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Far Fetched
Standard edition of the book realized by Tabularasa Edizioni in co-working with Tekè Gallery for Jesse Jacobs’s solo show “Far Fetched”, Carrara, Italy, June 2018.
Texts in Italian and English by Vittore Baroni, Marco Cirillo Pedri, Robert Clough, Stefano Dazzi Dvorak, Alessandra Ioalé, Marco Taddei, Valerio Stivè, Henry Flames.
Hard cover, 180 color pages printed on Fedrigoni paper Arcoprint EW 140 grams. Printed in 750 copies.
Texts in Italian and English by Vittore Baroni, Marco Cirillo Pedri, Robert Clough, Stefano Dazzi Dvorak, Alessandra Ioalé, Marco Taddei, Valerio Stivè, Henry Flames.
Hard cover, 180 color pages printed on Fedrigoni paper Arcoprint EW 140 grams. Printed in 750 copies.
- GenresGraphic Novels
180 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 2018
58 people want to read
About the author
Jesse Jacobs
23 books139 followersJesse Jacobs is a Canadian cartoonist and illustrator based in London, Ontario.
Jacobs was born in Moncton, New Brunswick. Early in his career, he worked in animation, notably on the Cartoon Network show Adventure Time. He has also experience as a game developer, although his main arena remains comics.
Jacobs is known for his psychedelic and geometrical style of cartooning. A number of his short comics have been featured in various editions of Fantagraphics annual anthology Best American Comics from 2012 to 2018. Most of his longer books have been published by the Canadian small press publisher Koyama Press, such as By This Shall You Know Him (2012), Safari Honeymoon (2014) and the Eisner nominee (for best new album) Crawl Space (2017).
Jacobs was born in Moncton, New Brunswick. Early in his career, he worked in animation, notably on the Cartoon Network show Adventure Time. He has also experience as a game developer, although his main arena remains comics.
Jacobs is known for his psychedelic and geometrical style of cartooning. A number of his short comics have been featured in various editions of Fantagraphics annual anthology Best American Comics from 2012 to 2018. Most of his longer books have been published by the Canadian small press publisher Koyama Press, such as By This Shall You Know Him (2012), Safari Honeymoon (2014) and the Eisner nominee (for best new album) Crawl Space (2017).
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
May 30, 2020
A Solipsistic Cosmogony: 'Far Fetched' & the Art of Jesse Jacobs
[WORK IN PROGRESS! REVIEW STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION, USING 40% RECYCLED IMAGERY & IDEAS!]
Illustration Below -- The suspect, I. M. Yahweh, aka 'God', during his trial for abandonment, the terrorist attack on Sodom and Gomorrah, his drunken prank in Egypt known as 'The Ten Plagues', and his genocidal attempt to kill all life-without-gills with his fancy Flood; Jesse Jacobs served as court artist, but his depiction of the defendant is a bit strange; I always thought he had a beard:
Since the days when we were closer to monkeys than men, the imaginative types have looked into the night sky and seen thousands of gods and goddesses and demons and titans... playing connect-the-shiny-dots and imagining astrological solutions to all their monkey-boy problems.
It's actually a big black nothing, of course... except for those occasional orb-shaped nuclear furnaces, and the odd little-black-nothing-that-eats-light-and-space-time. No Zeus? How sad. Although if you look at his criminal record, I'm surprised he ever had fans. Unfortunately, there's no handy instruction manuals or rule-books waiting to be dug up on the dark side of the moon (I'm guessing), so a surprisingly large chunk of the population still have a death-grip on whatever anachronistic mystical bullshit they were born into. The only meanings and morals are the ones we scribble into being; existence is endless darkness unless we 'bring our own light' -- as Kubrick put it.
Into all this boring existential blackness, Jacobs' imagines a scenario starring celestial jerks who are somewhere between the Lovecraftian monsters of the Mignolaverse and the Galactic weirdos of the Marvel Multiverse. This is a collision between cosmic nightmare and satirical comedy, in which infant godlings play games with their atomic building blocks. They can manipulate elements with ease, cold fusion is a simple autonomic function, and absent-mindedly dreaming into being the odd geometric structures of organic and inorganic materials that are becoming the artist's signature. In BTSYKH, these childish beings squabble like siblings do, and when one of them creates a couple of proto-humans, the conflict becomes nasty... jealousy and 'vandalism' ensue, and the little pets learn from their bad example.
