This week- surprise surprise!- the awesome Ray Fenwick is going to be guest blogging five of his favorite books. If you haven’t seen Ray’s work or read the huge article about him in Print magazine, then it’s time to check his work out via his website, his flickr page or his design studio’s site. His patterns are my favorite, full of super illustrative elements, they are always light and fun. (He’s been a huge inspiration for me in that department.) His work always has a great sense of humor to it from his handdrawn LL.Cool J lyrics to his Hall of Best Knowledge comics (which this spring will be published by Fantagraphics) to this great Don’t Freak Out Shopper tote bag. Ray has such a big fan club that it was almost impossible to get one of his Tiny Showcase letterpressed prints. When it came time to purchase I had to click refresh about 55 times because the site was so overloaded. I always look forward to hearing what Ray’s up to next because it’s always something exciting and his emails often make me laugh outloud. I am so so happy he was willing to contribute to this blog and make me laugh a little more. Thanks Ray!!

You should buy it!

A year or so ago a friend let me borrow a PBS series about contemporary art called Art:21, and it was there that I was introduced to the work of Trenton Doyle Hancock. Introduced sounds wrong, too genteel, because really, I mean, he kind of tore a whole in my brain. The paintings and prints he does are these dense, colourful narratives from a complex universe he’s created, with characters and plots that have an almost biblical feel. Then, to hear him talk about these characters and stories, it lets you see just how developed this whole story is. He’s making comics, but they’re taking the form of paintings, with action so complex that you wish you had a guide to what was going on.

Tooling around on the Picturebox site one day, I found this very guide, created by Trenton Doyle Hancock himself. The book was inspired by, and even laid out like, The Official Marvel Handbook of the Marvel Universe, which was a guidebook to all the super-heroes and villains from Marvel comics, so it’s a nice little nod to Hancock’s comics influence. Inside he gives full descriptions of all the characters in his paintings. He documents their history, intelligence, aliases, affiliations and everything else you could ever need to know, and it never ruins the mystery, it just enriches the experience of enjoying his work. It’s rare that you get to peek into the world an artist imagines, so the whole thing feel like a privilege, as though you found Hancock’s private notes in a drawer somewhere.

© Julia Rothman 2007