Considering the somewhat tenuous grasp on reality some of the folks that used to frequent the comic shop I worked in back in the 90s, tthis sounds a little dangerous at first, but once I realized that the odds are against this getting home usage anytime soon, I was able to properly enjoy the idea. WalkIn Comix is a project headed up by one Maribeth Black, and it’s exactly what the name implies. Take a stroll through the monitor-laden corridors of the exhibit, and you’re fully immersed in a graphic novel. It all sounds very cool, and I’d love to get the opportunity to check it out for myself.

WalkIn Comix is a graphic novel you can literally walk into — it’s printed on the walls, floor, and ceiling of a small set of labyrinthine rooms we built at the Tech. Talk about getting immersed in a book…

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If I only lived in NYC, I’d be going to see the Flux Factory’s Comix Ex Machina exhibit. Alas, I do not and therefoire, I shall not. But if you happen to be lucky enough to live within a respectable distance of the Long Island show, I encourage you to check it out as it looks to be potentially kick-ass.

If anyone does happen to go, I’d appreciate some sort of emailed impressions of the exhibit so I can post it here.

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If you live in New York (Andrew), you should take the time to visit the MoMA soon. They’re just starting a 13 film showcase of the work of Hayao Miyazaki, arguably one of the greatest animators to ever live. If you’ve never seen any of his work before, this sounds like a great excuse to introduce yourself to him. If you’ve never experienced Miyazaki’s films in a theater setting, you should check out at least My Neighbor Totoro, Porco Rosso or Spirited Away.

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From the always entertaining and hard to find Murray Roach.

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Deidre and I went for about an hour or so yesterday - looked like the show had a good turn out. The few things I did:

(1) Got a nifty sketch from Jeff Smith and he signed my “Complete Bone”. The coolest happening in the Jeff Smith line other than Jeff Smith himself - Chester Brown walked by and Jeff quit signing to ask Brown if could sign his copy of Louis Riel. It’s always neat to see a guy with Jeff Smith type talent gushing over another artist. Chester took the book and said “Mind if I take this and bring it back? I want to add something to it b/c it’s for you.” Jeff was part of the Scholastic booth and they was all types of promo materials for the the new coloured releases of Bone. It’s great to see a guy like Smith doing so well on something he obviously loves so much.

(2) Andy Runton rules. What a fantastic guy. My wife and I talked to him for probably 10 minutes, bought an Owly t-shirt, got a couple of copies of FCBD Owly and got Andy to draw sketches and sign both our Owly Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. I plan on sending him a note this week to get a commission or two done b/c he seemed excited at the prospect of doing one and was such a great guy. He really had some fantastic insight on the stories he was producing for Owly, and gave us one quote that will resonate with me for sometime; when my wife and I both said that the times where Owly gets sad were really heart-wrenching, his reply: “But Owly always gets sad!” It’s really a great testament to his abilities as an artist that you can have an emotional attachment to the stories so easily. He also had the prototype “stuffed Owly” that Top Shelf is going to mass produce in the summer. The story behind that? His mom sewed him the prototype and was just taking it to cons as part of his display until at one show he had to tell a little girl “Sorry, that’s not for sale” and it looked like it broke her heart. Mark my words - Runton will be the next Jeff Smith.

(3) Jim Mahfood also rules. He had a bunch of great stories and graciously drew me a “Jay & Silent Bob”, whose’s Oni Double Feature adventures first introduced me to Jim’s work. Looking through Mahfood’s original art it’s brilliant to see the use of blacks. Another great, great artist, no doubt.

Those were all the people I talked to and things I saw. It was my first experience at the TCAF and I’ll have to go back next year now that I’ve seen what it’s like. The creators all seemed so glad to be there because it wasn’t a convention setting - it was an art festival. From what I heard on the floor, the only mob of the week-end was for Jeff Smith (the guest of honour) and it was a very diverse crowd of people all looking for very diverse types of reading!

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After managing to almost miss it by screwing up the dates in my head, I finally made it to the “i am 8 bit” show in downtown LA over the weekend. The last few months have been a bit of a whirlwind for me, attending more shows than I have in the previous 5 years combined, and enjoying them all. “i am 8 bit” was no differnt than the others in that respect - thank god for the current surge in pop-art!

“i am 8 bit” is wrapping up it’s run this week, and while there were more than a few pieces that were really, really good (”Duck Hunter S. Thompson” being my personal favorite), the most impressive aspect of the show was the domination of the event by Nintendo and their creations. Sure, Pac-Man was totally representing, along with Q*Bert and Dig Dug, but it was Mario in his various incarnations that held reign over the exhibit.

“i am 8 bit” was conceived as an homage to all of the classic video games those of us who grew up in the 80s came to know and love. That it inadvertently almost became a shrine to the alter of Nintendo is a happy, if not totally surprising, accident. When I was growing up, I loved all of those 2-D arcade game characters, but it never dawned on me as it was happening that one company would end up commanding such a strong hold over the American, not to mention global, pop culture landscape. Indeed, among today’s video game companies, there isn’t anything like those heady days of yesteryear. Sure, HALO and GTA sell like mad, but how many people on the street actually know the names of the characters or plot points from these games? I’d place money that 2 out of 3 people in their twenties and thirties could identify Mario with no trouble. That’s some impressive stuff.

