Conceived, edited and designed by five-time New York Festival of Advertising award-winner Monte Beauchamp, BLAB! has been an annual coffee-table showcase of fine art, illustration and comix for over a decade. It is an objet d'art that has become a standard-bearer in the world of the professional visual arts. Every volume of BLAB! features an eclectic mix of the world's most exciting artists from the underground and counterculture, fine arts community, and commercial fields, but this volume is exceptional, with the introduction of many new contributors in addition to familiar favorites like Gary Baseman, whose hit TV show, Teacher's Pet, was recently turned into a critically acclaimed Disney animated feature. Pop Art virtuoso Lou Brooks delivers the front and back covers, while Juxtapoz magazine favorite Christian Northeast does the insides covers.
Also: Sue Coe takes a look at the so-called Bird Flu in "Fowl Plague," now rapidly spreading across Asia and almost certain to cause a world wide pandemic; Matti Hagelberg's "Shoes Say U.K.K.," wherein the President of Finland dies and rises from his grave; autobiography from Nightmare Alley's Spain Rodriguez; Jeffrey Steele's story about the Black Dahlia murder and the man who believes his father was the murderer; Peter Kuper's four-page, full-color, Little Nemo-inspired fantasy titled "Dream Machines"; Peter Hoey's "discovered" episodes from a long-lost newspaper serial featuring the Victorian adventurer Lt. Blade, in "The Mystery of the Empty Mirage;" Douglas Fraser's "Jumbo Shrimp," a two-pager about many things, including the ongoing, quiet grind of the common place, the gray of specific generics, and the times when God or Science just don't cut it; Tim Biskup paints up "Great Ghost Walk," wherein spirits hunt for robot souls; and Laura Levine relates a story about one autumn morning in Sept., 1945 when Farmer Lloyd Olsen went out to the henhouse and decapitated a robust Wyandotte rooster for that evening's dinner only to discover that it just wouldn't die, in "The Story of Mike the Headless Chicken."
New contributors include Xavier Robel, Helge Revmann, Geoffrey Grahn, Nicolas DeBon, Don Collie, Owen Smith, and Gary Taxali. This volume also includes Beauchamp's long-awaited piece on Kilroy (of "was here" fame). 120 pp. (54 in color), 10" x 10".
