Crazy Cartoons

The scene: Gumby is lounging on his bed. Prickle enters in a panic and says, “The unidragon ate the prism spheres we hid in Echo Cove!” Gumby panics. “If Santa Witch finds out they’re missing, the rainbow graffiti will fade. It will fade!”

Welcome to the world of Paper Rad, a website of art and comics where all the pop-culture detritus of a kid who came of age in the 80s is regurgitated up in a chunky day-glo mass. In Flash movies and serial narratives, the artists who contribute to Paper Rad use iconography that is indelibly burned into the brains of countless North American twenty- and thirty-somethings. We’re talking rainbows, bubbly hearts, yin-yangs, and unicorns—all done in primitive Apple IIC graphics.

You know Paper Rad. In a perfect strategic alliance, they are down with Providence’s Fort Thunder artists. There is a Fort Thunder fight comic on the site now, and Paper Rad made an amazing music video for Lightning Bolt’s “13 Monsters,” which can be seen at the site and on the Bolt’s new tour DVD. They are the easy-on-the-eyes part of that whole easy-on-the- ears scene.

A strange nostalgia vertigo happens when you visit Paper Rad and see characters like The Muppets, My Little Pony, Garfield, and Mario and Luigi thrust into the trippy sensibility of a geeky kid on brown acid. Putting these characters through unsanctioned activities is like an intellectually advanced and much more disturbing version of when you made your Han and Leia action figures fuck the shit out of each other. In a hilarious feat of guerrilla branding, the Paper Rad signature is an animation of Kermit and Grover standing in front of an American flag painted in sloppy stripes, a dripping peace sign replacing the 50 stars. They both have the vacant stares of Manson Family members and, like our memories of that time, they are an incredibly cryptic combination of cute and creepy.

Check out www.paperrad.org