Gallery: The Art Of Adam Tredowski

What science fiction and science fiction artists have influenced your work?
Ages ago I came across this fantasy magazine Fantastyka, in which they put continuously works of such artists as Jim Burns, Rodney Mathews, Zdzislaw Beksinski and Wojciech Siudmak. They made a huge impression. Even today I find them as the sort of example or pattern to follow, and one which I have not yet reached when it comes to the traditional painting technique. As far as the masters of digital painting are concerned, I’d have to mention Daniel Dociu, Sparth, Dusso, Craig Mulins, and James Paick.

Do you see a divide between SF and F in your own work or is it all mixed together?
I mix it all together. It is the composition that matters to me most as a whole and I try to stick to that.

What’s your relationship to technology and the modern world? Are there elements you try to put into your work?
I have to admit I’m not really a big enthusiast of all the new tech gizmos and news. I don’t really obsessively follow the progress as I don’t feel I have to have or be in the line with the newest technology. My PC, which got old a long time ago, would be the best example of that. It’s only the progress within the graphic design software that is of great interest to me, as I would really like to continuously develop my workshop.

Describe your workspace. How has it changed over the years?
I started with a pencil, oil paints, pastels, etc. It varied with the effects. I was missing the basics, as I learned as I went, and unfortunately I didn’t have anybody I could learn from. Additionally, when I started the Internet was only the means for the “chosen ones.” Then I got hold of a Commodore 64 and the Art Studio software. I got sucked in completely! Then there was the Amiga computer and the mind blowing “Deluxe Paint,” and then a very long break during which I didn’t have a PC. And so I came back to graphic design about three years ago. Today, my main tools are modelling software 3D and Photoshop CS2.

What projects have been most personal to you, and what are you most proud of?
I won’t be original saying this but I must say that all my works are very personal to me. The ones I like most are the ones which I did quite quickly—the ones about which I knew straight from the beginning what they were gonna look like. One of those is the project “Far from the city,” for example.

And, finally, what are you currently working on?
Currently, I [work with] the ZBrush 3.1software. In the future I’d like to put more “life” into my works, and ZBrush as a tool for adding character to modelling seems to be the perfect choice. What comes out of it? We’ll have to wait and see!

In closing, we'd like to give a big thank you to Annalee and to Charlie in this last column for io9. They’ve been great to us, and we appreciate the opportunity. io9 is one of our favorite internet destinations.

Despite this success, Edwards is most known for, and hugely popular because of, the success of China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, for which he did the cover. That iconic art re-launched his career by wedding the horror elements he was known for with complex, some would say avant garde, SF and fantasy elements. (In the Czech Republic, the covers of books in Laser Books' New Weird imprint are all by Miller.)

Along the way, he’s never lost a feel for the tactile elements of paint: all of his paintings have that sense of having been worked on, of the paint having been literally layered on and smoothed over and then roughed up again. A painting by Edward Miller has texture and depth. Slickness and seamlessness is not, to our benefit, part of Miller’s repertoire. It is because of these qualities that he has won seven British Fantasy Awards and been a World Fantasy Award finalist three times.

Despite his meticulous and inspired approach to his work, Edwards considers himself a “gun for hire.” For Edwards, this can be rather pleasant — when he gets to work with authors he admires:

I'm always convinced that the next project is going to be the best. Obviously there are certain authors who I'm pleased to be associated with, however slight the association might be. What I have become more and more pleased about is that my job gives me the opportunity to hang out with other creative people with similar interests. One of my favourite occupations is to sit with a bunch of writers and just listen. As my main method of expression is pictures rather than words it's always interesting to be with a group of people who use language as an art form; especially when the wine begins to flow.

Edwards’ visual sense was influenced by SF movies and serials from an early age:

For some reason my parents took me to see films like The Conquest of Space or Satellite in the Sky. I don't know if I'd already expressed an interest in space travel or if they just thought the movies would be educational but they certainly impressed me and the visual elements naturally came out in my drawings. There was also a movie serial called Captain Video which obsessed me for some time when I was about 6. Most of my toys and games had a Science Fiction theme.

