from Kutztown University in beautiful a quaint town of Kutztown, Pennsylvania. Cool miscellaneous fact about Kutztown is that the great artist Keith Haring was born there. I worked in the field for a few years and then went back to get my MFA in Graphic and Interactive Design from Tyler School of Art. It was at Tyler I really focused on a developing a personal illustration aesthetic. It’ s the same school the turned out such great Illustrator/designers the likes of Paul Kepple of Headcase Design, The Heads of State, Jessica Hische and Jeremy Holmes of Mutt Ink.

No heroes but I had started sketching on some Villains of Folk. Hoping to get started on that next year.

Annie Oakley. She was real person born Phoebe Ann Mosey who in her own way did allot to change men’s perception of women in that day. Life was brutal especially for women in her time. I think the fact she could kill a man 100 yards away with a rifle earned their respect. Women’s lib prairie style I guess. That is cool.

Animal inspired alphabet letterpress cards.

What’s in your music playing device of choice at the moment?

My laptop tuned to Pandora. Pixies station never disappoints:)

You can (and should) purchase cards from the “Heroes of Folk” collection here. Scotty also dribbbles…so be on the lookout for new work including the alphabet series and hopefully soon enough, “The Villains of Folk.”

]]> http://blog.rocious.com/2010/11/the-heroes-of-folk-interview-with-scotty-reifsnyder/feed/ 3 http://blog.rocious.com/2010/11/when-the-pocket-collapses/ http://blog.rocious.com/2010/11/when-the-pocket-collapses/#comments Sat, 13 Nov 2010 13:49:31 +0000 Jason http://blog.rocious.com/?p=1270 http://frcio.us/3aFC

By the time Alex realized the ball the neighbor dogs were playing with was not a ball at all but Mr. Singh’s toy poodle Tiddlewinx, it was too late. The dogs had already popped Tiddlewinx’s head free from his body and were gnawing at his matted skull. Alex froze, failing to notice the glistening trail that ran like a rope up the busted sidewalk to Mr. Singh’s house. The dogs had dragged poor Tiddlewinx half way down the block to the tall grass of their yard and settled under one of the neighborhood’s last remaining Elm trees to finish the job. This is why he shouldn’t come home from work early, Alex thought. Ever.

Studying the flower bed that had gone to seed, Alex concentrated on his breathing; flat, lifeless breaths that stretched out over the yard and made him feel small. After a few long moments, the sounds of the neighborhood slowed down till they were indistinguishable from the throbbing of blood that beat through his veins.

In a split second the scene snapped into focus: Mr. Singh running screaming down the street in his cover-alls; several neighbor ladies opening their front doors to see what was the matter; and those two dogs rolling that ball around with their long brown paws. All down the block, people emerged from their front doors, mostly housewives, moms and kids of all shapes and sizes. The late afternoon sky was still a hazy blue as sunlight filtered through crispy orange leaves and the neighborhood glowed like a magical kingdom from some old fantastic book.

Mr. Singh ran towards Alex and the yard where the dogs had ripped his dear friend apart. “Bastards!” he yelled. “You evil fucking bastards!” Several by-standers cried out to Mr. Singh from their porches, yelling at him to stay back for Christ’s sake, but it was no use. He continued down the street speaking in broken, half Pakistani, half English phrases bent on exacting some kind of ancient revenge.

The neighborlady Mrs. Carner snatched up her youngest and held his face close to her chest as soon as she realized what the fuss was all about. Alex motioned with his hand for them to come over, though the gesture was completely lost on her and she turned and disappeared into her house with a snap of the screen door.

Ordinarily, Alex would have risen to this sort of occasion. He’d have some answers, knowing exactly what needed doing. Instead, he couldn’t help feeling nothing. The world rushed past him and there was nothing to do but watch it go by in all its brilliant colors. Even this, Alex thought, was out of control, nothing to do but watch.

