What do you think?
Rate this book
The Cartoon Utopia
Ron Regé, Jr. is a very unusual yet accomplished storyteller whose work has a passionate moral, idealistic core that sets him apart from his peers. The Cartoon Utopia is his Magnum Opus, a unique work of comic art that, in the words of its author, focuses on "ideas that I've become intrigued by that stem from magical, alchemical, ancient ideas & mystery schools." It's part sci-fi, part philosophy, part visual poetry, and part social manifesto. Regé's work exudes psychedelia, outsider rawness, and pure cartoonish joy.
In The Cartoon Utopia, Utopians of the future world are attempting to send messages through consciousness, outside of the constricts of time as we understand it. They live in a world of advanced collective consciousness and want to help us understand how to achieve what they have accomplished. They get together to perform this task in a way that evolved out of our current system of consuming information and entertainment. In other words, the opposite of television. Instead, these messages appear in the form of art, music and storytelling.
In The Cartoon Utopia, Utopians of the future world are attempting to send messages through consciousness, outside of the constricts of time as we understand it. They live in a world of advanced collective consciousness and want to help us understand how to achieve what they have accomplished. They get together to perform this task in a way that evolved out of our current system of consuming information and entertainment. In other words, the opposite of television. Instead, these messages appear in the form of art, music and storytelling.
144 pages, Hardcover
First published November 21, 2012
8 people are currently reading
297 people want to read
About the author
Ron Regé Jr.
31 books23 followersRon Regé Jr. began drawing and self publishing comics in the early 1990’s in Cambridge MA. His first book Skibber Bee~Bye was published by Highwater Books in 2000. His most recent book Against Pain collects short works from 1986-2006 and was published by Drawn & Quarterly in 2008. His comics and drawings have appeared in hundreds of zines and comics anthologies. Illustration clients have included Nike, Sony, Tylenol, HP, McSweeney’s, Vice, The New York Times, and Canada’s National Post. Ron currently lives in Los Angeles.
His current project The Cartoon Utopia began in early 2008 as a series of 60 small drawings, but has expanded to include larger drawings, and longer comics pieces, including those presented here. Drawings from The Cartoon Utopia have been presented as solo gallery shows in Los Angeles, Montreal, Richmond VA, and Austin TX. They will eventually be collected as a book.
His current project The Cartoon Utopia began in early 2008 as a series of 60 small drawings, but has expanded to include larger drawings, and longer comics pieces, including those presented here. Drawings from The Cartoon Utopia have been presented as solo gallery shows in Los Angeles, Montreal, Richmond VA, and Austin TX. They will eventually be collected as a book.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
July 5, 2024
The Cartoon Utopia.
Seriously crazy.
Completely unique.
Amazingly and often dizzingly detailed artwork.
Maybe admirable but barely comprehensible utopian vision for how to save the universe and achieve ecological harmony and world peace.
The poet and artist and spiritual mystic William Blake gets quoted in Regé’s book, and because, of the spiritual guides he cites, I know (and love and am often mystified by) Blake best, I will say this reminds me of the most out-there ideas of William Blake. Though not like Blake’s artwork, except in the sense that it expresses an unconventional spiritual vision.
Regé tells us in an interview (see below) that there are a lot of artists who were or have been attending lectures in the LA area on alchemy. Alchemy is the medieval chemical science and speculative philosophy whose aims were the transmutation of the base metals into gold, the discovery of a universal cure for diseases, and the discovery of a means of indefinitely prolonging life. So alchemy figures into this vision, and theosophy, and magic, and the occult, and the visual arts, using comics to envision the future. Is this reminding anyone so far of Alan Moore at his craziest and most utopian, as in Promethea? Exactly.
I can’t imagine there are a thousand people in the world that would read this all the way through and engage seriously with its philosophy of the universe, but hey, no judging here on your chosen spiritual quest, go for it. It’s difficult, and mostly shared (verbally, at least) in the forms of zen koan-like aphorisms. Which are hard to read, based on his crazy unique (obscure) lettering style. But still, I like Blake, I like crazy visionaries, and I took a few days poring over this and once in a while showing the amazing art work to anyone I could. But of course they all thought I had dropped acid (with the author) just to read it.
The oversized volume is not a neat layout of the Cartoon Utopian vision but glimpses, fragments, a kind of journal versus a step by step statement of beliefs. Think vision, in part communicated through the visual, of course. Maybe that's the primary medium for communicating the philosophy.