In the 1950's in the UK there was a weekly boy's comic called the Eagle which is fondly remembered by most Brits of a certain age. The main strip was called Dan Dare. It was beautifully drawn by Frank Hampson and the hero was the chief pilot of Spacefleet who spent his time rocketing around the Solar System protecting the Earth from various threats of invasion, usually with a swift left hook. Imagine a kind of British version of Flash Gordon with a stiff upper lip and an RAF uniform. Hampson's style was very meticulous and the comic was printed on good quality paper which was very unusual at the time so the whole thing had a very sumptuous and sophisticated feel. I was probably too young to appreciate the artwork to begin with but the strip featured spaceships and aliens and ray-guns so that was good enough for me.

Somewhat later another artist began a strip in the centre pages of the Eagle which featured the adventures of a Roman Centurion, Heros the Spartan. It was drawn by Frank Bellamy and was much more oriented to what we would now call Fantasy, although there really was no such genre at the time. It was done in a very dramatic style with dark rich colours and featured monsters and magicians and was very much a kind of proto Sword and Sorcery. So I had both these influences going on at the same time but, purely in terms of style, it was the work of Bellamy with Heros that had the greater attraction for me. Where Hampson was very precise and considered, using a good deal of photographic reference, Bellamy's approach was much looser and more flamboyant. Bellamy is the first artist I remember trying to copy.

Edwards/Miller doesn’t see a real divide between fantasy and science fiction:

I know there are people who feel that Fantasy and Science Fiction are completely separate genres and never the twain shall meet. I've never felt that way in the least and I frankly find the idea ridiculous. There's a ludicrous kind of snobbery at work; ‘My genre is better than yours: Ya Boo!. I read Fantasy, SF and Horror and a bunch of other stuff too. Surely the real question is, not ‘What's the genre?’ It's ‘Is it any good?’, and even as committed fans we should have the courage to say that a lot of genre fiction, and art for that matter, is just not very good. Let's fly the flag for the quality stuff regardless of where it sits on the bookshelf. So the answer to the question is that I'm happy to work in any genre, if we must have such distinctions. My general rule of thumb is, if it's weird and it's good then I'm for it.

Edward Miller was born precisely because of the tendency of some people to pigeonhole artists into one genre. As Les Edwards I was known for working in a particular field and found it increasingly difficult to find any other work. I was very happy doing this work but any creative person wants to stretch himself and so Edward Miller came into being in order to explore a different style of painting and, originally, a completely different area of work. At first Edward's work was not Fantasy or SF oriented at all and it was only after a few years that the fantastic elements began to creep in. I suppose I couldn't help myself.

You can get more Les Edwards in his online gallery.

Aesthetically, Reid says she has the most affinity with SF through steampunk:

I've always been drawn to the past, but since I have only my perception to go by when depicting even the true stories, the result will always be somewhat fictional. Of course that's partly what science fiction is, whether it be about the past or the future, it's an interpretation...I can't say that my influences are considered science fiction in the classic sense. Paintings from the Renaissance, Art Nouveau, Max Ernst, and Joseph Cornell are inspirational. Vintage anatomical/biological illustration, mechanical diagrams, contraptions, alchemy and Victorian portraits also play into it. Stories like The Picture of Dorian Grey, or tales of time travel, ghost stories, legends, and old radio shows. I'm just as influenced by odd family stories that seem to arise every so often as well.

Retro technology plays a large role in Reid’s work:

I began interpreting late 19th and early 20th Century technology in my pictures, maybe as a result of our own technological evolution. Ironically, as the Industrial Age comes to an end, and the Technology Age begins, subconsciously, people seem to be drawn back to the other turn of the century. In regards to modern technology, you can look at it from the point of view that it will be someone else's eccentric inspiration in the future.

