Look, I’m going to try and display some restraint here. If I’m not careful, I could easily scare you away with the ocean of magniloquent praise swelling inside me. So let me be delicate in my wording– calm, cool and collected to help you understand the unparalleled beauty of Matthew Thurber‘s 1-800-Mice.

It’s an epic mystery about the moment in our future-history when human-tree marriage is on the cusp of social acceptance. An intersex mouse named Peace Punk roams the world seeking the entrance to Valhala, evading a trio of angry assassins through an underworld of never-ending hardcore festivals and viral video production palaces. A tightly wound mouse detective goes undercover amongst a pack of nihlistic terrorists, confronting his own criminality in the process. And a cog in the machine at 1-800-Mice (the world’s fastest courier service) learns the grisly truth behind a mysterious drug made of dead trees.

If that sounds like a lot, it is! There’s a whole Universe behind this story, and it feels like something dreamed by Henry Darger and Alajandro Jodorowsky after a night of getting stoned, prank-calling Marilyn Manson, and watching Monty Python. But don’t worry about keeping up with all the details: readers of 1-800-Mice will learn to truly appreciate a sudden nosedive into the surreal. Each panel says a lot, even when the narrative speaks in tongues.

Thurber’s particular poetry is a web of jokey stand-up observations, noirish voice-over, drifting existential questions, imaginary buzzwords, playful puns and casual dick jokes. He constructs a foreign language with familiar associations and unexpectedly deep capacity for humanity (even in interspecies characters). You’ll be reading a goofy exchange between a death cultist dentist and his vampiric assistant, and suddenly you’ll tap into a quiet sense of melancholy embedded within the panel. It’s an interplay that grants Thurber’s gonzo fantasy a surprising scope of emotional depth. Plus, heads explode, reality collapses, and you have a new message on MindBook.

1-800-Mice is published by the awesome PictureBox press, and it looks beautiful. The hardcover feeels really special, and it has pretty colors on it. Plus, there’s an endorsement from Matt Groening on the cover! Check it out at one of Thurber’s upcoming readings!

San Francisco: September 30th at 7:00pm – Escapist Comics (with Leslie Stein)
San Francisco: October 1-2 – Alternative Press Expo
Los Angeles: October 4th at 7:00pm – Family
Brooklyn: October 7 at 7:00pm – Desert Island
Brooklyn: October 20th at 7:00pm – Triple Canopy (with C.F.)

Mike Mills is one of my favorite multi-hyphenate creative people, and has been for a long time. Back in the era of my tidal obsession with Air’s Moon Safari, I read up everything I could on the band, and Mills– the designer who’d crafted their rad cover art. I watched as many of his music videos as I could track down with the middling assistance of dial-up internet and my primary pre-YouTube rad video source, the late great RES Magazine. Ever since then, Mike Mills’ creations– in print, feature filmmaking, documentary, graphic design and music video have only grown successively more and more awesome.

His latest endeavor is his most intimate and most emotionally evocative work yet, the film Beginners. It tells the story of a sad graphic designer (Ewan McGreggor) learning to love (Melanie Laurent) late in life, and his elderly father (Christopher Plumer) who comes out of the closet in the twilight of his life. It’s a simple story but its scope is epic: it’s about mortality, growing up, the unchangeable nature of historical circumstance and seeking connection in a disconnected family. As heavy Beginners‘ themes are, Mills juggles story and concepts with significant grace, blending melancholy and humor in a way that somehow manages to reveal the intimate inner lives of his characters.

Beginners is in theaters now, and I strongly urge you to check it out on the big screen. And luckily, since Mike Mills can’t be confined to one medium, he’s released a companion book to the film called Drawings From the Film Beginners. It’s full of funny and charming sketches that relate to the Ewan McGregor’s character in the film, who also designs album covers for a living.

Thanks to Focus Features, I’m stoked to announce that we’re giving away a copy of the book, as well as a dropcard that will let you to download the Beginners soundtrack for free. Comment with your favorite work by Mike Mills and we’ll choose a winner at random this Friday!