However, the cartooning, while remarkable, is also difficult to decipher at times, and it can give you a headache, even as you admire it on some level. Feels psychedelic, as I referenced above, in many ways, and this may be deliberate. Maybe in part because it is in black and white and obsessively detailed. And so mystical and non-narrative, lyrical. An homage to Blake's drawings in places, too.
The Holy Bible sayeth, many are called but few are chosen. I would say you have to be one of the chosen few to embrace this difficult work. You have to be in his cult, I think!
But seriously, the art is amazing, I would give it five stars for the achievement of it. You have to support ambition this grandiose, even if you don’t love it in other respects. You just have to. There’s so much assembly line crap out there, even in comics. Well, MOST of comics, admit it.
And I liked Goodreads reviewer Jason’s idea of the book as an adult comics coloring book. It would be a way we might take it a little less all-fired seriously. I bet Regé would like this idea, he definitely likes to have fun with his art, to, so I am glad I mentioned this fun part, after all the world peace wackiness.
I mean, yes, this is California, where the environment is crashing and burning. This is a global holistic crisis and it requires drastic measures. So I appreciate some unconventional vision!! I mean, I am old enough to recall singing (from Hair!) “The Age of Aquarius” with The Fifth Dimension with some of y’all hippies! Peace out!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjxSC...
So, as to utopias: There's Blake. And the mystical Yeats. And Thomas More’s Utopia. And religion in general. I grew up in a conservative religious community and we might consider religions as utopias, ways the world can be whole. And I left that conservative religion because it didn't serve my needs, was more Calvinistically dystopian (total depravity as its foundation) quite. But is Rege’s vision the one to follow? I disrespect no one’s Grand Theory of the universe. But this one’s not for me.
One thing Regé admits that keeps me in his game: Set aside for a moment his unusual, maybe even at times funny, vision of the world and you can just see he is about the joy of comics. And as an artist he is a true wonder, and original, and passionate about his art. You gotta give him that.
Here's Regé on Tumblr, so you can see some of us his stuff:
http://ronregejr.tumblr.com
Thanks to Jason for posting these, which I repost (and you can see some of his work in there, too):
Ron Regé Does Not Fuck Around About Peace and Love
http://www.vice.com/read/ron-rege-car...
An interview with Ron Regé:
http://www.tcj.com/cartoon-utopian-an...
Seriously crazy.
Completely unique.
Amazingly and often dizzingly detailed artwork.
Maybe admirable but barely comprehensible utopian vision for how to save the universe and achieve ecological harmony and world peace.
The poet and artist and spiritual mystic William Blake gets quoted in Regé’s book, and because, of the spiritual guides he cites, I know (and love and am often mystified by) Blake best, I will say this reminds me of the most out-there ideas of William Blake. Though not like Blake’s artwork, except in the sense that it expresses an unconventional spiritual vision.
Regé tells us in an interview (see below) that there are a lot of artists who were or have been attending lectures in the LA area on alchemy. Alchemy is the medieval chemical science and speculative philosophy whose aims were the transmutation of the base metals into gold, the discovery of a universal cure for diseases, and the discovery of a means of indefinitely prolonging life. So alchemy figures into this vision, and theosophy, and magic, and the occult, and the visual arts, using comics to envision the future. Is this reminding anyone so far of Alan Moore at his craziest and most utopian, as in Promethea? Exactly.
I can’t imagine there are a thousand people in the world that would read this all the way through and engage seriously with its philosophy of the universe, but hey, no judging here on your chosen spiritual quest, go for it. It’s difficult, and mostly shared (verbally, at least) in the forms of zen koan-like aphorisms. Which are hard to read, based on his crazy unique (obscure) lettering style. But still, I like Blake, I like crazy visionaries, and I took a few days poring over this and once in a while showing the amazing art work to anyone I could. But of course they all thought I had dropped acid (with the author) just to read it.
The oversized volume is not a neat layout of the Cartoon Utopian vision but glimpses, fragments, a kind of journal versus a step by step statement of beliefs. Think vision, in part communicated through the visual, of course. Maybe that's the primary medium for communicating the philosophy.
However, the cartooning, while remarkable, is also difficult to decipher at times, and it can give you a headache, even as you admire it on some level. Feels psychedelic, as I referenced above, in many ways, and this may be deliberate. Maybe in part because it is in black and white and obsessively detailed. And so mystical and non-narrative, lyrical. An homage to Blake's drawings in places, too.