I have a bit of a love/hate thing going on with the modern world actually. Mentally and visually, I'm drawn to the past, but because of modern technology, not only am I able to use a computer as a tool for commercial work, but also I'm able to lay out the preliminary stages for paintings, although I still use classical methods (traditional gesso, egg tempera, oil) to execute them.

Some of her inspiration comes from her upbringing. Her father was a flight engineer “for the RCAF, then was shot down and became a POW for the last six months of WWII,” then became a mechanical engineer. Reid’s mother served as a nurse in London during the Blitz.

She explains:

People of that generation tend to not talk much about dark, uncomfortable subjects, although every so often I would get a story out of nowhere. My dad was also a bit eccentric, so you could never be quite sure what he was up to. He'd have all these strange projects on the go like a Day of the Dead skull hanging in a macramé plant hanger (for realism, he glued his own hair on it), and often he'd include me, his baffled daughter, in the process. There was also the ‘Planet amongst the Stars’ wall art—I should add that the planet was a big piece of driftwood, the stars were Christmas lights that he wired through the other side of the wall and the atmosphere was dark brown fake wood paneling. In his workshop you'd often hear him muttering and swearing, whether he was hammering, sawing, or drafting. He'd also leave odd little notes everywhere—to me, my mum, but mostly to himself.

Recently, Reid had a show at La Luz de Jesus Gallery in LA. Soon, she will finish up a long running animated series with a.k.a. Cartoon Inc. in Vancouver.

See more in on Bonni Reid's gallery.

Eagle-eyed io9 readers will recognize some of these artists from posts run earlier this year. From Libby’s beetles with clockwork innards to Wayne Martin Belger’s cameras with embedded dragonflies, the exhibit is a dialogue between natural and unnatural worlds. Terms like “post-industrial surrealism,” “mechanical animism,” and “visual debris” also help define Fantastic Contraption.

Some indication of the non-traditional slant of the exhibit can be found in Beetle Repo Man Mike Libby’s answer to the question of influences: “Bradbury, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco. Their influence is not direct, as I do not see myself as an artist who illustrates or diagrams the ideas put forth by a writer. Though I admire their literary agility in describing situations and visual details, I like Bradbury's metaphors, and Calvino's intricacies.”

In terms of SF, Libby in particular has created some unique approaches through art: “I made a piece that is a timeline of all the times I've seen a time travel movie. This is overtly a real map based on my chronological experience of Science Fiction and how it prompted me to think (fantasize) about time travel. So here the base foundation of this project is SF which prompts fantastical thoughts through empirical display.”

The influence of that now nearly dirty word “steampunk” has perhaps never been so succinctly expressed, either: “For me, a gear stirs the imagination more than a circuit or diode, you can imagine it moving and turning, causing movement and turning in other things.”

The Fantastic Contraption exhibit opened in July and ran through early September. If you didn’t make it to La Jolla between to see it, check out the gallery that runs with this feature, and the cool accompanying book from IDW Publishing. It’s beautifully designed, of course.

Fantastic Contraption [via Device Gallery]

This isn’t the first time the New Zealand-born and based Broadmore has done something silly. Three years ago he co-designed and oversaw the art direction of the Tripod-Wellington Film Industry Tribute sculpture, which he calls a “a six metre tall robot of doom which lives on Courtenay Place in Wellington city”) He has also served as a designer and sculptor on Peter Jackson’s King Kong and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Perhaps most famously, though, he is the genius behind the famed Weta Workshop’s Weta Originals Rayguns, otherwise known as Dr. Grordborts Infallible Aether Oscillators. (We may not have mentioned yet—he seems to like rayguns...)

What does Broadmore bring to all of his endeavors besides a healthy sense of play? A great sense of old-fashioned adventure, amazing attention to detail, and a strangely baroque approach to seamlessness. Everything he creates tends to look like it could really exist somewhere in the world.

