Acontortionista Manifesto
MMMNNNRRRGGG comics, Portugal Published June, 2011 44 pages, 6.5 x 9 inches soft bound, two colors This book was mailed free of charge to me by the enigmatic Portuguese publisher MMMNNNRRRGGG. I was immediately drawn to its effective use of artistic sensibilities that referenced ancient Greek imagery in an Art Deco/Nouveau context; probably Aubrey Beardsley. There is however a modernist simplification of those styles, the hatching and meticulous rendering are traded for minimalist washes of pink and careful line work, which evoke at times Japanese Ukiyo-e or the pop art of Roy Lichtenstein. The group responsible for this book is a collective going by the name of "Empirio." One of their members is photographed here. (Hey, good lookin'.) That visual style, old and new, tasteful and reductive, is a good way to describe the content of this book, which is indeed a manifesto, a documentation of a group's beliefs and ideals. In 2012 it's quite absurd