Jason Goad

Rafael Grampa

Comic book artist Rafael Grampa’s style reminds me of Taiyo Motsumoto’s but with an art-nouveau and even tattoo-inspired sense of layout informing each panel. His unique renderings of classic comic book characters has certainly rekindled my interest in superheroes. His comic, FURRY WATER and the Sons of Insurrection, co-written with Daniel Pellizzari, is due out from Dark Horse next year.

Bin Zhang’s comic book art

The work of Chinese comic artist Benjamin — nee Bin Zhang — is full of energy, and bright but contracted colours. He has published his comic book in seven European countries, and his book, Orange, was a big hit in the French market. After impressing fans with his fast and dynamic drawing skills at the Comic Convention in New York, the editors at Marvel Comics started to take notice of this young digital artist. Read more

Ryan Pequin’s Three Word Phrase

Ryan Pequin’s Three Word Phrase web comics are completely absurd, often non-sensical, and completely juvenile like doodles passed around in a high school biology class, which is what makes them hilarious.

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.