Theo Ellsworth, author of the innocently hallucinatory graphic novel Capacity, has just come out with a new paperback, Sleeper Car.

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Portland-based illustrator and graphic novelist Theo Ellsworth has a style that is odd and surreal enough for the thirty-something indie set, but also have an innocence about them that would suit children’s books — his drawings are dense enough to keep people of all ages staring at all his weirdo characters and animals.

Theo Ellsworth makes obsessively detailed drawings and self-publishes comics, mini comics, and zines about imaginary people and places. The cosmic imagery, subtle geometry, and implied animism in his works recall the epic, heroic, and odd imagery of Jean ‘Moebius’ Girard, Mayan ruins, and the Nazca lines, filtered through the jam-packed and often psychedelic lens of underground comix from the 70s. For Imaginary Friends, at San Francisco’s GRSF Gallery, Ellsworth is making 30 pieces using pen and ink, colored pencil, and watercolor. A quarter of them will be woodcuts. According to the artist, recurring themes include but are not limited to ‘parades of monsters, people made of leaves, scaled and antlered beasts, flying machines, complicated structures, and dreams’. The show runs between July 18 and August 19.