Cartoon Workshop/Pig Tales

[January 17th, 2007] Here's an idea of what you're getting into with Paper Rad: the first characters you're introduced to in the Massachusetts minimalist art collective's second book, Cartoon Workshop/Pig Tales (Paper Rad, 96 pages, $15), are Super Ninja (a bit of a pervert, and prone to un-ninjalike cheap shots), Chuck Norris (quite evil, and totes a pet alligator named Lil' Chomper) and Gregg (a dude, maybe gay). No doubt you can imagine the possibilities of this first strip: Gregg begging Chuck Norris for salsa, Super Ninja kicking Chuck Norris in the balls, Lil' Chomper sodomizing Gregg's friends, and so on.

It's all pretty insane, in fact—the entire book rides on the idea that we all need some "pretty insane" in our cultural consumption. This is how Paper Rad—which has partnered with Portland's own E*Rock to create videos for Beck and the Gossip under the name Wyld File—rolls: absurd, crude and trippy. For example, as if the '80s-era, Portland-born California Raisins weren't mind-melting enough (singing raisins!), Paper Rad takes it to a higher level later in Cartoon Workshop—another dimension, if you will. They appropriate Will Vinton's Claymation marketing tool for purposefully inarticulate, hyperdigitized art and psychedelic collages of overlaid and blended raisin figures, one of which features the shriveled grapes lounging in a hot tub, puffing and drinking. A whole book of this stuff, mass-distributed, could do wonders to correct the collective brain damage inflicted by the original Raisins. But, alas, the interlude is just a few pages long.

Flip the book over and you've got Pig Tales, a long series of vignettes revolving around the acid-warped exploits of a pig-faced socialite on a "vision quest" of sorts. (Yes, you read that correctly.) The colors are limited to the Crayola 24-pack spectrum and are retina-searingly bright. Entire frames randomly erupt into hectic tribal patterns or random collage confusion; characters vomit rainbows, other characters vomit speech balloons containing lines like, "I like to go out doors...of perception. It's like when you fall asleep and your mind opens a door to your other mind's...door.'"

By the end, its impossible to tell what the hell "trippy" even means anymore: The book is a constant cycle of parody, earnestness and self-parody. It makes as much sense as you want it to, or as the chemicals in your brain allow you to—naturally...or with help. Call it a coffee table book for the asylum, or call it a collection of scrawlings smuggled out of the asylum. Either way, odds are you could stand to lose your grip on reality for a little while, and Paper Rad helps you reach that goal marvelously.

Perhaps you really just want to know if Cartoon Workshop/Pig Tales is, well, cool. The answer is to be found, eloquently put, in the book itself: "Anything can be cool, if you do something cool with it."

—MICHAEL BYRNE.