The show runs until Friday night of this week at Gallery 1988 on Melrose in LA. If you can’t make it, fear not for there will be a book coming out later this year that will collect all the pieces in the show. For now, you can click on Mario below to view a Flickr gallery of some of the pieces as captured on my crappy cell phone camera.

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This past weekend saw the opening of the b.b. birdy show at Chinatown LA’s premier vinyl figure store, Munky King. Previously on display in Chicago and moving shortly to Japan is an exhibit of about 140 customized figures by an impressive array of pop artists from Gary Baseman to Ragnar to Kozik to MAD.

The figures themselves stand somewhere between 3 and 4 inches tall for the most part, though one artist basically remade the figure as a foot and a half tall robo-behemoth looking thing. While a few looked like they were thrown together on the fly, the majority of the pieces on display were pretty damn cool. Some were painted-up versions of the basic b.b. birdy figs, while others were heavily modded pieces, almost unrecognizable from the source material. It’s really quite impressive that you can give 140 artists the same canvas and get over 140 highly individualized finished pieces. It’s shows like this and the recent MAD*L exhibit that illustrate just how flexible and viable vinyl figures are as an artform.

I managed to snap off a couple of dozen shots of the evening with my cameraphone, so the images are a little fuzzier than I’d prefer. Still, with the reggae bumping from the DJ’s van outside the storefront to the people crammed into the small-yet-comfortable store area, it was a good way to spend part of my Saturday evening. The show runs through June 4th, so if you’re in the area, drop by and check it out for yourself before it leaves the US for good.

Make with the click to view the entire photo gallery

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When I was in high school, my teeneage mind was consumed by girls, comics and skateboarding (not always in that order, I admit), and I spent hours and hours devouring whatever magazines I could find that would tell me about California’s skate scene. It wasn’t just the skaters and the fashion that sucked me in, it was the art too. The graffiti in the background of the photos was often more interesting to me than the moves being shot, and the decks - oh the decks!

For the last few years, I’ve been wanting to just buy skate decks and hang them on my walls - art without the hassle of frames. Haven’t quite gotten around to it just yet, but I’m sure I’ll start my collection shortly. Vancouver’s “Globe And Mail” recently covered the phenomenon of skateboarding’s development as a countercultural pop art phenomenon in a recent article, touching on the Z-Boys of Dogtown, Keith Haring, Basquiat and more. I think I’ll try to get to the Orange County exhibit in the next week or two.

Back in the seventies, when a scruffy crew of latchkey skate punks, later known as the Z-Boys of Dogtown, was growing up in the derelict grottos of West Los Angeles, no one thought of them as extreme athletes who would one day inspire a slew of art exhibits, their own major motion picture and a pop-culture phenomenon. These kids were hard-partying losers, a scary bunch of social misfits from broken homes, who appeared to be wasting their days by smoking pot, doodling on their skate decks and breaking into empty swimming pools across drought-stricken Southern California.

They were beautiful losers, no doubt, with their tanned bodies and flowing bleached-blond hair, executing the graceful leaps, dangerous spins and death-defying stunts that pushed skateboarding into a vertical sport. But they were losers, nonetheless.

Flash-forward 30 years. The underground has gone mainstream. Civic-sponsored skate parks are popping up on every corner from Moose Jaw to Manhattan, while Z-Boy memorabilia can be found in Happy Meals and on prestigious gallery walls. On June 3, Sony Pictures Entertainment will be releasing Lords of Dogtown, Hollywood’s take on the 2001 cult-classic documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, which won a slew of awards at the Sundance Film Festival and elsewhere. The film stars Emile Hirsch and Heath Ledger as the tough-talking teenager and beach-bum Svengali who invented the aggressive art of extreme skateboarding that turned an afternoon hobby into a business empire. It is being hyped with a touring Dogtown art show (which hit Whistler, B.C., and Vancouver last month) and a 34-city amateur skateboard competition, sponsored by Adidas, which rolls into both Toronto and Vancouver on Saturday.

Read the full article.

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A pair of artists in New Zealand are both using Spider-Man as a means to get their messages across, albeit in different mediums. In one show, Spidey is contemplating his own mortality in a sculpture by Stephen Birch while, down the street at another gallery, he’s aiding artist Oliver Bogle to express himself through graffiti.

Spider-Man stands tall, poised, even elegant in his spiderweb suit. The bright blue tights around his backside are a powder-blue colour rather more spectacular than the original. He is light on his feet but his hands are large. Here is our modern David transposed from Florence to Karangahape Rd.

He is confronted by evidence of mortality. He is eye-to-eye with an elderly, bearded, balding head which projects from the wall on the end of a hairy limb.

The effect is of fixed melancholy. The contrast between the two faces goes far beyond Pop Art to make a piece both striking and witty.

A Spider-Man leap takes you from one end of K Rd to the other for the Disrupt Gallery where there is, until May 12, an exhibition of graffiti art done in spray enamel by Oliver Bogle.

Spider-Man features again. The most lively, if not the most spectacular, painting in the show is Intercity Webslinger where Spider-Man, swinging from a rope, can in hand, is doing large graffiti lettering on a block wall.

Full article here.

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