Samplerman - Fearless Colors (EN)

Comics took 40 years to reach automatism (thank you Robert Crumb and Moebius for taking drugs!). It “wandered around” with autobiography, author self-representation, journalism, essays, and chronicles — and took an eternity to gain institutional recognition. We can’t stay on the sidelines, we can’t let the DJs take the whole cake! Grab those scissors and glue! Or better yet… fire up Photoshop!

Is it a bird?
Is it a plane?
No!
It’s Samplerman!!!

A thief who steals from a thief earns a thousand years of forgiveness!

FEARLESS COLORS compiles some of the best comic pages Samplerman created between 2012 and 2015. You could say they pay homage to the American comic books of the 1940s and 1950s, but mixed together like a DJ set in what Marcos Farrajota dubbed the “Comix Remix” — an article originally written for the Finnish newspaper Kuti and now available in various languages, including Portuguese on the Chili Com Carne blog.

Crossing classic genres like romance, detective fiction, sci-fi, and horror, some of the pages reference the work of Fletcher Hanks as well as the “original Samplerman”: Ray Yoshida. Violence, action, gunshots, spaceships, microbes and bacteria, mutilated bodies — all are reassembled in a fractal collage that opens up new narrative and interpretive possibilities.

Behind every superhero, there’s always an alter ego. In Samplerman’s case, it’s the French illustrator Yvang. He began the Samplerman project in 2012 through the Tumblr ZDND (La Zone De Non-Droit) alongside the restless Leo Quievreux, and has been infecting the web ever since. He has contributed to several publications such as š! (Latvia), Off Life, Smoke Signal, Ink Brick, Lagon, The Village Voice, and Scratches. His solo works include: Street Fights Comics (self-published, 2016), Miscomocs Comics (Le Dernier Cri, 2017), Samplerman (Secret Headquarters, 2017), and an illustration for the LP compilation Intrepid Curves #18 by Vinyl Moon. He also created a cover for DC Comics’ Doom Patrol, specially invited by Grant Morrison.