The Holy Bible sayeth, many are called but few are chosen. I would say you have to be one of the chosen few to embrace this difficult work. You have to be in his cult, I think!
But seriously, the art is amazing, I would give it five stars for the achievement of it. You have to support ambition this grandiose, even if you don’t love it in other respects. You just have to. There’s so much assembly line crap out there, even in comics. Well, MOST of comics, admit it.
And I liked Goodreads reviewer Jason’s idea of the book as an adult comics coloring book. It would be a way we might take it a little less all-fired seriously. I bet Regé would like this idea, he definitely likes to have fun with his art, to, so I am glad I mentioned this fun part, after all the world peace wackiness.
I mean, yes, this is California, where the environment is crashing and burning. This is a global holistic crisis and it requires drastic measures. So I appreciate some unconventional vision!! I mean, I am old enough to recall singing (from Hair!) “The Age of Aquarius” with The Fifth Dimension with some of y’all hippies! Peace out!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjxSC...
So, as to utopias: There's Blake. And the mystical Yeats. And Thomas More’s Utopia. And religion in general. I grew up in a conservative religious community and we might consider religions as utopias, ways the world can be whole. And I left that conservative religion because it didn't serve my needs, was more Calvinistically dystopian (total depravity as its foundation) quite. But is Rege’s vision the one to follow? I disrespect no one’s Grand Theory of the universe. But this one’s not for me.
One thing Regé admits that keeps me in his game: Set aside for a moment his unusual, maybe even at times funny, vision of the world and you can just see he is about the joy of comics. And as an artist he is a true wonder, and original, and passionate about his art. You gotta give him that.
Here's Regé on Tumblr, so you can see some of us his stuff:
http://ronregejr.tumblr.com
Thanks to Jason for posting these, which I repost (and you can see some of his work in there, too):
Ron Regé Does Not Fuck Around About Peace and Love
http://www.vice.com/read/ron-rege-car...
An interview with Ron Regé:
http://www.tcj.com/cartoon-utopian-an...
November 15, 2017
A+ for a masterful Attempt at drawing the invisible, F for the Filosophy. Of course I knew what I was getting myself into with titles like "The Spiritual Whirlwind or The Etheric Vortex" and "Affectional Alchemy and Awakened Immagination" (sic), but I still can't help but cringe when reading declerations like "Evolution is the movement from multiplicity towards unity". Cartoon Utopia feels like the quintessential "outsider art" comic book (the frequent spelling mistakes help in that respect), but Regé is way too good for that and seems to know exactly what he's doing: he's trying to come up with new narrative ways to transfer thoughts between minds and is doing a hell of a job at it. As he says in "The Science of Applied Energy", "We have no conception of that inner world to which thought forms belong - All that we can do at best is to represent a section of the thought form".
Oh, and when he uses his heavy blacks the artwork is reminiscent of Jack Kirby at his most abstract. Absolutely transcendent!
Oh, and when he uses his heavy blacks the artwork is reminiscent of Jack Kirby at his most abstract. Absolutely transcendent!
December 6, 2015
I approached this genuinely weird book with an openness to its weirdness and a commitment to dealing with the author's eccentric style. I figured those attitudes are essential to dealing with any sort of spiritual, hermetic, or occult work, and this book is, or at least repeatedly purports to be, both such a work (a true labor of love) and a facilitator of similar drive, dedication, and devotion in the reader. I hope the author releases a paperback version of this book, on slightly more textured paper, as a "grown-up" coloring book. After all, what better to way to engage with this creative work other than with a creative response?
As for my wife, she loved the cover so she picked the book up, flipped through a couple pages, and put then hurriedly it down in near horror. I think it gave her an instantaneous migraine; she said she was overwhelmed by the black and white illustration, after seeing the colorful cover and expecting, well, color. We agreed that this book would work better as a coloring book.
I need to buy my own copy and color the blessed thing!
Ron Regé Does Not Fuck Around About Peace and Love
Cartoon Utopian: An Interview with Ron Rege Jr.
As for my wife, she loved the cover so she picked the book up, flipped through a couple pages, and put then hurriedly it down in near horror. I think it gave her an instantaneous migraine; she said she was overwhelmed by the black and white illustration, after seeing the colorful cover and expecting, well, color. We agreed that this book would work better as a coloring book.
