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Vice Blog

NOEL FREIBERT IS AN EXTREME TROGLODYTE

Noel Freibert first blew up many minds with his silkscreen packaged like a monster-shaped box which you slowly unclasped until it spilled out in an explosion of beautiful guts. He's part of Baltimore's Closed Caption Comics geniuses, a collective who've been doing some of the very best work in the fine art and comics fields, further blurring the separation between those two scenes. Everyone in the group is great. Zach Hazard, Chris Day, all those guys… But Noel's the first guy I noticed and what he does is so immediately huge and obviously good that you feel ashamed. Imagine a man with a giant sack on his back. Then he hits you in the head with that sack. As you pass out you see that the word "TALENT" is written on that sack. This sack-man is Noel. He did the most recent Vice Comic. Here's what he had to say for himself.

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How'd you come up with that Froggy fold-out silkscreen object you made?
Ahh yes, the Troggy book. I came up with that format from sitting around and folding paper, measuring things, messing around, experimenting with paper. The idea formally was to be somewhere between a toy, a sculpture, and a book. The book is the body of one character "Troggy," it changes into other things, other characters, as you open it.

Where'd Closed Caption Comics come from?
We all went to school together. It started out very small, just a group of people interested in comics. We would get together and draw for a couple of hours and then print whatever we had finished.

Now it's a blog. Just kidding, we make a new physical book every once in a while, issue nine is coming soon.

Aren't you guys like the comics wing of Wham City or something?
We aren't involved with Wham City.

What's with the pony tail?
I'm a man of simple solutions.

Where'd your drawing sensibilities come from?
It's a mix of Heta Uma, pre-code comics, and matisse. I think of painting and sculpture also.

How do you make money?
I sell my time under the title of "Security Officer" at a museum.

Outside of the CCC guys who do you like in comics right now?
In no order: Jesse McManus, Carlos Gonzales, Mickey Zacchilli, Anya Davidson, Sam Gaskin, Leon Sadler, Ben Stiegler, Lizz Hickey, Austin English.

Who do you not like?
I avoid things that I do not like, my mind is void of these matters. But my tastes change rapidly. If I don't like something, I might be a few steps away from liking it. I can also convince myself that I don't like my favorite things. Being constantly critical is key.

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Are you depressed?
I am a mostly happy man. I can experience the full range of human emotion, but I tend to "hold it together." I have been told that I am calm.

Tell me about all the cool different stuff you made. There's the Troggy book. Did you make that record that comes with cobwebs?
NO NO NO, I didn't make that record with the cobwebs, the art and design on that record is all by Erin Womack.

Erin was on TV showing off her awesome Star Wars collection long ago. She's my Star Wars collecting hero. What's she like in real life?
She's the real thing when it comes to Star Wars. Ask her to lend you her bootleg VHS copy of the "Star Wars Christmas Special." It's a made-for-TV Christmas movie starring the Chewbacca family, the entire cast of the first film, and Jefferson Starship. Along with the artwork for that spooky LP, some of my other favorite things she's made are these masks called the "root magi" that remind me of some of the "The Parliament of Trees" in the Swamp Thing series. Really beautiful stuff.

So what about the stuff you actually made?
The latest books that I've completed are "Mr. Cellar's Attic" and "Black Colour." A formal issue I enjoy working with is printed color. I have a background in screen printing and that is how I approach my work, whether it is printed or not. In these two newer works I focused on how I (Mr. Freibert) color comics. The style is "painterly" and it builds from a book I made two years ago called "Prowla" that used a brushy technique in a two-color process. A hybrid of painting and screen printing.

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But enough about the past. Let's divert our eyes to the Future and let me give you a brief hint of what fine titles you can expect in the world of Tomorrow: The Blue Hand, Not Human Me, Born in a Bag, Gun Violence Amerika, E.T. Variety Magazine, Behind the Wall, I Was Sprayed by the Electric Web, and future issues of Mr. Cellar's Attic, and more installments of the E.T. Advertisement Catalogue.

Using black as a color is rad. Is that what you're referring to with your Colour Black thing?
The idea of "Black Colour" was to take the layers that would normally be printed as cyan, magenta, and yellow and printing them black. The line art that is normally printed black is void. All one sees is color in black.

I have "Prowla." I like how it surprises you by being a pop-up book at the end.
I learned a lot from making that book. One thing that stands out is that a lot of people didn't realize that the book was handmade. Many people thought that it was a print-on-demand book. It was frustrating in a way, simply because that is the most labor intensive project I've printed, but in hindsight maybe it's a good thing that people thought it was pro-printed.

What does E.T. stand for?
I think of it as a roaming acronym, or that it stands for "Every Thing." I also like simply "EntertainmenT." The first idea was that it was a play between "Extreme Troglodyte" (a creature that lives deep underground) and the more commonly known "Extra Terrestrial" (from outer space). I had to make sure that I had all ground covered, from the core of the earth, to the far corners of space. I knew that I needed something similar to EC. I wanted the public to know that they could expect the best.

I also have a record label "Educational Tapes."

NICK GAZIN