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.

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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 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.

Somehow, writer/artist Giannis Milonogiannis pulls all of this off with the finesse of an illustrator with much more comics experience. OCB will be available in print for the first time this June from Archaia Comics, but you can read a good chunk of the series free on the OCB website.

Twelve Greek comic artists have come together to bring more absurdity to this world. They all use the same 4 four-panel format. Now, all you have to do is read while drinking your morning coffee.

Warren Ellis is beloved of many comic fans for his wryly funny and occasionally sickening visions of a future dystopia. His current ongoing project is published online in weekly installments and completely without charge. A post-apocalyptic saga concerning a band of psychic British punks, FreakAngels is illustrated by Paul Duffield in a flat, line-heavy style tinged with fantasy-anime that sets the series apart from the look of mainstream print comics.

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Ever want to know what your favorite superhero is really like? Ever wondered what was going on in the head of one of your childhood cartoons? The truth is that they think of random stupidity, just like everyone else. The Munchausen Affect has given you a passage to those intimate, personal, and downright silly thoughts.

Iron Man, Wonder Woman, the X-Men, Doctor Who and Frodo never looked so cute! These soft, adorable, and delightfully geeky ‘amigurumi’ (Japanese miniature knit dolls) created by Lady Lindsay make a sweet gift for the comic fan or movie buff in your world, even if that person is you. Or me — I’ll take Batman and The Joker for the win.

Steve Cakebread has been a graphic designer and cartoonist for twenty years. His off-kilter cartoons, which are a wry comment on human condition, have been published in newspapers and surf titles like The Bulletin, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Good Weekend, The Melbourne Age, Australian Surfing Life, Fleur (Brazilian Surf Magazine). When I asked why he doesn’t take his cartoons to job interviews, he told me he thinks they might just be an acquired taste, and wouldn’t want to upset any delicate palates. I’m starting to understand what he was getting at.

Mark: When someone you’ve never met before asks you to describe your comics, how do you explain them?
Steve: Edgy, dark and often right down in the gutter.

M: What’s the relationship between your cartoons and your work as a graphic designer? Which came first?
S: I’ve always done the cartoons. The graphic design came along a fair bit later, almost by accident in some ways.

M: How did you get your work published? When was it? What’s the story?
S: I’ve always drawn cartoons. I was a regular contributor to the University magazine where I attended and continued drawing when I travelled overseas. I’d been painting in a communal studio in Adelaide when I returned and the cartoons were just something I kept doing. One day I sent half a dozen single panel cartoons to the Bulletin magazine and to my surprise the editor loved them and bought all six. It went from there and I managed to become a regular contributor for about 6 years.

M: Did it become a regular gig right away?
S: Once I got published with the Bulletin, things really began to roll for me. It opened up a national audience and because the editor liked my style so much, he published almost everything I sent him. This then lead to the gig with The Melbourne Age where I got a regular daily spot, which continued for about 3 years. A lot of illustration and graphic work spun off from this.

M: When it did become an ongoing exercise, did it change the way you created the work? I mean when you were writing, did the knowledge that it would be read by a regular audience have any bearing on your content?
S: I had to produce 5 cartoons a week. They were essentially comments on the human condition. I tried to maintain a certain edge to the work I created. The fact that I had much wider audience meant that I was very conscious of keeping up a high standard of the work.

M: What do you consider to be the main influences in the development of your comic style?
S: I was a child of the late 70s punk generation so a lot of my influences grew out of that aesthetic. British Illustrator Ralph Steadman was a huge influence as well.

M: Oh I can see that connection just looking at some of his work. It’s really quite unnerving. Your comics are intended for adults. Do you ever feel the need to self-censor or do you let it fly exactly as it comes to you?
S: No I create stuff as it comes to me. The censorship normally comes from the editor but in my case this was extremely rare. In the six years of publishing I only had one story pulled because the subject was a high profile surfer and the mag got nervous about being sued.