Despite what he’d been told by family and friends in recent months, he understood that for the most part, there was nothing to be learned from the things that caused so much pain. Just put a little something away for yourself and move on. Take this dog for example, he thought. What was to be extrapolated from Tiddlewinx’s loose furry face? Wasn’t this the way the world worked? That’s just the way it goes.

Tough shit, dog.

Suddenly aware of the bulging file folder under his arm, Alex ducked into the house to stow his work under the staircase, then returned to the porch. The street had filled up with squad cars and a van with two men who were both white and wore blue baseball caps with an embroidered gold insignia. The van itself was long and bright like some cosmic tampon and outfitted with several doors and compartments that were accessible from the outside. Mrs. Carner must have called Animal Control, Alex assumed.

Still more sirens could be heard echoing down the tree-lined corridors until they were everywhere at once, a constant stream of sound swirling in the wind. Without thinking too much about it, Alex shifted his weight onto his left foot and let one rip — a real whopper that caused him to crack a smile. The Carner boy turned to look at him from the next door porch. Alex winked and waved at the kid, then re-fixed his gaze on the men in the white van readying themselves for the task at hand.

One of the officers looked to be a bodybuilder, with sleeves rolled up tight revealing his substantial girth, while the other officer was much squattier, with softer arms that were covered all the way down to his elbow. Together, they donned helmets and armed themselves with two long and robust metal poles that had a noose on either end. The men looked a little silly and out of place. This was a neighborhood after all. Children played football and street hockey where these armed men now stood.

As the officers scurried through several of the compartments, making a few last minute adjustments, and several announcements about standing back and giving them room, their badges flashed with sunlight. Alex scanned the scene for Mr. Singh, thinking he may have thrown himself in harm’s way. He was relieved to spot him up the street a few houses sitting in the back seat of a squad car where a red-headed policewoman was trying to calm him down.

The van partially obscured Alex’s view of the two dogs, so he walked to the edge of his porch where he could see past the hood. Alex and his wife used to have a white Chevy just like it. They’d inherited it from her parents who’d called it a conversion van. Alex jokingly referred to it as the Albino Sex Machine. He and his wife had once taken it all the way to Florida and camped in it for an entire week where it rained cats and dogs, though he wasn’t thinking about that now.

Instead, he watched the officers perform their well-choreographed moves and admired their technique and steeliness in the face of such danger. Having secured the area, the taller, more muscular officer worked the scene methodically, being careful to mimic the squattier officer step for step. Each man moved to the opposite side of the yard, keeping the dogs equidistant from the other. You could hear them talking gently, hypnotically, as they extended their nooses. Sensing the sudden change in pressure, the dogs stopped their gnawing and began to rear up on their haunches.

Without hesitating, the two officers lunged and snatched the dogs by their thick necks. Like that they were on the line and kicking ferociously, unfurling a barrage of corrosive barks and growls the likes of which Alex had never heard before. In fact, the whole neighborhood could hear them, because except for the hostile canine strains, the street had become as quiet as a frozen lake.

With little effort, the men hoisted the dogs into the back of the van one by one. Only Tiddlewinx still remained in the yard, and it was all the red-headed policewoman could do to keep Mr. Singh away.

Still hanging off the edge of his porch, Alex was struck with an urge to sit down. It was as if the sky had clouded over, then cleared up again and the dog men were not men at all, rather tiny bushes, and the van in the street melted away into a puddle of cool blue water. And for that brief moment in time, he was enchanted by his own failures. Through half-opened eyes, Alex could almost see to the other side of the block, where the houses got a little bigger and he watched as the world gave a little and began to bend around him for a change. And for the time being, it didn’t seem that bad. Not that bad at all.

Illustration by David Huyck

No one combines beautiful design, typography and longboarding as well as Buddy Carr Skateboards. This company first caught our eye a few years ago with the launch of the Hello deck featuring shape and graphics designed by Antonio Carusone, creator of TheGridSystem.org and Aisleone.net. Since then, two more decks have been produced from the collaboration between Buddy and Antonio — including the stunning L’Esigenza Della Velocitá (Italian for “Need for Speed”) we featured a few months ago. We were intrigued with the partnership between Antonio and Buddy — two people who, at first glance, seem to be very different. Not only do they live across the country from one another, but they’ve never even met. So we asked them if they’d answer a few questions for Ferocious about how their partnership came about and their process for producing some of the most beautiful, unique skateboards on the market.