Influences for Broadmore include a variety of pop culture fodder: “Movies like Alien, Aliens, Star Wars, 2001, etc. Things like 2000 A.D., the comic that featured Judge Dredd, had a big impact on me. I love the art of Mike McMahon (Judge Dredd, Sláine) and many others. Specifically for Dr. Grordborts, classic pulp art of the first half of the last century has really inspired me.”

Broadmore also has a healthy lack of respect for boundaries, saying of the terms “science fiction” and “fantasy”: “Those two concepts are always funny to me. They are totally vague the more you examine them. They have both simply become backdrops for narratives. I would argue that very few science fiction stories are actually in any way speculative fiction based on real science or the realistic application of potential scientific breakthroughs. Most science fiction is just fantasy with more silver paint. I massively prefer the aesthetic possibilities of science fiction, but I'll enjoy any fantastic setting if it's had energy and inspiration put into it.”
That said, Broadmore is “very into technology and science in general and I'm very excited by what science and technology opens up to us as possibilities. Computer tech is really producing the goods at the moment. The iPhone for instance is the future tech as imagined in years past finally coalescing. I'm an avid layman reader of any and all science I can find time for. Genomics, quantum mechanics, cosmology, evolution, nano-technology are all fascinating to me. I'm terrified on the other hand by the subtle anti-science, anti-medicine attitude that's become more pervasive in western society lately. All kinds of baseless pseudo-sciences are accepted by people that have little or no proof. Things like Homeopathy or the current celebrity hyped autism anti-vaccination trend that are pushed amaze me, the media in general don't seem to examine these things as critically as they should. I don't specifically make any of my fiction an allegory for these things, but I do like to poke fun at some human assumptions and foibles. My own included.”
Broadmore seems to have enjoyed all of his creative experiences thus far, although he clearly has his favorites. “As far as feature films go, King Kong was great for me as I'm a Dinosaur nut, and recently District 9 (still in production) by Neill Blomkamp. But for me creating Dr. Grordbort's universe is the most fun, most satisfying. I have to say, I'm amazed by how fast the guns are selling out. There clearly is a desire for this kind of realizable art/sci-fi in the real world, and I’m really glad to be a part of that.”
You can catch up with Broadmore this weekend at Comicon, where he will reveal a new manifestation of his wonderful imagination: the latest Raygun from the Dr. Grordbort's line, the Goliathon 83 - Miniature Version, labeled in the press release, “a masterpiece of micronised murder machinery.”

Mignola’s dark, flat style, which Alan Moore has called "German expressionism meets Jack Kirby," gains its unique power from the use of shadow to define space in each panel. Through these varying shades of darkness color reaches the viewer as if from the bottom of a well. The contrast or frame created by the shadow his use of color unexpectedly rich and deep. What should be murky is sharp. What should be opaque instead illuminates. The flatness is itself deceptive, in that Mignola manages a kind of layering effect that renders both the characters and their actions three-dimensional. All of these effects ran counter—and still to some extent run counter—to traditional wisdom in creating comics.

If Hellboy has become iconic since then it is in part because of this unique quality to the art and in part because Mignola’s imagination in the storylines has been a match for his artistic talent. While the stories work as adventures, and Hellboy himself entertains with his wisecracks, Mignola often mines very strange territory indeed—mixing myths of world creation and destruction with more localized stories of witches and demons into the fabric of a modern world. Using such varied material has allowed him to refine and add nuance to his art.

Now that Hellboy has reached the big screen, Mignola has teamed up with another great visual stylist: Guillermo del Toro, whose vision in movies like Pan’s Labyrinth brings another great tradition—Mexican surrealism—into Hellboy’s world. The result is a unique hybrid vision from two highly imaginative creators.

With Hellboy 2 opening in theaters, we talked briefly to a hyper-busy Mignola about his work...

What science fiction and science fiction artists have influenced your work?
The writing of H.P. Lovecraft and Michael Moorcock...the art of Frank Frazetta and Jack Kirby were my biggest and earliest influences.