M: Do you like to stir the pot? Do you like the idea that some people will get it and appreciate it and others might be offended?
S: I definitely love stirring the pot. The comic I published with Australian Surfing Life did upset a lot of people, even the senior members of the editorial team tried to have it shelved. They argued that it wasn’t in the true spirit of surf culture in Australia. To the credit of my Editor, Derek Reilly, he ignored the criticism and continued to publish the cartoon. It ended up running for 5 years and developed a huge fan base. I ended up selling it to a Brazilian surf mag as well. The comic did get its fair share of complaint letters though. A lot of parents were upset by the rampant drug taking, drinking, stealing, swearing, blasphemy and rubber doll shagging. I couldn’t understand why…

M: Did the publishing of your work have any affect on continuity? Did you start writing story lines or does each strip stand alone?
S: The comic strip evolved over time. The more I wrote and drew it, the more I got to understand my characters. The fucked up nature of certain characters would often drive the storylines. They were all stupid and really didn’t give a shit about anything apart from going surfing. There’s got to be a fair amount of humour in that premise alone. The stories more or less stand alone but there were times when I didn’t know how to end a particular episode. That’s where “to be continued..” came in very handy.

M: Can an artist expect to earn a living from publishing comics? I know that’s sort of a “how long is a piece of string question”…
S: It’s a very tough way to make a living. Cartoonists don’t receive the respect or recognition the way they do in Europe. Getting a regular spot in a major newspaper is really difficult. I think I got lucky, but I had a style that the editors seemed to like at that time. There are great spin-offs from being published though. I picked up quite a bit of freelance work in advertising and Illustration more or less off the back of the published cartoons. I don’t think its a career you would take on thinking it will make you a lot of money, but there are plenty of cartoonists who do, mainly in editorial.

M: As well as designing sportswear, you mentioned some TV concepts you were working on? Are you allowed to talk about that?
S: I have numerous projects on the go in various stages of development. For the past 5 years I’ve been working on an animated concept called “The Daisy Cutters” with David Webster at Ambience/Omnilab. It’s the story of a dysfunctional power pop band based in the suburbs of LA. It is unashamedly pitched into the American market. We have completed a 3 minute storyboard/animatic with a full voiced soundtrack and looking to go to pilot soon. Ambience has funded us over this period and we’ve also managed to record 2 music tracks, which I also co-wrote. We are currently looking for a second partner to finance a 13 part series.

Prior to that I worked on 13 X 1 minute downloadable animations for the Mobile 3G network, creating characters and co-writing scripts.

I also have a kids animation concept called “Boy Germz” currently in development as well. I’m also working on a range of T-shirt designs under the name of “Inkriminate”. I’ve done about 20 designs all up.

M: I’m noticing a lot of multi-discipline when I’m talking to creative people. Do you enjoy working across all these different mediums and having a bunch of projects to focus on at the same time?
S: Yeah I do, but I must say I’m not the world’s greatest multi-tasker. I like devoting time to one thing at a time and seeing it though to some kind of resolution.

M: You’ve definitely got a lot on your plate. How did you get into graphic design? Did you study? What was your entry point to the industry?
S: I got into graphic design after I scored a job with Hot Tuna Surfwear. I was employed on the strength of my cartoons so I had to learn the programs on the job. Thinking back on it, that was a tough entry into that world. I had no formal training as a graphic designer, I actually studied painting. I learned the programs and it more or less went from there.

M: Sometime being thrown in the deep end is the best way to learn though don’t you think? Do you have any future plans for your comics?
S: I have an idea that I’ve thinking about for a while. I’ve done some initial character designs and roughed out a few basic storylines. The working title is “Spakkfilla”. The basic premise is about a character that inhabits a modern day hell, like a sort of suburban Dante Inferno. He lives in a soulless concrete apartment with his partially skeletal dog on a diet of heroin and icy poles and a television that can never be switched off. It’s a horror story really. Spakkfilla is a character that lives in the gaps of life, his existence is barely acknowledged. He’s a metaphor for the dislocated life much of the modern world embraces as normal…mmm, that sounds kinda fucked up doesn’t it?

I want to create something that is dark but funny and reflective of a modern dystopian life. I am drawn to totalitarian regimes like North Korea and Burma whose governments mind fuck their citizens. I think this is great subject matter for art and comics.

M: I can understand that. Humour speaks the loudest truth after all.

