Carlton Mellick III

There is fantasy art, horror art, and science-fiction artwork. But is there such a thing as bizarro art? I believe so. In order to define bizarro artwork, I’d say it would have to be an image that tells a bizarro story or could easily inspire a bizarro story. With that definition, I would say that Jase Daniels is a definitive bizarro artist. His work is dark, surreal, somewhat cartoonish (in a good way), and it always tells a strange story. It reminds me of the French film Fantastic Planet, or the web cartoon Salad Fingers, or the surreal animated MTV shows from the ’90s like Aeon Flux, The Maxx, The Head, and Liquid Television. Fans of bizarro should take note.

I first discovered Jase Daniels when I picked up his book (a collaboration with bizarro writer Forrest Armstrong) called This City is Alive:

It’s a great book that was nominated for the Wonderland Book Award. Although it is now sold out, it is perhaps the most beautiful bizarro book to be published. It is a short novel with full color illustrations. Forrest and Jase are the perfect match of artist and writer. They compliment each others’ work perfectly. I hope they work together on many future projects.

Last week I got an advance copy of his new book, The Grubby End:

It was published by Crossing Chaos, a new company that has released books by some bizarro people like Jase Daniels, Forrest Armstrong, and Tom Bradley (although I’ve heard the company is anti-bizarro for some reason).

The Grubby End is a wonderfully surreal story of pictures, like a 100 page bizarro version of a David Wiesner or Maurice Sendak book. The story is genuinely creepy in style, and weird as hell. It’ll take you on a journey through an insecty world of soggy sky scrapers, maggot eggs, and little goblin-like people. It’s genuinely creepy and weird as hell. It is also 100% bizarro. I highly recommend it.

Here are some samples:

It’s coming soon. Watch for it on amazon.com or crossingchaos.com.

To check out more of Jase Daniels’ artwork, go to his website: http://www.jasedaniels.com

This entry was posted on June 25, 2009 at 6:49 am and is filed under Bizarro Artists, Bizarro Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.