Buddy: I have always had keen interest in type and numbers and had been doing some research one day and stumbled upon Antonio’s site (aisleone.net) I emailed Antonio asking him if he knew of someone who might want to do some skateboard graphics for the brand i wanted to launch. He replied and said he would love to do something and that’s how it started and how it continues.

Antonio: Buddy and I met through email and actually we haven’t met in person yet. Buddy was looking for a designer to collaborate with and he sent me an email and explained what he wanted to achieve. I knew it was something I wanted to be a part of, and since I skated while growing up, it was a logical match. I’ve always wanted to design graphics for skateboards and I’ve been able to finally do that with Buddy.

Antonio: I only designed the shape for the Hello skateboard, the others were designed by Buddy. Usually Buddy has an idea for a shape and he runs it by me with some high level ideas on what he wants to achieve with the board. From there I take the inspiration from Buddy and work off it. Usually we agree on a concept and then from there I go and put together some rough designs. The shape of the boards plays a large role in influencing the design. For example, Buddy explained to me the idea behind the shape of the 39 board, that it was inspired by classic surf boards. I knew immediately I wanted to create a 60s style graphic, but with a touch of some modern elements. Simple two-tone to compliment the shape. With the Velocita board, it was all about speed, even the shape of the board. We wanted it to resemble a race car, so we went with a classic race graphic. It’s a really collaborative effort which I love.

Buddy: Antonio did shape the Hello model, i allowed him to do the complete board from shape to tape to graphic. On the Thirty Nine and the Velocita i worked on a rough shape and then worked with our sales manager to finalize them both. Our upcoming pool / park model is my shape, it is the exact board i ride and one that i shaped myself, complete with cnc grooves for better grip on certain maneuvers.

When it come to graphics i have a rough idea in mind that i share with Antonio and he elaborates from there.I like to think that i give him a lot of freedom,Antonio is an expert in his field therefore i trust his decisions and direction. There are certain things he has wanted to do but from a production standpoint i have not been able to do some of them …yet.

The brand is 13 months old, we are still laying foundation bricks, growing at a manageable pace and taking time to produce quality products that speak to people. When I have customers requesting touch up paint for their skateboards I know then we have created something special.

Antonio: When Buddy first contact me he explained that he wanted to do something that hasn’t been done before in the skate industry. There really isn’t a company out there that takes the simple approach to the aesthetics. Keeping the brand simple and clean was definitely intentional and we hope to build on that.

Buddy: I messed around with some ideas several years ago with a couple different artist and realized that the only way to stand out was to be different. Deep down I knew this all along. Thankfully I stumbled upon Antonio and now we are making some truly remarkable products that stand apart.

Antonio: That’s mainly up to Buddy, but if we do another run we do try to change something with the graphic to make the second run unique from the first. For example for the second run of the Hello board I did a new graphic treatment.

Buddy: Yep, and as demand grows so do our production runs.

Antonio: For the most part, Buddy leaves the graphics up to me. He definitely has input, but for the most part I get creative freedom which is great. For the Hello and 39 boards I used a very simple grid. For the Velocita, I wanted to try the golden ratio for kicks and it actually worked really well. It definitely helped with the angle of the stripes and the location of the number circle.

Antonio: The biggest challenge for me is the limited canvas you have to work with. The tight conditions can easily force you into a bad composition, making the design feel cramped. I’ve found that having elements bleed off gives a sense of openness and created interesting compositions. Plus, you have to take into consideration the truck placement and that portions of the graphic will be covered by them.

Buddy: From the start I wanted something super clean, something that stood apart. Type driven graphics with a modern feel. I like to think not only are our products evolving but are graphics as well.

