GRAPHIC ALBUM REVIEW
07/19/10 (PORTLAND) Andy Grossberg

The Titmouse Mook

Titmouse is an animation studio maybe best known for the Adult Swim cartoon they produce, Metalocalypse. (You can read about our studio visit here.) But they’ve also done commercials, music videos, title sequences for shows, and much much more. Now they have added a graphic anthology to their resume. Why? Who knows, maybe they couldn’t help themselves. But it is an undeniable fact that this entry into the printed page is as creative as everything else they produce. Titmouse brings you: The Titmouse Mook.

Just because a few comicbook adaptations have made some money at the box office everyone thinks they can produce a graphic novel. And every art school thinks they can turn out comic artists. But the mainstreaming of comics has left many cracks in the drying cement of its glorious multi-story tower and those cracks are where the artists of this mook live. In the muck, the grime, the dirt between slabs, which is exactly where talent has room to explore and grow like weeds, coming from a sort of anti-mainstream filled with work that makes you reexamine what you thought sequential art was supposed to be.

Stories in the mook take stabs at genre convention, quite handily, while ripping apart preconceptions. A well drawn story with a female lead that is grounded with schoolboy humor? Flawless in its execution and chock full of satire. These are stories that grab your shoulders and shake the fixed notions out of you. Why a man with a beard of bees? Does it matter when there’s a story to be told? Sure this is a lot like any old sketchbook put out by some animation studio so you’d expect the artists to be familiar with the comic medium but many of these guys run with it and in directions that are unexpected.

There is the weird, the strange, the odd, the gross, the unpolished bits around the edges of comic art that show where there is still room to expand. And then, just when you think you have a a handle on it, they drop in some pieces from an art show in LA or an interview with an artist who’s using a prosthetic leaning device to help him draw while lying on the floor. No, what you have in your hands from the moment you open their mook is pure chaos not just static art on a page.

But if this isn’t enough, and I know it isn’t, read our review and interview with Titmouse head honcho Chris P. in the latest Tripwire out in two weeks. Or click on the pages in this review to get a closer look at some of the art. Or better yet, check it out yourself here.