High-res
Webcomic Wednesday: The art of Matt Furie
The sadness at the heart of this Webcomic Wednesday column is this: Matt Furie doesn’t really do webcomics, or comics of any kind, that much anymore. His four-issue series Boy’s Club, starring degenerate muppet-like young-man characters whom you might recognize from the feels good man meme, remains the funniest comic I’ve ever read, both for how precisely Furie lampooned 20-year-old male idiocy and for how tightly he tied it to the rock-solid character designs of his four leads. That he’s since moved away from sequential work would be a great tragedy but for the fact that it’s freed him to focus solely on those rock-solid character designs. By the dozens. By the hundreds. Imagine the biggest Crayola crayon box you’ve ever seen, now replace each crayon with a different monster but keep the rainbow color palette intact, and you’ve approximated the effect of Furie pieces like the one seen above, or the countless individual creature portraits showcased on his tumblr.
Furie’s creature art is hardly the first such work to combine the influences of the Muppets, Saturday morning cartoons, mascots, video-game enemies, D&D art, stoner culture, and so on – you pretty much can’t imagine him without first thinking of the influential Fort Thunder and Paper Rad crews, to say nothing of the decade of visual culture since their heyday. But Furie’s art delights independently of his influences because he seems so in love with the physical craft of constructing these critters. Look at how Furie draws the folds of flesh in his monsters’ faces, or their goggle eyes, or their leering toothy grins, or bodies covered in scales or fur or hair. These massive line-up drawings, of which he’s done many, give the impression of a sort of delirium, in which each monster is so much fun to draw that he immediately draws the next, and the next, and the next, until the page is full. Few artists capture the childlike rush of sheer creation, creation without boundaries (or without creation myths), the way Furie does. It’s tough to begrudge him his absence from the bookshelf.