Buddy: I have always ridden decks with shape, to mea skateboard should have a look and have a shape. The board shape plus the graphic is what makes the product whole. The shape should have function as well as some flair. The goal is to offer an alternative to whats currently out there.

Buddy: Next up is the actual pool deck I use. I’ve made some in past (with another artist) but wasn’t happy with the graphic and although it sold okay i knew i wanted it to look completely different than how it did. Now with a few discussion as far as graphic direction Antonio is once again creating something stunning. We should have this one ready to roll out soon.The relationship Antonio and I have is really unique. He and I are 3500 miles apart, we have never met nor has there ever been a phone call,all communication, every idea is digital.A really unique working experiment that is producing truly remarkable products.

As a dental hygienist, my wife comes home covered with strange stories about the things people say when they’re stuck in a chair. Mostly, it’s anecdotal evidence of the three Ds: Divorce, Disease and Dough. I listen intently, nodding my nose in anticipation of the good parts (it’s crazy what people will share with strangers). Occasionally, she’ll begin in such a way that makes me sit a little taller, knowing we’re in for a huskier evening of dinner-talk. Last night was one of those days. Staring at a bowl of Buckshot Gumbo, she put down her spoon, carefully turned the napkin over in her lap and asked me if I wanted to hear a weird story about her day. You could have planted peas in the creases of my forehead. It was obvious: things were about to get interesting.

8:17 am // “THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN CROWN.”

“At eight this morning,” my wife (let’s call her Robyn) began, “the lab called to tell us Greg’s crown was ready. Greg’s a funny guy. 55 years old, drives a bus. Anyway, Dr. Dentist said he’d pick it up this afternoon.

Ten minutes later, the phone rang again. It was Greg’s son calling to tell us Greg had been killed by a truck on Sunday evening.”

A thin layer of oil began to swim on the surface of our gumbo as Robyn continued. “Dr. Dentist asked if he’d like to come by some time and get his father’s gold crown. Greg had died with one of our temporaries in his mouth,” she clarified for my sake.

“What did he say?” I asked racing a piece of shrimp around the edge of the bowl. “I mean, is that a weird thing to ask?”

Despite the obvious awkwardness of the pending exchange, Robyn explained there was really no other way around it. “It’s his. He already paid for it — the lab isn’t going to refund the money for a gold crown. And, of course, we can’t keep it.”

“I guess not, no. I just never thought it about it is all.”

Watching Robyn’s neck run red, it struck me how intimate a temporary crown could make a situation like this — intimate and incomplete in a way that can only make your life seem one or two steps closer to some invisible edge.

Our conversation tacked across the obvious until we found ourselves inside something new again, imagining Greg’s son coming to the office to retrieve his father’s tooth, what they’d say, and what he’d do with the damn thing once he got it home.

Where do you store the old man’s molar, anyway?

“It’s gold,” Robyn replied holding her chin. “He could melt it down and sell it if he—”

“I bet he doesn’t show,” I interrupted. “I wouldn’t.”

11:30 am // “WHILE VISIONS OF SUGAR PLUMS DANCED IN THEIR HEADS.”

“Just before lunch,” Robyn continued. “We saw the mother of the super-smart family I’m always telling you about.”

I knew instantly to whom she was referring; The Family had been the topic of many dinner-talks in the past. Like the night I grilled salmon and learned about how their 19-year daughter had dropped out of Duke’s Biomedical Engineering master’s program because she didn’t feel challenged by the coursework despite being five years younger than everyone in her classes. Or the weekend I broke out the tajine to roast a lamb shank and listened to Robyn tell me about how the husband comes home from work every night and takes his blind neighbor running with him, rain or shine. Or the day we had breakfast for dinner and Robyn told me about a devastating letter the office had received from the mother of this Glass-ian clan, explaining how the 23-year-old son— the one with cerebral palsy — had died in his sleep waiting for Christmas morning to arrive.

