Monday, August 17, 2009

Mark Burrier's Rare Words

The cartoonist and illustrator Mark Burrier is doing something over on his website that's faintly similar to Doodle Penance.

(I don't at all intend to suggest that he's even heard of our project; I just mean to note the similar sort of web-fueled drawing, and to point you in his direction if you haven't seen his site. I've never met Mark, really, though I've taken a few postcards from him at MoCCA over the years. I like his comics.)

Anyway, he's got a place in his sidebar where visitors to Rare Words can input a word or phrase. He then illustrates those phrases, in the order they're submitted.



This, for example, is "Devil Donkey." For some reason that's the first thing that came into my head when I visited his site a couple of weeks ago.

Go check out his site, and make sure you probe around long enough to see "Finding Life," "Comely," and "Believe in Love," which are a few of my favorites from his project.

Which of his pieces do you like the best?

4 comments:

  1. I'd like to add that the methods of Doodle Penance and of Mark Burrier's images also recall those of flarf, a recent movement (so to speak) of poetry that graced (so to speak) the pages of the latest issue of Poetry (Chicago).

    One of these days I really need to make a post about the ridiculous amount of comics-related material in Poetry over the last year. In the meantime, here's the URL for the Wikipedia entry on flarf:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flarf_poetry

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  2. I don't really think Burrier's project is very flarfy.

    He's basically just drawing what people "tell" him to draw—like an artist at a convention, only with a really off-kilter series of requests.

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  3. Also, I rather liked Seraglio and Autopsy. I also liked Believe in Love, but I wonder if you liked it more for its cynical wit or for its prominent use of an insect.

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