I need to buy my own copy and color the blessed thing!
Ron Regé Does Not Fuck Around About Peace and Love
Cartoon Utopian: An Interview with Ron Rege Jr.
May 28, 2014
In this disgustingly (and stupidly, IMO) Materialistic culture we live in, the values of someone like Ron Rege Jr. are mocked and marginalized. Which is why this book full of positive wishes for Love and Harmony is all the more necessary and beautiful!
And it IS Beautiful!
It can be a touch difficult to read at times,... not because of his loving spiritual message, but because his words are integrated into each image in bubble letters that create a push and pull dynamic between the words and images as they each strive for visual predominance. It is really a great concept, but as I said, it can be a touch difficult at times to read and sometimes the art receives less attention than it should.
But this is also why I may like to reread this someday! :)
And it IS Beautiful!
It can be a touch difficult to read at times,... not because of his loving spiritual message, but because his words are integrated into each image in bubble letters that create a push and pull dynamic between the words and images as they each strive for visual predominance. It is really a great concept, but as I said, it can be a touch difficult at times to read and sometimes the art receives less attention than it should.
But this is also why I may like to reread this someday! :)
July 15, 2021
Optimistic metaphysics, psychedelia, and magic from a gifted comic artist whose lettering can be a bit frustrating to read sometimes. Lately, I like my alt-comics with more earnestness than irony, so this was a welcome investment of time.
August 18, 2018
Nice to look at but I found it difficult to concentrate on the experimental but convoluted flow of text and narrative combined with the illustrations.
September 7, 2024
the drawings and concepts are beautiful but this book is illegible and overly crowded. a different font and colored pages would have delivered the information better.
August 6, 2025
magical book I appreciate how complex and meditative the art is and the integrated text experience but found myself frustrated by the difficulty of reading it at times
March 23, 2017
I've seen it described as a modern grimoire; I would suggest that a modern Emerald Tablet would be more accurate. This book demands that you devote close attention to read it, by typeface alone. It's not a good thing to (try to) read quickly, either; it's to be digested.
I think I might get a copy.
I think I might get a copy.
February 23, 2017
This seemed like it was coming from a high/spiritual place.
That being said, sometimes it seemed a bit naive or too high (in the drug sense).
I've read other books about utopias and usually there is more of an explanation on how the utopia can exist in contrast to what we have now. This one was much more hand wavey and as a result feels like their conclusions are just dreams with little chance of fruition (or at least nothing individuals can do to push it along).
The general message seemed to be one of peace/unity. I get the feeling that the way there is hidden throughout the book, but I didn't grasp it at least consciously.
Other reviewers have complained about the text readability.
It can be hard to read, but seemed to get better as the book progressed.
Also in some sections they rewrite the text above the image in a more readable format.
That being said, sometimes it seemed a bit naive or too high (in the drug sense).
I've read other books about utopias and usually there is more of an explanation on how the utopia can exist in contrast to what we have now. This one was much more hand wavey and as a result feels like their conclusions are just dreams with little chance of fruition (or at least nothing individuals can do to push it along).
The general message seemed to be one of peace/unity. I get the feeling that the way there is hidden throughout the book, but I didn't grasp it at least consciously.
Other reviewers have complained about the text readability.
It can be hard to read, but seemed to get better as the book progressed.
Also in some sections they rewrite the text above the image in a more readable format.
May 6, 2013
Sooooo...it's neat that Rege has his own unique style. HOWEVER. If I were putting a book like this together, that is heavy on the text, with even heavier subject matter, I'd make the text legible. It's just ridiculous how difficult it is to read, I'm sorry. Also, although I appreciate the style, it's too bad the art is all black and white, again considering the subject matter. Peace, love, consciousness, alchemy, magic...all in busy black and white panels. The cover is the only piece in color.
August 23, 2013
I rather like the intricate, often cleverly composed panels, dense with highly stylized linework. The pseudoscientific babbling, less so. One the whole, it reads like the rambling copy on a bottle of Dr Bronner's Magic Soap, but fails to leave me tingly and refreshed.
January 5, 2016
I like the idea behind it and some of the ideas presented in it. The ones that I could read that is. Generally the illustrations and the text embedded in them are way too busy for me. Color would have helped tremendously. I didn't finish it.
January 4, 2013
bonkers
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews