Deadboy Designs

Quirky illustrations by Murray Somerville

If you’re a fan of the weird and wonderful, you’d be stupid not to check out the work of Murray Somerville. His quirky illustrations transport you to a surreal and humorous world, and have appeared across a range of zines, comics, t-shirts and even Becks bottles.

Is Superman renouncing his American citizenship?

Could it be that America’s foremost superhero is turning his back on the country that made him fly? In more ways than one. It’s been reported that in The Incident, a short story in Action Comics #900, the caped crusader (no, not that one) tires of the political mess he’s embedded in and decides ‘to continue working as a superhero from a more global than national perspective’. How it plays out from here? Only Xray vision will reveal.

Old City Blues

Old City Blues is a cyberpunk mystery comic with the mood of a Noir tale, the fast-and-furious action of Japanese animation, and kinetic artwork that reads more like a big-budget sci-fi movie than a comic book. Old City Blues tells the story of a futuristic Athens, Greece, and the police force that navigates through the criminal life that dwells in it. Think Moebius and Paul Pope collaborating on a southeastern European blend of ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘Akira’, but with more giant robots. Read more

Ken Taylor

Australian illustrator Ken Taylor has created imagery for some of rock n’ ’roll’s great purveyors of sound, from the Rolling Stones and Queens of the Stone Age, to Nine Inch Nails and the Mars Volta. He has an easily recognizable style that screams sharp edge cool. Bold and bawdy, Taylor’s pieces use vivid colour to create a cut-out-comic-like feel reminiscent of old movie posters from the 1930s and 40s.

Kelly Smith

Beautiful, delicate, fragile, a little bit collage, a little bit sketchfull. This is the work of Kelly Smith. Combining several mediums in a collaborative expose between pencil, paint and print to create timeless works of elegant splendour, it is easy to compare Smith’s works to the last snowflake of winter, fleeting but real, avoiding the brash bright mercantile world for the prettier climes of illustrative pleasure. Smith has a twelve-day exhibition on at the 696 Space in Brunswick, Melbourne, opening November 14.

Brandt Peters

Trapped in a time warp between then and now, the work of Brandt Peters combines an old school aesthetic with a modernity bordering on futuristic fantasy, with a touch of morbid fascination thrown in for good measure. In other words, he creates wonderful imagery combining cartoon-like pin-ups with sometimes freakish attributes (large skulled beings, for instance), and every now and then seems to throw in a nod to sci-fi — such as a mechanical glass jar — for good measure. Muted tones replace the bawdy colours often associated with such mediums, giving his pieces a whimsical, dream like quality. He must live in a delightfully wispy world.