Monday, January 14, 2008

RENEGADE RHOMBUS by Shunga

To start off this week, I'm excited to share a new comic by one of my favorite cartoonists, Shunga! Shunga is the latest moniker of artist/musician Aaron K, who previously ran an awesome lo-fi site from out in Hawaii where posted his fucked-up comics. We blogged about those comics back here, and the lucky ones may remember some of them, including 20,000 Leagues Under Nebraska, Hyperco, Martian Flaneur and the infamous Vacuum Horror. (SPOILER ALERT: Vacuum Horror ends with Abraham Lincoln's decapitated head floating in space!)



Not one to dwell on the past, dude took down all his old comics a while back, and has relaunched a new site here. Since moving out to SF, we've had the luxury of becoming buddies with Aaron and hanging out with him while he's been working on his latest stuff. The easiest way to describe these comics is like if the spiritual grandson of Burroughs and Maruo played surrealist memetic games on paper made of human flesh with Cronenberg and Jun Hayami (That makes sense, right?). Anyone who's enjoyed the Shintaro Kago scanlations lately owes it to themselves to read on.



In addition to cartooning, Aaron K plays in a bunch of different bands. Previous projects include a noise thing called PEARL JAM II, but you can check out his most recent stuff here:

SHUNGA: Sounds Like "knitted shawls made of rotten hair throwing up plasma."
CASTRO STRETCH: Sounds Like "Muhammed Ali teaming up with Crass, what you know about Gremlins 2: the videogame music?"

As I've mentioned here before, Aaron K is also responsible for Love Entity, the 15-page feature comic for Electric Ant #1. It's a beautiful mind-bender baling together kamikaze pilots and dustbowl sharecroppers with inter-dimensional sexual overtures. At least, that's how I read it. It's fucking great, and will be available this Spring in the zine's first issue.



In the meantime, we are happy to present here the first of hopefully many more amazing Shunga comics by Aaron K. His next comic is already well underway, it's a Running Man-meats-gay Kafka epic titled BULLSHIT MOUNTAIN and featuring the death of Chris Ware on page 2-- It's another winner, I do believe.

Click here for more details on ordering comics from him. He's running a sliding scale, and will be upping the price of the book as he adds more comics to it. If I heard right, the end game is to have a Shunga book with 5-6 comics in it ready for Alternative Press Expo in November. (And I'm gonna try to convince him to reprint Vacuum Horror maybe too).


CLICK BELOW TO READ. ENJOY!

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Send love letters and orders to Aaron K at atkaneshATgmailDOTcom

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

On the topic of that comic. Sort of reminds me of shintaro Kago but the blood splatter and viscera seem reminiscent of Maruo.

I feel bad. I finally get a blog to post art after being so influenced by you guys and the awesome comics you, and then I set one up on wordpress instead of blogspot so I can't add you.
I apologize if this is annoying. I just started it, so there's very little content, but there should be art and an ongoing comic after awhile.

bittermelon said...

stop being like the most supportive friend ever

bryan reynolds said...

downright inspiring
i love it

Ryan S said...

@tbrawner:
Thanks for the comment, and for alerting me to your blog! I've added it to my reader, and will be keeping up on your posts. I'm interested to see more from this comic you've mentioned.

Oh and, I haven't used wordpress myself, but I don't think there is any systemic reason why you couldn't link us if you want to... I'm pretty easy other sites have added us to their "blogroll" section.

Thanks!

Ryan S said...

@bryan: I knew you would dig it :) You should friend shunga on myspace, and check out his music too.

Anonymous said...

The random stream of consciousness reminds me of superjail

Laser Potato said...

...so all of this crap could have been avoided if Mom just used TiVo?
Wow.
Just wow.

Unknown said...

Link appear dead?

Ryan S said...

@Rosana: Yep, Aaron has since taken down the comic. You can see his current work here: http://aaronshunga.com/