What do such diverse tales such as Reboot and Rogan Gosh have in common with MTV videos, pop art, some cool 2000AD covers and the new Mad Max movie? The answer is one of the top Brit artists (in a number of fields, both in comics and without) Brendan McCarthy.
With Peter Milligan he co-created one of the most unusual and challenging graphic novels in Skin, which dealt with a violent skinhead youth who had phocomelia due to Thalidomide poisoning in the womb (Irvine Welsh would re-visit this idea in a short tale years later). Personal violence was intertwined with corporate violence which left many readers, critics and publishers shaken but remains, in my opinion, one of the most honest and powerful British comics of the last few decades.
Swimini Purpose is a new book collecting all manner of McCarthy-isms, from his comic work to CGI design for animated series; it is pop art for the 21st century, from the introspective to the wild and untamed. Only a few hundred copies have been printed and we’re lucky enough to have a small amount of the few remaining copies. Not only that, we have copies signed by Brendan himself. When we tell you these are rarer than a suntan on a penguin we aren’t kidding – once these few are gone, that’s it, so you better get on over to the graphic novel site right now.
“Swimini Purpose is like a fractal river of ideas inside ideas inside other ideas. It’s like tumbling through someone else’s mind into a sprawling, phantasmagoric scrapbook.” Frank Quitely.
Thu, Sep 15, 2005
General