Some stuff I picked up at CAKE last weekend

Sara Drake had this funny, beautiful, creepy risograph comic about something terrible happening in a museum. It's wordless and there's some wonderful off-camera action sequences and great use of panels in a way I don't think I've ever seen. It's called Tipu's Tiger. I'm hoping for a sequel.

This is a spread from a little biological dream love comic by Ines Estrada.

On my way into the show Laura Perez-Harris handed me this crazy anthology/experiment-in-book-design, which has an interview with me in it. There's some great looking stuff in it including a novel approach to the problem of making a comic bilingual. It involves printing the translation in black and white ink on a transparency to match the word balloons, which is then bound into the book. Ingenious (not pictured).below are Alicia Galer,  Jason Estrin, and Mickey Z

Anya Davidson made a crazy sci-fi pulp love story called Needle Dick:

Michael Deforge sketchbook zine:

Laura Park worked magic on a matchbook cover for me:

And I picked up the new David B book from Uncivilized. It was a good show. Lots of stuff is not pictured including the mock-up Zak Sally was showing off of the not quite finished Recidivist 4. stay tuned about that.

Ratko Ikic

On Saturday morning I had breakfast with Nick and Nadine of Sonnenzimmer. Afterward, on the way South to CAKE we were distracted by a row of huge, colorful paintings leaning up against a wrought iron fence on Ashland avenue. We immediately pulled over for a better look and ended up talking to the artist, Ratko Ikic. He didn't have much English and none of us speak... Bosnian? So very little was really communicated (he has a book of English Castles that he references... and that's about all I got). These are a few of the paintings. They are kind of stunning.

Clearly he's self taught, I'm guessing he came to painting late in life. But they really had a pretty amazing, idiosyncratic sense of mood and light and color. And the guy is ambitious. They were big. And there were a lot of them. It was pretty amazing in about six different ways at once.

That's him in the cowboy hat. He's got a gallery/studio at 4036 N Ashland. Go knock on his door if you're curious. He might actually try to give you one.