Since I hadn’t seen anyone else mention it, I thought it was worth noting before the World Cup ended how similar the new Adidas football logo is to the Ableton Live logo from a few years back. Accidental? I doubt it.

Alex Grey unveiled his latest painting at the MAPS 2010 "Psychedelic Science in the 21st Century" conference on Saturday night.  Painted in acrylic on canvas, "The Shulgins and their Alchemical Angels" features the portaits of Ann and Sasha Shulgin, a husband and wife team who were pioneer psychedelic researchers, most famous for their books PiHKAL and TiHKAL, which Grey inscribes at the top of the image.  The molecule formation in Sasha Shulgin's hand is most likely a reference to the significant chemical discoveries he had made during his career.

Website io9 recently reported on a new exhibition of paintings by Mark Todd featuring classic Marvel and DC comic covers drawn by the likes of Jack Kirby, John Romita and even Don Heck.  Todd emulates the original covers fairly closely, in so far as the references can easily be recognized by anyone familiar with the  comics, though he deviates from them in ways that helps lend the works an air of artistic credibility.  Applying many of the motifs found in Pop Art, Todd changes the original color scheme, often using a monotone across the whole work and sometimes highlighting it with a few flecks of brightly colored paint.  He uses a variety of mixed media and draws in a scribbly zine style, which has become popular in the last few years.  To his credit, he changes and abstracts from the narrative content of the original covers, yet, apart from the cool references, I don't get the impression that Todd really has that much to say.  At best, there seems to be a vague sense of irony typical of postmodern art, but little else.

From what I can see, this is an idea in its embryonic stage, a great starting point from which to explore what makes comic covers from that era so visually impactful and what that might say about modern forms of visual communication.  But I feel like Todd has stopped short.  He hasn’t quite dismantled the format and reinterpreted it from a 2010 perspective.  As a result, the works suffer from an overreliance on the creativity of the original comic artists, leaving one feeling somewhat empty-handed after the novelty has worn off. The artist applies typical visual arts motifs that we’ve often seen in galleries and museums, but without any substantial analysis or commentary that separates the paintings from the original works in a significant way.  These are paintings that were conceived to look like art, rather than challenge the viewer to see something new in a familiar form.  It's a good start, but I think Todd needs to take it much further to deliver on its potential.  Conceptually, this is a sketch, not a finished product.

The wonderful world of Misney, a surreal mashup for the new decade. This print represents Disney's acquisition of Marvel in an image that unites the two iconographic fictional universes.  Though they seemed to previously reside in two separate areas of our imaginations, they are portrayed here in a new synthesis, providing a jarring but enjoyable platform from which to consider how these dissimilar worlds interrelate.    

Bob Dylan will showcase his painting talent in an international exhibition in 2010.  "Train Tracks" is taken from the collection called "Brazil".

Fom the CoSM Blog.

Robert Crumb's website announces a reissue of a classic Crumb print A Short History of America.