Quasimoto Action Figure from KID ROBOT

Just click "Play" on the video above and don't think too hard. This appropriately drowsy ad for the KID ROBOT's Quasimoto action figure's backed by the music of Madlib, whose alter-ego is the helium-voiced Alf/Ant-eater/itdoesn'treallymatter Id that is Quasimoto, sometimes Lord Quas. And now it's this figure that comes in Yellow and Blue, with awesome art by STONES THROW records' art director Jeff Jank:




Jank's artwork is the perfect analogue to STONES THROW's personal and personable hip-hop. Like a Madlib beat which'll sample some dope Melvin Van Peebles record or some weird-ass Bollywood crooner, Jank's pulls from any and anywhere, with a focused, distinctly professional sense of design that's throwback but then, a mindfully handmade, looks-like-doodling drawing style. His drawings looked scratched-out on paper like he never lifted his pencil from the paper while drawing and although his lines wobble, there's a really crazy sense of consistency to the wobble that trips you up.

Notice the hand-drawn sense you get from the "Q" sign on the cover to Quasimoto's The Unseen or the contrast between computerized shading and gradients on that same cover or on Further Adventures and how somehow, it like works right along with the dotted grit of the building's bricks AND the photographs of people placed, collage-like in some of the windows. It has the same insane but perfect sense of contrast and complement as something like Jack Kirby's collages.

This cover for J. Dilla's masterpiece Donuts is crazy on the perspective, but also feels like some kind of weird, captured-from-life image realist image too. Brandon Graham's work is perhaps the best example of what I'm talking about, where somehow it's bubbly, inherent cartoony-ness is so well-rendered that it feels as real as some hyper-realistic painting of the same thing. Something about those angled, nervous lines that mark the different window panes on the shop that accomplishes more than a straight-edge...

There's also just a charm to Jank's work, as seen in the gold-toofed donut gobbler or that Dragonball Turtle Master-esque dude (wonderfully named by Jank, "Lord Wigflip")...



-Promo for B-Ball Zombie War Compilation featuring Lord Wig Flip!


-"Bullyshit"


-"Don't Blink" (Incredible fan-made Lord Quas animation)

Archer Prewitt > Chris Ware

Archer Prewitt's Sof Boy comic is a 90s indie classic--and woefully OOP!--about a cute, marshmallow-y guy getting kicked and tortured in a bunch of ways and always sort of still keeping his spirits up. It's really hilarious and oddly affecting. Prewitt's also in the band The Sea & Cake who released Car Alarm a couple of months ago, and it's easily one of the best albums of the year that isn't an hour of shredding.


This month also marks the release of an action figure of Raymond Scott, which Prewitt did the design work for; for those not aware, Raymond Scott was the guy who composed a lot of the music that ended up in Looney Tunes cartoons and was also this totally crazy electronics music inventor and pioneer. Here's more information about him that I wrote, for those who care.

One of the more interesting aspects of Prewitt's design is how it has the same feeling as his work on Sofboy and other stuff, this kind of determined line that's still scratchy and a little ugly, but is smooth and clean like conventional advertising. He still finds places to make it interesting and so, it isn't cold or harsh. He's one of the few graphic designers around that isn't sort of making advertising art that's about advertising.

There's a lot of time spent on making it aesthetically pleasing but as much time's spent on making it sort of making it look uneven or a little drunk or something: Scott's angular proportions, puffy lettering of varying size, etc. Also, so much "cool" design work falls back on the obviously incredible work of the 50s and early 60s but here it makes total sense as it's Raymond Scott's era. It's when he was making most of his music and it's the only era that was crazily open-minded and corporate-minded enough to see Scott's electronic compositions as making sense of commercial background music. This odd mix of the avant-garde and bottom-line economics.

Prewitt's design work comes especially illuminating when compared to another Chicago-based comics dude/graphic designer, Chris Ware. Ware's work is formally obsessive and yeah, that's the point and all, but it's something that both makes his work immediately identifiable and frankly, not that interesting over time.

Other than the sheer craft, there's not a lot of joy or exuberance in Ware's work and worse, even when he's aping ragtime-era record sleeves, there's this odd level of irony or way of putting it all in quotes. Prewitt's work's steeped in the past too, but he seems less interested in up-ending America's ugly past--the kind of dumb Zinn-thought most of us get over by college--through design and irony, than infecting some joy and a touch of chaos into our lives.

The Scott design also reminds me of The Sea and Cake's video of their cover of David Bowie's "Sound & Vision":


Prewitt's done some action figure design work before as seen below. There's the toy of another electronics innovator Robert Moog (inventor of the moog synthesizer, obviously), a particularly hilarious one of the Kauffman brothers from Adaptation, and some dolls of Prewitt's early band, The Coctails:

Pop-Up Book Circus Art Fun With T-Pain

While hardly comics related, at the record store yesterday, I noticed the really cool art and design on the 12-inch single of T-Pain and Lil Wayne's song "Can't Believe It". The design and overall weirdness of T-Pain's latest album Thr33 Ringz (out in November) has been a topic of discussion in the hip-hop world and tons of places are posting the circus-themed cover art, but no one's talking about who actually did this art. My plan for this post was to you know, figure it out but an all-day search on the internet's revealed nothing. Anybody out there know?


The cohesion of the entire package is great, as each single copies an old-time circus poster, with a Medusa-esque T-Pain at the top and a equally fun caricature of the guest and then, a layer of color over the whole thing that's appropriate to the song (an icey blue for the Chris Brown featuring "Freeze"). The caricatures remind me a lot of BAPE master Nigo's work--especially the art for Pharrell Williams' In My Mind--and maybe he had something to do with this, but there's less robotic, factory-line imagery here and more, spare in some places, expressive in others line here. Notice T-Pain's nose, Lil Wayne's tattoos, or Ludacris' perfect smirk. On the back of the album itself, each guest on Thr33 Ringz gets one of these illustrations and they're all surrounding T-Pain, who's at the center of some carnival game wheel or something.


The album cover itself, plays it a little more safe, with a silhouette of ringmaster T-Pain and circus iconography in the background. Conceptually it's cool because the cover is the introduction to the music--the main attraction--which you'll only get to hear once you buy the CD, but there's an added surprise...the interior album art folds and pops-up and makes a kinda mini-circus itself!