ACCORDION FACE

In a comment on the first ever Accordion Face post, from cartoonist/writer/comix publisher Jay Lynch, Jay raised the point of “who influenced Basil Wolverton? … Wolverton’s style, it seems, came full-blown out of nowhere”. I was thinking most likely Boris Artzybasheff, who I had also neglected to blog about to date. Anyway, from my quick bit of research and calculations, Boris Artzybasheff appears to have been doing the grotesque anthropomorphous characters a few years ahead (~1940) of Wolverton’s more exaggerated/distorted characters (using Lena the Hyena as a reference point 1946). Though the two styles seem to converge more over time. So maybe it’s even just coincidence, and great minds being affected by the times. Would love to hear any thoughts on this!

Subject for another Basil Wolverton post later down the track no doubt. For now, here’s a selection of the mindblowing catalog of work by Boris Artzybasheff. My absolute favourite of which being the “Machinalia” series via ASIFA Hollywood Animation Archive:

More from Artybasheffs’ book “As I See” via ASIFA Hollywood Animation Archive’s posts and google:

Goosebumps books were the shit. I couldn’t get enough of them as a kid, being a member of the Goosebumps club, and collecting them up until.. about the point the artwork started changing. I don’t know if I would have been half as into it if it wasn’t for the first 60-70+ covers, all of which TIM JACOBUS was responsible for. I discovered that they’ve re-released the old books with revamped covers, which are also great, but I’m still partial to the originals as well as the first GOOSEBUMPS type treatment and greatly garish colour schemes.

You can see the process of this one on Tim’s website here.

I wish Scholastic had released an art book of all his covers. I’m also surprised at the lack of quality scans of the covers online.

Tim’s out-of-print book “IT CAME FROM NEW JERSEY” has been placed right at the top of my book wish list!

What were your favourite covers?

Links:
Tim Jacobus
Scholastic’s Goosebumps page

Victor Soma is a Polish Illustrator and artist. I imagine Poland must be a pretty cool place to work, in terms of Illustration, Design and Advertising. And very much Accordion Face friendly? I love Polish poster design, especially 70’s/80’s Polish film posters.  I admit however, I don’t know a lot about other Polish creative output.

Victor’s work reminded me of the surreal, and kinda violent aesthetic of these posters. Really cool crazy stuff!

You can check out more of Victor’s work at his Flickr.

See more of Victor Soma’s work here.

Charlie Immer is an Illustrator / painter from Brooklyn, NYC. I’ve had the above image as my desktop background for some time time now, and haven’t found anything worthy of replacing it. His cutesy character designs in their sugar-coated environment really cancels out just how f***ed up what is actually taking place in each of his pieces. SO GOOD.

I’ll let the work speak for itself, but if you’d like to read more about Charlies work and what inspires him, there’s a great interview with the man over on
Creep Machine.

Charlie Immer’s website

While I’ve already broken my run of focusing on Illustrators, this was too good not to share! I stumbled on this kiddy-car by Elmer Presslee on his Flickr. I can only hope that the day I have kids they’ll be into monsters et al  so I can make weird stuff for them!

And to finish off, a picture Of Elmer and his son in costume! Check out his Flickr for loads more anatomical oddities.

UPDATE: I just discovered Bill’s (aka Elmer) website here.