Imagine that.

“I haven’t seen mom since . . . it . . . happened,” Robyn said, “so when I went out to the lobby to bring her back for her eleven o’clock, I already had the x-ray jacket in my hands knowing I wouldn’t be able to hold it in once I saw her. I thought if I could just get her back to the x-ray room quickly, I’d make it. As soon as I saw her, we both just burst into tears.”

The mother told Robyn how hard the past few months had been. About how on Christmas morning, when The Family found him in his bed, the police had to be called to investigate since it was a home death. The mother went on about how the cops spent the morning digging around his room and looking in the basement for something they never found.

While neighbors were busy exchanging gifts and swiping stories, The Family was quietly trying to re-assemble the puzzle of their life that was broken by a young man who couldn’t lift a finger — who just laid in his bed next to a tiny Christmas tree he’d decorated himself.

“I’ve been volunteering for the past month,” the mother told Robyn, “just to stay out of the house. When I’m at home, I have this strange feeling like I’m waiting for someone to come through the front door any minute. Hours can go by. You knew him. He wouldn’t have wanted me to just sit around and rot. We were always going places together. Running errands, shopping.”

Robyn pushed her bowl to the corner of her placemat and told me about the last time she had seen the son alive. It was November. The mother had scheduled a cleaning for all five kids — blocked out the whole afternoon. At one o’clock sharp, The Family’s white van pulled up. One by one, they filed out before the mother leaned in and hefted her oldest son onto her thick shoulders, then carried him up the short flight of steps and into the office where she plopped him down onto one of the sofas in front of Judge Judy.

“She was always picking him up and getting him out of the house. It’s hard to imagine,” Robyn added, “how lost she’ll be with no one to carry.”

4:00 pm // “JUST START AT THE BEGINNING AND TELL ME EVERYTHING.”

“Our last patient of the day was a 92-year-old woman who still has all of her teeth—”

“Seriously?!”

“—she’s really sharp. Always talking about food. At least she used to.”

Passing me bread wrapped in an orange napkin, Robyn explained that the woman’s husband had suffered a stroke last November. Before the ambulance ever made it to the house, he was gone. That was six months ago. The nonagenarian widow — who’d been chauffeured to her appointment today by her son who was wearing a camouflage t-shirt that stretched tight across his belly and said “HOOKED ON QUACK” — was merely a shadow of her formal self.

Once the widow was seated in the chair, she sad she wasn’t sure how old she was. Looking at the chart, Robyn said, “Let’s see, it says here you were born in 1918. That means you’re 92 years old.”

The widow looked up with watery, glassy eyes and slowly repeated what she’d heard, “I was born, in 1918. I am 92 years old.”

Moments later, when the dental assistant popped in to say hi, the widow repeated it again, “I was born, in 1918. I am 92 years old.”

At the end of the appointment, Dr. Dentist came in and gently patted her on the arm, telling her how good it was to see her again. The widow lifted her left shoulder off the chair just enough to get a better look at the doctor and quietly whispered, “I was born, in 1918. I am 92 years old. I was born…in 1918.”

10:15 pm // “INCH BY INCH.”

Gathering up the plates and piling everything onto one placemat, Robyn pushed her chair away from the table and shot a giant hole in the conversation by announcing that she didn’t want to grow old, how she’d rather die young. I blew out the remaining candles, then followed her into the kitchen, where I poured myself a tall glass of milk. Together, we headed upstairs to watch a few minutes of TV before going to bed, feeling around for some sign of that invisible edge.