Jacobs seems to suggest that if there IS some kind of omnipotent Wizard of Oz pushing buttons behind the curtains, we might be better off without him anyway. He's a capricious and cruel piece of shit, and we're just the discarded play-things he grew bored with -- just like Jacobs' vastly powerful adolescents who create life solely for their own fucked-up amusement.
Whether or not you agree that sequential art is still in a creative 'golden age', artists like Jesse Jacobs and Michael Deforge are pulling off some neat tricks, dreaming up comic-book magic and illusions. Flipping through this slim, beautiful volume, it feels at times like something unknown has finally crawled free of it's liquid iron womb, bursting from the Marianas trench in an explosion of molten rock and metal, to introduce itself as something truly new under the sun.
It's not though. I feel awful agreeing with scripture of any sort, but there ain't nothin' truly new. As Picasso put it: "Good artists copy. Great artists steal". They own it. Jacobs has influences you can find somewhere under the top layers of his stylistic skin, but they're hidden too well to spot with real certainty: Jim Woodring, Moebius, Marc Bell, David B., Stephane Blanquet... they're probably somewhere in his aesthetic DNA. But the instant I see a Jesse Jacobs page or panel I know exactly who did it.
[WORK IN PROGRESS! REVIEW STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION, USING 40% RECYCLED IMAGERY & IDEAS!]
Illustration Below -- The suspect, I. M. Yahweh, aka 'God', during his trial for abandonment, the terrorist attack on Sodom and Gomorrah, his drunken prank in Egypt known as 'The Ten Plagues', and his genocidal attempt to kill all life-without-gills with his fancy Flood; Jesse Jacobs served as court artist, but his depiction of the defendant is a bit strange; I always thought he had a beard:
Since the days when we were closer to monkeys than men, the imaginative types have looked into the night sky and seen thousands of gods and goddesses and demons and titans... playing connect-the-shiny-dots and imagining astrological solutions to all their monkey-boy problems.
It's actually a big black nothing, of course... except for those occasional orb-shaped nuclear furnaces, and the odd little-black-nothing-that-eats-light-and-space-time. No Zeus? How sad. Although if you look at his criminal record, I'm surprised he ever had fans. Unfortunately, there's no handy instruction manuals or rule-books waiting to be dug up on the dark side of the moon (I'm guessing), so a surprisingly large chunk of the population still have a death-grip on whatever anachronistic mystical bullshit they were born into. The only meanings and morals are the ones we scribble into being; existence is endless darkness unless we 'bring our own light' -- as Kubrick put it.
Into all this boring existential blackness, Jacobs' imagines a scenario starring celestial jerks who are somewhere between the Lovecraftian monsters of the Mignolaverse and the Galactic weirdos of the Marvel Multiverse. This is a collision between cosmic nightmare and satirical comedy, in which infant godlings play games with their atomic building blocks. They can manipulate elements with ease, cold fusion is a simple autonomic function, and absent-mindedly dreaming into being the odd geometric structures of organic and inorganic materials that are becoming the artist's signature. In BTSYKH, these childish beings squabble like siblings do, and when one of them creates a couple of proto-humans, the conflict becomes nasty... jealousy and 'vandalism' ensue, and the little pets learn from their bad example.
Jacobs seems to suggest that if there IS some kind of omnipotent Wizard of Oz pushing buttons behind the curtains, we might be better off without him anyway. He's a capricious and cruel piece of shit, and we're just the discarded play-things he grew bored with -- just like Jacobs' vastly powerful adolescents who create life solely for their own fucked-up amusement.
Whether or not you agree that sequential art is still in a creative 'golden age', artists like Jesse Jacobs and Michael Deforge are pulling off some neat tricks, dreaming up comic-book magic and illusions. Flipping through this slim, beautiful volume, it feels at times like something unknown has finally crawled free of it's liquid iron womb, bursting from the Marianas trench in an explosion of molten rock and metal, to introduce itself as something truly new under the sun.
It's not though. I feel awful agreeing with scripture of any sort, but there ain't nothin' truly new. As Picasso put it: "Good artists copy. Great artists steal". They own it. Jacobs has influences you can find somewhere under the top layers of his stylistic skin, but they're hidden too well to spot with real certainty: Jim Woodring, Moebius, Marc Bell, David B., Stephane Blanquet... they're probably somewhere in his aesthetic DNA. But the instant I see a Jesse Jacobs page or panel I know exactly who did it.
Displaying 1 of 1 review