1. To Buy: 100% Unofficial Simpsons Comix
“Illustrator and painter Jack Teagle works from an old shipping container he converted into a studio on his parent’s farm in Southwest England.” That’s the opening to a great interview with Teagle that appeared on Threadless.com (yes, the T-shirt website) that I first saw on LinkedIn, of all places, the other day. Threadless and LinkedIn! What is even happening here?
Anyway, in that interview Teagle talks about a fun side project he and several other artist friends had a few years back, the Simpsons Drawing Club, where they would draw zany pictures and comics featuring Simpsons characters. They stopped posting art to their Tumblr in 2020, but Teagle has collected some of his comics from the project into a 52-page collection titled 100% Unofficial Simpsons Comix.
You can buy your very own copy on Teagle’s Big Cartel site. You can also find all sorts of T-shirt and gear with his artwork on it on his Threadless shop, and check out more of his artwork on Twitter and Tumblr.
2. To Support: Kaiju Sunset on Zoop
Geoffrey D. Wessel and Norrie Millar have what sounds like fun take on the kaiju comic up on the comics crowdfunding website Zoop:
Kaiju Sunset offers an alternative look at the daikaiju v. giant robots genre, with a diverse team of radical environmentalists working to save the kaiju rather than destroy them, in a world on the verge of social and environmental collapse! A mysterious message to the team’s leader, Natalie Okwuono, leads her to question what her team is doing, and discover the real goal behind the rescue mission, before it’s too late for the entire planet!
Someone save the kaiju! You can see some of the art over on their Zoop page, which looks marvelous, plus they have a great variant cover by Zandor Cannon, who has a familiarity with giant monsters himself. The campaign ends in 12 days.
3. To Hear: The musical adaptation of Seth’s George Sprott
It’s always interesting to see (or in this case, to hear) an artist’s work adapted into another medium, especially when it’s something not-quite-expected — like a musical adaptation of the graphic novel George Sprott by Seth.
“Something strange happens when you pass your work along to another artist for interpretation,” Seth said. “It goes away a relative and comes back a stranger. Lines of dialogue I had written in my graphic novel, now spoken or sung by actors, were odd and moving. I could suddenly recognize from what wellspring of emotion they had originated in me. A truly moving experience.”
Director and musician Mark Haney adapted the graphic novel into an opera, Omnis Temporalis: A Visual Long-Playing Record, a few years back, and it is now available on vinyl from Drawn and Quarterly. In a Seth-designed package with a ton of Seth artwork, so go check it out. You can also find it on Bandcamp.