Illustrations by Aaron Scamihorn

I don’t quite remember the catalyst which prompted me to visit the Blogspot home of Emi Lenox’s diary comics, but I do remember that it took me about 3 hours that night to finish reading every single post she had ever put up. I was completely dumbfounded by the way she effortlessly countered the mundane aspects of every day life with a whimsy and joy that was so much more than just “cute;” it is infectious and honest and completely wonderful. Taking a step back and looking at her work as a whole, one can find certain themes and movements like the stark honesty and literal depictions from her id, including her love for music, her hatred for bears, her meticulous money-watching, her cravings for breakfast burritos, and her day-to-day toiling at her day job. On the other hand, interspersed throughout her daily updates are epic tomes of love and loss crammed into single panels filled with armies of cats commanded by Miss Lenox herself in her search for companionship. These metaphorical asides are shrouded in simplicity in order to keep the details of her love life out from under the internet’s scalpel, but they are certainly universal and endearing in the same way a truly great pop song gets even the hippest of toes tapping. Back in December I did a post about the things that excited me about comics and Emi was right up there. For those that don’t remember:

The only web-comic of my list is the product of one of the best comic artists you’ve never heard of (I  hate saying that, but I totally believe it), but that won’t be the case for long. Emi Lenox has been churning out this web-comic (and 3 other sites) for the past few years and her work is nothing short of incredible. She has interned for some of the biggest names in the business in Portland all while honing her craft and I would not be surprised if her output for 2010 (including a piece in the new Pop Gun) puts her on everyone’s “Best Of” lists for next year. Her voice is original and fresh, her style is broad and fantastic, and everything from her lines to her type styles hint at her future notoriety.

You might as well just call me Nostradamus because just last week it was announced that the mighty Image Comics will be releasing a 400-page collection of her work. Needless to say, we were more than a little excited that she took some time out of her busy, busy schedule to sit down and talk with us.

I first got into comics because of my mother and brother. Through my brother, I discovered X-Men and Batman and through my mother, various manga such as Sazaesan and Chibi Maruko. I always loved drawing and comics became a hobby of mine in junior high and high school. For the longest time, I knew I wanted comics to be part of my life somehow and at first I thought it was through production which is why I interned for Top Shelf. I didn’t think it was possible for me to get anywhere with my art and I had the fear that I wouldn’t enjoy it if I depended on it for income. It wasn’t until the last year that I realized I belonged behind the drawing table.

There are moments where it is strange. For instance, when I want to tell someone about something that had happened and then they cut me off because they already knew about it from the comic! But since I hide anything super personal in my metaphors, I don’t find it too strange! But now that it will be released as a GN, I’m getting a bit more nervous. I ADMIT IT.

I’ve recently been given a disc of a ton of new stuff. Of these new bands, I’ve taken a liking to Chad VanGaalen (The song Willow Tree in particular). I will always have a love for acoustic guitar and the banjo. But I seem to still go back to the tunes I have been listening to for the past 10 years. Like Nada Surf, Jimmy Eat World, SuperDrag etc. I think there is just a familiarity to it and it feels like home.

I would have to say the majority of creators I have met are wonderfully nice! I met Brandon Graham (King City) at ECCC earlier this year and he was so nice, he ran across the street from the cafe we were at to pick me up some medicine for my headache! The Allreds (Madman) and Jeff Lemire (Sweet Tooth, Essex County) are some of the most kind and generous folks out there. But I swear, everyone I have met are so friendly, it makes me feel lucky to be part of a community like this!

It’s a bit of both actually. Sometimes when I’m dilly-dallying I’ll vision what a panel would look like for something that just happened and then make a note of it. Other times (which is most), I sit at my day job and make thumbs for each day and note what happened that day. I then choose out of the list which ones to draw and that’s that! I try to remember to bring with me a little notebook everywhere to take notes. I’m not shy to admit I don’t have the best memory. That’s partly why EmiTown started. A personal diary where I can remember certain things that happened. I did that since high school actually. If there was a moment I never want to forget, I drew it out in a scribble. I’ve read back through EmiTown before and I’ve already forgot a lot of the things I drew. I like to blame my alcohol consumption in my early twenties for my terrible memory. Don’t drink too much, kids!!!!