What’s your relationship to technology and the modern world? Are there elements you try to put into your work?
I am able to send and get email. I do not love technology. My stories are very low tech...in the entire run of Hellboy I think I've only drawn three cars and none of them were moving!

What projects have been most personal to you, and what are you most proud of?
The Amazing Screw-On Head and the short story The Magician and the Snake.

What are you currently working on?
I'm writing 2 different Hellboy series, The Crooked Man for Richard Corben and The Wild Hunt for Duncan Fregredo and I am writing and drawing In The Chapel of Moloch. I'm also co-ploting the BPRD comics and a few other things!

Many thanks to Mignola and Dark Horse Comics for letting io9 to run a gallery with this feature.

http://www.hellboy.com/

About the size of a thick tombstone, including over 400 pages of mostly full-color art, with nonfiction by Harlan Ellison, Thomas Ligotti, and others, this absolute stone-cold classic is a testament to the publisher’s attention to detail and Lovecraft’s enduring influence. It also provides a wonderful gallery setting for H.R. Giger, Bob Eggleton, John Coulthart, Michael Whelan, Lee Brown Coye, Virgil Finlay, Ian Miller, Gahan Wilson, John Picacio, Harry O. Morris, J.K. Potter, and many others.

Often, the images in the book mix fantasy with Lovecraft’s take on “cosmic horror,” the idea that the universe is hostile and inert.

In SF-nal terms, Bob Eggleton interprets that cosmic horror as alien influence:

Lovecraft's elder gods, unspeakable ones,shamblers and so on...were all in reality malevolent aliens from other worlds. They were ancient and evil, but the fact they're from another world is lost in the mists. His stories had references to astronomy, astrology and science and yet took this 180 turn into something scary and dark. Nigel Kneale, for instance wrote the Quatermass series in much the same way. Quatermass & The Pit was truly Lovecraftian.

John Coulthart notes, too, that:

The young Lovecraft was a keen astronomer who became acquainted at an early age with a sense of cosmic scale, the vastness of the universe and so on. That combined with a natural pessimism, and his later atheism gave him a strong sense of human insignificance in the face of cosmic enormity. ‘We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity,’ as he says at the opening of "The Call of Cthulhu."'

Not exactly the most uplifting of messages, but definitely powerful—and revolutionary within genre at the time.

“His problem as a writer was that most Western supernatural fiction up to that point had some kind of Christian dimension to it, even if this wasn't directly stated,” Coulthart says. “That was obviously a problem for an atheist writing a form of fiction which needed something malevolent at its core. His solution was to replace the Devil and the Christian idea of evil with vast extra-dimensional entities which disturb or threaten us because we mean as much to them as microbes do to human beings.”

Disappointingly (to us at least), Harry O. Morris rules out a literal cephalopodic element to the idea of cosmic horror:

[It’s] not a giant squid descending from outer space, but rather an all pervasive sense of dread that permeates everything we think we know including our faces in the mirror and the knives and forks at the dinner table.

For Ian Miller the concept is more visceral, citing films like Alien as Lovecraftian in mood: “Things hidden in the shadows, in tight dark place, dangerous, scratching, moving, creeping, stalking, mysterious, and always at the peripheries of one’s vision waiting in the shadows to spring out and bite you...Things arcane. Airless dark places with strange smells. Dark cupboards. Things that scratch and suffocate. Tight shoes and fish eyes...I suspect fear fueled by adrenalin gave rise to the notion of warp speed, though I'm sure some would disagree.”

How, then, do these artists put their own personal stamp on something so strong and powerful on the page, and thus indelibly imprinted upon readers’ minds?

For Eggleton it’s trying to give “a kind of epic feel to [the paintings]. A sense of the familiar and then at the same, something alien and bizarre.”