Peter Sutherland clearly understands the importance of narrative. Just take a look at his website: the landing page is a plainly presented paragraph of scattered childhood reminiscences, with no clear links to a portfolio of his photographs. Forced to read these cryptic half-memories, you’re placed in a trance of sorts, at which point Sutherland sneaks in links to his images. Suddenly these urgent photos of desolate Americana, crooked nature and youthful antics burn bright with the implications of a Universe of ethereal narrative contexts.

Sutherland is a master of all trades– photography, curating, filmmaking– he does it all. But somehow his artwork seems best suited to the printed page. Maybe that’s because it’s so immediate, kinetic, candid, organic. You smell the exhaust fumes of Sutherland’s wanderlust and you feel the dried up mud caked on his camera. Flipping through the pages of his books feels like peeking at a freshly developed roll of film, filled with a hundred impossibly lucky snapshots from the best adventure you’ve never gone on.

He’s been publishing zines and art books for years, through a veritable cross section of my favorite small presses: Nieves, Cederteg, JSBJ, and Gottlund Verlag to name a few. Now, Sutherland has put together a deluxe package of printed (and digital) matter called Work(ed) through Future Shipwreck megafriend Jesse Hlebo‘s press, Swill Children. Work(ed) is comprised of four elements: a risoprint on newspaper poster, a 36 page photo book, a 32 page collage zine, and an online component. Made in an edition of 193, the first 50 ordered come with a free Magic Grip jar opener, which “also removes lint from your clothing.” All that for $20! Take a look at the madness after the jump, and I’ll leave you with these words that Sutherland uses to describe the project:

clouds of dust
tarps
innersections of technology and nature
sketchy dudes
4×4 situations
blades
alien arrangements
hot springs
road dogs
summits
escape

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It turns out heaven is a place on Earth, bathed in a cloud of dust on the tracks between Black Butte, Oregon and Mt. Shasta, California. That’s where train hoppers have created the Black Butte Center for Railroad Culture, a museum celebrating the splendor of transience, complete with a zine library and punk venue in two refurbished antique boxcars. When I visited the Center during a summer gathering, I couldn’t help but marvel at the togetherness of such a collective, and the very existence of a place where a phrase like “queer feminist train hopper” is nothing to gawk at.

Amidst such a vibrant sub-subculture, sometimes resident and full time punk virtuoso Robnoxious is well known for providing a good bit of community glue through his zines, illustrations, and screenprint designs. Heavyweight zine distro Microcosm now carries a wide selection of Rob’s prolific output, exposing a much broader audience to gems like You Fucked Up– a dreamy post-apocalyptic anarchist fantasy series whose fourth and final installation arrives in early 2011.

Shut Up and Love the Rain, released in September, is an earnest and hilarious comic diary of young Robert’s discovery of human sexuality and his own latent queerness. He doesn’t stigmatize or shy from the details, and the result is a narrative that empowers us all to utter our tales of awkward adolescence. As much as I enjoy Rob’s bare, yet whimsical illustration style, my favorite sections of Love the Rain are his text memoirs. These may be the most frank accounts of youthful experimentation I’ve ever read, and his triumphant tales of masturbation will have you fetishizing the banana in ways you never imagined. The latter half of the zine takes on a more sentimental tone– featuring an intimate interview with Rob’s parents about his father’s transgender coming out story (you can also read this section on his blog). It’s a sex-positive feel-good family dramedy for the rest of us.

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Dirty Dishes, a book of illustrations and paintings by outstanding Canadian animator Amy Lockhart. We share her love of angry ladies and the sheer terror of human bodies. Published earlier this year by Drawn & Quarterly.

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Some people spend years searching for their place in the world. Paul Paper just makes it up. He’s a sly Lithuanian photographer with a gifted eye, but he’s also an emissary for the online art world. He provides a catalyst for collaboration and creative cross-contamination that’s so often lacking on the varied fragmented Internet art venues. He’s not just discovering a community of like-minded artists who support each other’s varied creative endeavors– he’s building one.