Italian artist Vacon Sartirani specializes in all things wormy, sluggy, and grotesque, often interjecting his writhing creatures into more recognizable pop images. His Mickey Mouse against the Worms series re-writes old Disney comics to feature slimy, writhing, faceless monsters.

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When I visited San Francisco a few years ago, in the middle of a film festival, on a beautiful morning when Spring was starting to dress us more colorfully and happy. I went to SFMoMA and saw an installation by the artist Ann Hamilton called Indigo Blue. Before going back to the cinema, I took a look into the gift shop. Near the books, I found glasses, author postcards, and a wallet that surprised me. It was part of the Poketo Collection, designed by Alex Noriega, an illustrator from Barcelona. Yesterday, I found his new project, Stuff No One Told Me, a blog with a collection of comics with funny and inspired sentences about our life. Alex Noriega told us more about his work.

In your previous works, we found a world of dreams. Between robots and animals flying in a soft atmosphere, your new work is projecting reality. Can you tell me more about this transition?
‘It isn’t something that I want to change forever. I still enjoy painting about nothing in particular. Stuff No One Told Me is just a new project I started that happens to be about reality and and what happens to people on a day to day basis. Although it has some sort of philosophical view of things. I try to keep it as relevant to my life and interests as possible. So whatever I upload is important to me in that time of my life as well, and I guess people can tell. It’s funny how each person understand the comics differently’.

What’s coming after this project?
‘I don´t really know what’s going to come next. But if things come out as I want, I will be publishing illustrated books — for adults and children — for the rest of my life’.

We have three signed copies of the first issue of City of Abacus?, a comic book pop singer VV Brown recently created with David Allian and illustrator, Emma Price. To enter, Just Like any post on the LAEM homepage, then leave a comment under this giveaway with the city you live in.

Artist and illustrator Melody Often has a subtle art nouveau-inspired quality to her comics and paintings, but a slight manga influence is evident as well with the glassiness of her figures’ eyes, and the odd-looking creatures in her surreal compositions seem like spirits that have escaped a Hieronymus Bosch netherworld into a dark but protective forest.

What’s not to love about the idea of taking classic 1980s album covers (The Breakfast Club soundtrack, for instance) and reinterpreting them using characters from famous comic book series’. Illustrator Cliff Chiang has done just that. And he’s done it very well, with his takes on Jennifer Beals from Flashdancing as Electra and Duran Duran as Vampirella, among others.

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I went to SVA with Khary Randolph. I thought that i could draw before I met this dude. Khary is absolutely amazing as an illustrator. I swear dude was drawing comics for marvel while he was still in college (this may not be true, but it sure as hell seemed that way). Dude was that good.

Since Graduation he has worked for a number of clients in the animation, advertising and comic book industries and left his mark on many properties, such as Spider-Man, X-Men, Hellboy, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Boondocks and Teen Titans.

Brooklyn artist Lizz Hickey specializes primarily in print, her DIY comics-inspired imagery translating well into the medium with their blobs of shape and color layered over with intricate patterns and trippy, surreal details.

The very humor of Kate Beaton’s latest web comic series, Canadian Stereotype Comics, is predicated on the stereotype that Canadians are too non-descript to really have stereotypes. Plus, Beaton herself hails from the Great White North. Is that totally meta or what?

For the person who has everything comes this: Custom Bobbleheads. ‘With over 190 body types to choose from, you can’t go wrong with a comic bobble head based on your friend, family member or significant other. These comic figures have exaggerated bodies and heads lovingly hand-carved in poly-clay by a master artist’. Fun!

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Stumbling across the comics of artist Vanessa Davis just made my day. Her personal meanderings and sketchy style just make me want to read every little thing I can get my hands on. I especially enjoy the memior-esque series she’s been creating for Tablet Mag. I can’t think of any better way to procrastinate on a weekday afternoon.

Damn is this funny. Not only funny, but beautifully illustrated and sometimes educational. The Oatmeal has been around for a while and has been publishing a stack of new comics lately. My favourite is ’15 things worth knowing about coffee’. I’d been wondering where the term ‘Americano’ comes from, and due to an amusing illustration and an educational note I now know during WWII American soldiers ordered water with their espresso to dilute the strong flavour. Isn’t that something? To have a laugh and learn a few things, check out The Oatmeal.

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.