Morris’ approaches Lovecraft through ambiguity: “For me, the best way to express this uncomfortable aura visually is to leave portions of the picture undefined, in shadow, and influenced by chance/chaos. Also, I'm inclined to try and convey a sense of timeless antiquity which seems to be a cornerstone of Lovecraft's vision.”

John Picacio also believes the best Lovecraftian art doesn’t try to show everything. “It leaves something to the imagination....a few conceptual voids here and there, purposely left for the mind to fill with something personal and therefore much more potent....I think trying to literally illustrate a Lovecraftian monster usually misses the mark. It’s just not as scary anymore because the terror has somehow been contained in the lines and the strokes, and therefore distilled. That’s why his stuff is so difficult to effectively translate to comics and film although so many have tried.”

Coulthart is one of those creators who, in addition to his Lovecraftian paintings has successfully translated the icon’s vision to comics:

I wanted to take Lovecraft's fiction seriously on its own terms, something which—in the comics world especially—wasn't happening very often. When I started illustrating his work in the 1980s there was little apart from the Lovecraft special issue of Heavy Metal from 1979 which had attempted that. I tried to match his dense writing style with an equally dense and detailed drawing style and tried to make things look solid and historically accurate. I've always been interested in architecture and Lovecraft's concept of alien architecture continues to fascinate.

This might make the art seem ultra-serious, but it’s not all “cosmic.” As Jerad Walters, the genius behind Centipede Press points out:

Some of the artwork is humorous or whimsical, and rather good-natured. There's a difference in humor between the ‘Deep One’ Horrora Model Kit image, which is more nostalgic, and the ‘Where the Great Old Ones Are’ image, which is just a send-up of HPL and Maurice Sendak, and the black humor of the Gahan Wilson piece, which is just over-the-top. It is the black humor of some of the works that works best in the book, for me at any rate. I think that the humorous side comes out because all of these bleak, nihilistic visions of Lovecraft can be so dreary and depressing that a send-up of it all is just inevitable.

All of these approaches and many more are showcased in The Art of Lovecraft; the gallery above can only begin to hint at the variety, depth, and jaw-dropping quality of the book. It’s a stunning love letter to a long and storied tradition.

As for those tentacular horrors, Walters says:

I don't think any reader of weird fiction can ever look at tentacles the same way after Lovecraft. I remember boiling some squid and chopping off the heads, putting them off to one side of the cutting block, planning to save them for something, until my wife quite reasonably asked if I was out of my mind.

Or, as China Mieville writes in "M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire":

The spread of the tentacle—a limb-type with no Gothic or traditional precedents (in “Western” aesthetics)—from a situation of near total absence in Euro-American teratoculture up to the nineteenth century, to one of being the default monstrous appendage of today, signals the epochal shift to a Weird culture....The “Lovecraft Event,” as Ben Noys invaluably understands it, is unquestionably the centre of gravity of this revolutionary movement; it’s defining text, Lovecraft’s ‘The Call of Cthulhu,’ published in 1928 in Weird Tales.

As you might expect, creating distinctive backdrops for TV is very different from art in other contexts. Jensen says:

Art directing evening news broadcasts in the 80's-90's made me focus on clean, readable, and stylish graphic design. Each [60 Minutes] story begins with a studio introduction in front of artwork—in a 'magazine'. The executive producer and director gave me incredible freedom. Time was the biggest challenge. Three illustrations a week, was quite a lot of work. In seven seasons I probably made about 650 to 700 illustrations. Another challenge is that unlike an illustration in a magazine, you couldn't linger on it. On average the work I did was gone in thirty to forty-five seconds. Perhaps that's not a constraint in execution, but in satisfaction it certainly is!

A number of classic SF artists have influenced Jensen, including Paul Lehr and Richard Powers, whose work, he says:

is fundamental to my appreciation of SF art. I respond to surrealism and ambiguity...Another artist from the same era I really liked is John Schoenherr. His compositions are masterful. Michael Whelan was the artist of another generation that next most influenced my work. He has an uncanny knack for composing an image that feels true to the book in a specifically narrative way. I remember seeing his "Foundation trilogy" paintings in a Boskone artshow, this is before the paintings were published, and I just knew that they were for those books.

