Monday, January 31, 2011

Dina Kelberman: Pwning Indie Comics Since...

































For the adventurous music lover out there, if you have at any point in the past year or so visited Tiny Mix Tapes, there is a good chance that you've stumbled across the art of Dina Kelberman.  She illustrated their year-end headings for 2010 and contributes to their comics section with her online series, Aperiodic Comics.  She also has a slim little perfect bound title called Important Comics: A Collection of Unquestionable Merit & a monthly "periodical" called The Regular Man which is now about 15 or so issues deep and consists of a single page foldout comic.  And she's a genius, pure an simple.

Despite the crude simplicity of her characters, Kelberman manages with her layout, typography and proper use of a heavy yellow-red-blue color palate, the most beautiful, smart and artistically accomplished comics currently being published (self or otherwise).  And funny.  She is to comics what Don Hertzfeldt is to animation, an incredibly creative, out-there-weird and uniquely witty voice.  Her book, with its humbly sarcastic title, is nonetheless extremely important, evolving comics from their casual throwaway beginnings to something I could see (and hope to see sometime in the future) hanging on the walls of my home.

The Regular Man is similarly smart and perhaps even more focused in terms of pushing layout, narrative and color (in the space of a single page!).  Maintaining the same core characters it operates seamlessly with the book and the online work.  In addition to Kelberman's visual awesomeness, the dialogues she explores, while sometimes bizarrely vague (ala David Lynch imagined as a twenty-something year old slacker), are more often disarmingly insightful.  It's a win-win-win-win, or something.  Really, head over to Important Comics and check out her work.  Here are a selection of some of my favourite Aperiodic Comics below:

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