I'm sure folks have been witnessing this themselves, but our friend Johnny Ryan is starting to scare me. A lot. His most recent strips for VICE are approaching new existential FUCK-YOU fear mongering heights (in an astonishing and great way!). Really incredible and troubling stuff--- this bodes well for Prison Pit: Book 2, coming out on September 8, 2010.
Electric Ant Issue 2: Exquisite CorpsesEdited by Ryan SandsThis book is good but it’s no GFTG3. It has a pretty good crew of artists in it. Calvin Wong, Hellen Jo, Ted May, Michael Deforge, Lisa Hanawalt, Kazimir Strzepek, and Harvey James are in there. I’m in there too at some point. Electric Ant is a perfect-bound zine with articles and photos in it but I only care about the drawings and the comics. If there were more drawings and comics it might have beat Lobo. Sidenote to Zine makers: Stop runnig low contrast photos in your black-and-white zine; they turn into a greyish sludge and look boring.There’s a comic in here called “Planet X Rises” in which each cartoonist wrote and drew a page before handing it off to the next one. My contribution was to a series by various artists drawing their favorite scenes of violence from popculture. Harvey James drew the riot scene from early in Akira. I drew the scene from Road Warrior where Wez’s blonde boyfriend catches the metal boomerang in his forehead. Ted May drew Iron Maiden fighting the guy in the Eddie suit onstage. Then Hellen Jo, Calvin Wong and some other dudes collaborated on a drawing of Tom Hanks looking at his adult dong in Big while the skyscraper transfomer toy dances around in the background on fire.
As a promotion for the movie, Vice and Where the Wild Things Are have put together a collection of indie comics/manga creators covering WTWTA imagery. The pamphlet was edited by our friend Johnny Ryan, and features a ton of our favorites (Electric Ant contributors in bold!):
Jordan Crane
Frederic Fleury
Ben Jones
Josh Simmons
Esther Pearl Watson
Mark Todd
Dan Zettwoch
Matthew Thurber
Benjamin Marra
Hellen Jo
Lar Merde
Lisa Hanawalt
Martin Ontiveros
Matt Furie
Nick Gazin
Ray Sohn
Ron Rege Jr.
Imiri Sakabashira
Sammy Harkham
Shintaro Kago
Skinner Davis
Ted May
Vanessa Davis
Tony Millionaire
...the current one ("THE TECHNOLOGY ISSUE") features comics and illustrations by a few other Electric Ant #2 contributors!
Mimi Leung did a spot illustration for a story about a ghost hunter, and Pan's comic King Top is also featured. NICE WORK, YA'LL.
I just pieced together a comics mystery (wrapped in an enigma). The co-creator of PANRAY, Panayiotis Terzis's housemate, and the co-creator of the comic strip True Chubbo are... the same dude?? Okay, I get that his name is Raymond Sohn and that I should have figured this out already, but for some reason I didn't put it all together until last week.
I've already gushed here about how much I dig PANRAY, but more recently I saw the comic True Chubbo on Vice's site and really enjoyed it. It seems weekly (?) strips of True Chubbo are posted by Ray & Tomomi Fujimaru on their blog. Here are some of the raddest ones from there & Viceland (plus a few other things):
For more posters, comics, and art by Ray Sohn, check out his site here.
Say what you will about Vice (and sure, there is lots of shit to say), but recent issues have included a bunch of Electric Ant friends and contributors:
Interview with Matt Lock:
http://www.viceland.com/int/v15n11/htdocs/matt-lock-324.php