(For more on Jensen's thoughts about book design, check out this cool MindMeld feature from the always lively SF Signal.)

From 1984 to around 2000, Jensen used acrylics on illustration board, with occasional forays into oils and mixed media. But Jensen’s work in television news eventually led him to computers:

Over time, I started using the computer for my book cover sketches. I worked with tight comps in acrylics but learned that digital sketches could be much more efficient for pre-visualization. On a few occasions, I used digital images in parts of my final work. The covers for Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age and Snowcrash were both mixed media. Each had portions rendered digitally, which I photographed and collaged into the final illustration.

Jensen is still ambivalent about the use of computers for art:

There are some really wonderful aspects to digital media in making an image but, I still have a high regard for the 'object', the physicality of a painting. Hanging digital prints in an art show has always left me unsatisfied.

Despite, or perhaps because of, that ambivalence, Jensen has often been associated with cutting edge SF, especially as he does very little fantasy art:

Through the 90's I think my work was often associated with cyberpunk themes and I really enjoyed that. I've often found myself working with visual elements that touch on AI, virtual reality, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, technology of that sort.

That said, his latest project, which he calls “alien menagerie” (see the gallery) is often as fantastical as SF-nal. Interestingly, these paintings mark a “return to traditional media” for Jensen. A single painting from this series, displayed at the Microvisions 2 show at the Society of Illustrators, made it into the best-of art anthology Spectrum 15, to be published this fall.

Bruce Jensen [official website]

Even better, the storyline is sly and clever, with four parts that come together with increasing complexity and strangeness. Fittingly, A.L.I.E.E.E.N. was nominated for an Eisner Award—just another in a long list of amazing imaginative leaps by Trondheim. He often shares these honors with Joann Sfar, co-creator with Trondheim of the famed Dungeon series. If A.L.I.E.E.E.N. is willfully perverse (check out the awesome online game for the book), then Dungeon is the Citizen Kane of epic fantasy comics—hilarious, touching, deep, and illustrated with genius-level precision.

Sfar, with another French star, Emmanuel Gilbert, is also responsible for the playful science fiction series Sardine in Outer Space. Where A.L.I.E.E.E.N. could be described as a children's book for adults, Sardine is joyously for kids, even warning on the inside cover flap that no grown-ups are allowed, "unless they're pirates or space adventurers." From Doc Krok to Supermuscleman, Sardine includes a host of marvelous villains, each one made simultaneously real and exaggerated by Sfar's artwork. Everything from slapstick outer space pirate action to cosmic squid is choreographed in vibrant color and with an exuberant energy.

Together, as dual artists and writers, Sfar and Trondheim represent one of the best double-threats in comics. In terms of what each brings to their collaborations, Trondheim said in a Comics Journal interview,

It's very hard to say. Joann brings with him a strong cultural foundation, his knowledge of philosophy. I bring structure. The jokes and nonsense, that's both of us. Often we find ourselves being told: 'that gag, that's Lewis,' even if it was really Joann. Or 'that serious reflective moment, that's Joann,' and it turns out it was me. Since our goal is to systematically surprise each other, we've also become good at putting ourselves in each other's place, to think like each other.

[This] effortless homage to Jim Woodring's horrifying, alien landscapes was already gorgeous and awful before he added a new element: the poop joke. My inner intellectual, sated, was joined by my uncontrollably giggling inner five-year old. A winning combination.

Brill also points out:

[Sfar] can do anything....[his] loose, assured line and vibrant watercoloring on Klezmer won my heart the moment I picked it up. And with works as profound and diverse as The Rabbi's Cat, Sardine in Outer Space, and Vampire Loves, [he] proves again and again that he's...a force of nature.

Check out First Second for various Trondheim-Sfar galleries.