I currently draw each strip in a page of a sketchbook with a pentel pocket brush pen. One of those nice hardback sketchbooks with a nice little ribbon bookmark. It’s nice because it’s a bound book to keep forever but lately I’ve been debating working on paper that’s a larger size. I mean, I’m literally drawing on paper that’s smaller than standard letter size. I think I could get more detail and “panels” on a larger piece of paper…I’ve also been debating that if I move to larger paper, to start using brush instead of the brush pen. The downsides to that is that it would be more timely since I don’t have a lot of experience with brush…PLUS the ink takes longer to dry! AND the materials would be more costly. I think I’ll stick to the sketchbooks. I’m currently on 7th sketchbook. Clearly, I tone the comic in photoshop with a wacom tablet and my laptop. But that’s about it for computer involvement other than editing my terrible grammar and spelling errors!

Well, I’m not quite sure what’s going on with Popgun but whatever I do churn out for it will be printed either there or in a mini for next year! Projects that I can mention? Well, now it has been announced that EmiTown will be collected by Image! It will be a year’s worth totaling 400 pages. It will basically start the month I started using the brush pen. I can mention that I plan on having a completely new line of minis for next year. I’m retiring everything that was printed this year. These are plans and I’m hoping to complete them but I want to have a new Perfecting Loneliness mini, a mini with short stories about heroes, another about relationships (it’s my niche!), a first issue of an actual story (which I plan to have 5 issues)! That’s a lot to do but I think I can do it! I have a couple OGN ideas that I have been talking to some publishers about. So there are things for the future, fret not!

I don’t know if I’d say that there is more interest or rather that the internet makes it more apparent of all the cartoonists out there looking for their place in the comics world. And how could that ever be a bad thing?

Some of the first comics that I first fell in love with was ElfQuest, Dragon Ball, and Bone when I was a teenager. Blankets, Jimmy Corrigan, Lost at Sea, and Optic Nerve back in my early twenties. Those really hold a dear place in my heart as  being the inspirations of what I wanted to do with life. Currently, I’ve been really digging King City, Fables, Asterios Polyp,and Demo. I try to pick up new titles to keep checking out different styles to keep me inspired whenever I have the dollas.

You know, I can’t say for sure. That question to me is like, “Why avacados?”. I just love them! Maybe it’s because I think more naturally through pictures than I do with words? I don’t know but I love comics to death and I don’t think it’s a love that will ever go away.

Many thanks to Emi for being a good sport with everything! Make sure to go get lost in EmiTown and anxiously await the collected edition that will be coming out with Image Comics this fall!

(By the way, it is a HEINOUS CRIME that this was left out of the Monsters and Dames book. Seriously heinous and nearly unforgivable.)

Meg is a super talented illustrator from Phoenix, AZ who we’ve been gushing over for quite a while. You may have seen her work in publications like Jamie Magazine, Paste Magazine, Seattle Metropolitan, Las Vegas Weekly, and a whole slew of others. She was kind enough to answer a few questions about a project she started earlier this year called “Picture Book Report.” It’s a monthly showcase of illustrations inspired by the text from its contributors’ favorite books. Fifteen illustrators—fifteen books—three weeks each month for the whole year. Make sure to check out the project and all the talent involved.

It started out just me on my lonesome– then I started talking to friends and we started adding on members. I think originally I was just shooting for ten, but I invited quite a few people and some agreed later than I expected, or they told their friends and they wanted in, so it kept growing, and then I capped it at fifteen to make it easy to update. I knew giving each person their own post day was good to keep the blog active, and there are always three full weeks in every month so fifteen works well. Technically with the roster changes it’s been more like eighteen, I think. It would be amazing to have a ton of people posting every day, but it’s tricky enough trying to ensure just fifteen people can produce work regularly!

It was a little tricky at first, but I’ve been doing okay with it. The bigger issue at play is people’s schedules–given how feast or famine this market can be, sometimes there are downtimes for illustrators and sometimes it’s remarkably busy and hard to fit a personal project in. Despite this, the work’s been stellar, even if some people have to delay or post less regularly. I may have bitten off more than I can chew in making this a yearlong project; but so far it’s still holding its own. More or less the project runs on its own, with only occasional nudging from me. I’m lucky to have a team of collaborators who love the blog and want to make their best work for it!

