HYPNOKOMIX is a loveletter to the “comic book” in all its forms: a fractal collage that evokes an immersive, sensurround experience in the beholder through a science of pages and frames and bubbles. The brain fills in the blanks between the panels. It is programmed to do so. The comic book, in this sense, is like sheet music for a symphony of hallucinations. Another world or several are conjured by the primordial hieroglyphic breakthrough of lines on paper and the shapes they make.
HYPNOKOMIX is a tribute, too, to the customary subject matter of Western Manga: the hyperbolic sleazy pulp flash and pop! of genuine American Surrealism. The love diaries of nubile teenage mutations who have multiple bodies or bodies made of glass and souls made of smoke. Spastic teen sidekicks with ceaselessly shrieking signal watches, shifting shapes and travelling through time and dressing up like gorilla beauty queens to get the attention of their Ubermenschen. The lavish neuroses of quantum burn victims who can’t keep track of a conversation due to the digital din of pixels crunching and atoms chafing in transit. Evils so massive they cast ravenous shadows across the teeming surfaces of infinite Earths. Only in comics do things happen like they do in dreams.
HYPNOKOMIX is an evocation of the transformative shamanic effect that the mythopoetic fever of comic books can have (has had, IS having) on an adolescent mind that’s fighting to keep its imagination alive as play gives way to socialization… every brain a butterfly to be pinned and mounted and exploited by the hive. A child’s mind is exotic and improvisational and hungry for wonder… before the social programming begins in earnest. A child is looking for survival strategies in all the mixed-up media its omniverous psyche is consuming… in search of a symbol system or context that will make sense of EVERYTHING. If only for a moment.
HYPNOKOMIX is a line of mind-altering ideas wrapped in outrageously beautiful images, the launch of five six-issue arcs that you NEED to READ at the gallery or the comic shop, the hipster boutique, the tattoo parlor, the major metropolitan newsstand and / or the contemplative suburban necropolis. It’s art and attitude and fiction and fashion that feeds a subculture yet unborn. Pop culture from a cluster of possible futures, downloaded into “now” through paper portals and vectors of ink, through the transcendental geometry of pages and frames and bubbles.
HYPNOKOMIX is an art movement disguised as a line of comics disguised as a sentient corporation disguised as a cult disguised as an ad campaign disguised as an art movement. And vice versa. It’s laying eggs in the heads of all who bear witness in improvised HypnoParlors from coast to coast. It’s a gang of five gorgeous, nymphomaniacal magazine mythologies in search of a publisher who will pimp them out to the general populace. Each is immortal and infinitely mutable. And there are twenty-five more worlds where they came from. Twenty-five and counting.
“…the forms and formulas of the comic book have always had the resonance of hidden truth for me, like the trashiest funny-book might contain a crucial conceptual clue to the labyrinth of living, an x-ray spectacle, a distorted glimpse of the motifs and machinations at work in the stories we’re made of, the stories we’re living in, nestled between tacky ads for inflatable skeletons and sea monkey incubatoriums.“
—Jason Squamata
