Bootleg Comics
Bootleg Comics is a Naarm-based artist working predominantly in design and illustration. Their black and white graphics are chaotic, cryptic and dense with information. At first, this sensory overload might inspire curiosity, entertainment, stimulation. What might appear to be familiar icons from comic tradition and meme cultures begin to merge and mutate. These hybrid characters inhabit equally warped narratives and landscapes that evade closer inspection.
Bootleg Comics is a Naarm-based artist working predominantly in design and illustration. Their black and white graphics are chaotic, cryptic and dense with information. At first, this sensory overload might inspire curiosity, entertainment, stimulation. What might appear to be familiar icons from comic tradition and meme cultures begin to merge and mutate. These hybrid characters inhabit equally warped narratives and landscapes that evade closer inspection.
Bootleg Comics’ creative process embraces the errors and accidental arrangements that arise through mass reproduction and bootlegging of images intended for public consumption. Most of Bootleg Comics’ subject matter is collected by trawling online databases, old magazines, technical drawings, and game systems.
Bootleg Comics’ designs reverse the prevailing translation of physical media into digital media. By obsessively reproducing the iconography of marketing and pop culture, Bootleg Comics forces a generation of loaded, nostalgic and commercialised imagery to its grotesque limit.