We were talking about doing it all throughout 2010– but we may have to define the confines of the project again. It’d be great to have a finished set of illustrations for everyone, but it’s hard to stick to a project like this for so long and also do any of the hundreds of other things our illustrators are working on! Still, we’re giving it our all until we’re feeling the urge to move onto something else.

Perhaps; the dreamer in me would love to take on another story, but there are a thousand other ideas floating in my head– I’d like to start working on a book of my own, for example. It’s definitely a possibility though. We’ll see what the future brings!

Thanks! Well… I think the scenes with the Cheshire Cat and the Queen will be good. I’m really looking forward to illustrating the Tea Party (which will be more of an environmental scene rather than close up) and the scene with the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon will be great. I doodled a little idea of the scene a few months ago that involved a giant skeletal seashell/coral kind of gazebo, and I think that’ll be really fun.

Everything and anything. If my eye happens upon it– be it an interesting color combination, a pattern, a motif– it’ll probably get worked in at some point. 

I drew as a kid, took some drawing classes, colored in library books, that sort of thing. I figured out illustration was for me in high school and then again in my junior year of college; but as my career evolves I’m also seeing a shift from working mostly in editorial work to trying to branch out into producing ideas of my own, falling back on my other love which is printmaking (namely screenprinting). So I’d say that I have little flashes of ‘Aha’ moments figuring out where my career is taking me.

Nothing new yet to share, but the other big project I curated was an art show in my hometown called Disconnect the Dots, in which I collaborated with thirty other illustrators and artists from around the country, from folks like GHOSTSHRIMP and Katy Horan. Half of the collaborators started a piece and half of them received a piece I started. It was ridiculously stressful, but a lot of fun to try and play with other creatives’ working styles. 

I hope to get to curate other projects and events down the line– for example, I’d like to produce an event for illustrators that is more in spirit with a comic convention than an expensive conference, I’m trying to put together a community printmaking studio, etc, etc. One of my recent realizations is that I’m actually not bad at getting people to come together and work together, so hopefully in my next phase of life I’ll be doing a lot more proactive work like this.

Overall, it’s been great. I’m so proud of my friends and love the work that’s coming out of it. Perhaps I’d be a little more conservative in the timeframe, but we’re all handling it like champs and making some stellar work– I just hope more people will take notice and scoop some of these people up. They make beautiful work, and I can’t wait to see what they produce in the future.

Check out the rest of the work and follow along as the year progresses – picturebookreport.com

So this 10-minute wall-painted animation blew our minds. We can’t imagine how long all these stop motion and hand-painted animations took to paint and photograph — especially the ones that span entire buildings. Honestly, we were asking ourselves as we watched it “Did they really do all that, or did they do it in post?”

Check out the video at blublu.org or artsh.it.

Press check! Went tremendously well and we took some photos of the press sheets we brought back. First few are of the un-folded cover. Why yes that is a metallic ink, thanks for asking.

Some classy iPhone photos…

As a bizarre introduction to his work, here’s a short motion graphics piece from Varnese’s portfolio called “My Desk is 8-Bit.”

Quoting Alex: “I recently found myself wondering what a video game might look like in the form of a stop motion animation. While a normal person’s response to such a question would of course be “who gives a shit?” I possess few of the qualities typically associated with normalcy and was irrevocably compelled to find out. This is the result.”

And we’ll leave you with the project that drew us to Alex Varnese in the first place. It’s titled, “Alt/1977: We Are Not Time Travelers.” It’s an exercise in not only Varnese’s classic gamut, but in advertisement. He’s taken some simple modern devices and reworked them through a series of 1977 advertisements. A first glance, you’d almost think you’ve seen them before. The faux wood—the oversized keys—the expanded serif decals. But in fact it’s an mp3 player, a laptop, a mobile phone and a handheld video game system.

Check out the full series here.