New year, new things. And we have been spoiled with riches, glorious, fragrant creative riches from the four corners of this blessed planet we know and love. ’Nuf said.
Guided by Tourists Gustavo Eandi
First up is this oversized graphic short, published by the wonderful Landfill Editions. It’s newsprint pages are swamped with evocative graphite illustrations by the young illustrator and zine-wiz Gustavo Eandi. The drawings pull from manga and gothic typography to tell a story of erotically charged urban noir. It’s heavy on pictorials and light on text, as apparently Eandi finds wordless stories more democratic. Nice one man.
www.gustavoeandi.com
Failed Attempts Catalogue Library
The Catalogue Library shipped over their latest compendium of hand-made zines, and boy is it a tasty smattering. Failed Attempts saw nine artist commissioned to produce their own mini-mag in red ink on rose-tinted paper (they all succeeded, by the way). Forgery was high on the agenda, with Chris Nosenzo faking signatures and Come de Bouchony’s compiling celebrity-lookalikes. There were some boobs and bikers from the Steady Print Shop Co. and even a few inspirational messages from Studio SM (remember: failure is never final!)
www.cataloguelibrary.co.uk
Chris Ware: A Sense of Thereness Mono.Kultur #30
Another brilliant issue from the Berlin-based magazine where form follows feature, with each issue’s design tailored to mirror the interviewee’s style. We think it’s a stroke of genius. This time the legendary cartoonist Chris Ware gets a retrospective in a technicolor extravaganza of pull-out content. Needs no more explanation really – in the words of Destiny’s Child, it’s “so good”.
mono-kultur.com/current
Sleep Paralysis Gabriel Bruce
Mr. Bruce has got a voice like a hoarse Johnny Cash singing into a barrel, and his debut single Sleep Paralysis is a drum-heavy meditation on lucid dreams, false awakenings and OBEs (Out of Body Experiences). For the vinyl release he’s teamed up with Off Modern to design an item as suited to your bookshelf as it is your record player. Photographs, historical anecdotes and snippets of the singer’s own poetry went into creating these 50 gorgeous pages of bespoke liner notes. Lets just say we’ve seen the “hourglass fill at both ends…”
vimeo.com
Eyeworks Festival poster
We damned the Atlantic for keeping us from their festival, but at least it wasn’t too great a distance for a nice bit of air-mail to cross. This lovely piece of graphics from our favorite experimental animation fest is jazzy, vibrant, and heartily eye-catching. We lapped it up.
www.eyeworksfestival.com