Paper’s love for cinema led to a great group project we’ve shared here before, Postcards to Alphaville, which featured movie-obsessed artworks from a fleet of artists including FS favorites Michael C. Hsiung and Drew Beckmeyer. He also somehow convinced dozens of amazing artists to create works inspired by the winking riddle “It could be me, but it’s actually Paul Paper.” On top of all that, Paper runs the always on-point directory of global artistic radness, I Like This Blog.

Paper’s latest work is called I Forgot to Forget and features 16 of his original photographs lovingly printed in a staplebound zine. I was stoked to get a copy in the mail a couple months ago, and I’m happy to share it with you here. Unfortunately, only 60 of these were made– so unless you act fast, you probably won’t be getting one for Christmas.

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Despite their pride of place in the filmography of Kenneth Anger, fireworks, like so many other popular aesthetic attractions, have been made into a kind of “bad object” of artistic appreciation. Their appeal is so obvious, their form so familiar what more can really be said or shown about these shimmering, summertime diversions? Well, here comes Pierre Le Hors with a 320-page visual manifesto, appropriately titled Firework Studies. This work, through some miracle of creative willpower and clarity of vision, restores a sense of wonder and, yes, even a tinge of nostalgic melancholy to this well-worn topic.

The images in Firework Studies are characterized by their sharp, almost startling monochrome contrast and an erratic sense of composition which makes even the most firmly centered elements seem strangely isolated. Here, we see each dazzling burst not as a distinct thing-to-be-admired, but as a single moment in the past which is always-already lost. Thanks to Le Hors’s fantastic presentation, one cannot help but be aware, even as they are staring into the face of an explosion, of the coming silence, of the inevitable fizzling out. What we have here is not so much a memorial to a particular time or image or sight that we all know and love, but something more like evidence, an attempt to prove that something existed and, by God, it mattered.

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I ran into the supremely charming artist Ryan De La Hoz at APE last month, and quickly fell in love with his awesome zine, Residual Energy. It’s easy to digest, and yet somehow haunting– filled with mysterious illustrations, grainy photos, and clever nostalgia for those 8-bit afternoons of childhood yore. Ryan’s wonder-filled personality really comes across in their glossy pages. Take a look at both issues of Residual Energy below, along with a gorgeously shot video interview by Paul Nguyen.

If you’re in the Bay Area this weekend, don’t miss Ryan’s latest work at Heist Gallery on Saturday night!

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Continuing our Matt Furie Monday marathon, join me at the coffee table to take a look at Furie’s latest hilarious issue of Boys Club. Lovable weirdos Andy, Brett, Landwolf and Pepe are back, accompanied this time by a beanie-wearing pizza delivery creature named Bird-Dog and Whitey, the sinister pimple. Bird-Dog lays out the history of marijuana while Landwolf twirls his boner in front of a strobe light. Plus a great recipe for Slim Jims and Easy Cheese!

Pictures of Boys Club 4 below, along with a few pictures of the rad print I picked up from Furie at APE last month, created by Desert Island– the amazing NYC comic shop behind Smoke Signal.

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I’m proud to be a part of Dallas Clayton‘s life. His ideas are awe-inspiring and revolutionary, but he has a real knack for wording them in a way that everyone can understand. And then he illustrates them with a subtle sense of humor and grace that seems seriously scarce in children’s books these days. I’m proud to have been a part of the journey his sophomore book, An Awesome Book of Thanks, has taken two pages of text to a painstakingly detailed series of drawings, to an endless series of TIFFs and PDFs, to an actual book that you can touch and smell and put in a child’s hand and see their face light up.

Watch out the video that I made with Dallas to announce the new book, and then read An Awesome Book of Thanks for free! If you’re in L.A., don’t miss Dallas’ book launch party at Family this weekend. There will be cupcakes!

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