Cardboard Colin and the Wasps

By Philippa Rice
mycardboardlife.com

Philippa Rice does the awesome webcomic My Cardboard Life. All the artwork for it is done by cutting out pieces of paper, cardboard, and other material and arranging them into panels. It's incredibly well done, and funny too. It's one of the webcomics that I read every day, and I encourage you to click on the link above and read some.

Cardboard Colin is one of the main characters in My Cardboard Life, and from the description above you can guess that he is just some pieces of cardboard (with drawn in arms, legs, and eyes). Horrible things frequently happen to him (currently he is pretending to be a pop-star horse and has developed a sugar cube addiction). In this comic some wasps land on his head, don't go away for ages, and eventually settle in to raise a family.

The humour in My Cardboard Life frequently comes from the utterly bizarre experiences that the characters become involved in, but the characters also have distinct personalities, however "two-dimensional" or "paper thin" they may be (sorry, that was a terrible joke), and the interactions between them also creates humour in the comics.

I mentioned above how much I enjoyed Rice's cut and paste artwork, but I'll just repeat that again because I think it's really good. The amount of emotion Rice manages to get out of a square of cardboard and some dots for eyes always impresses me. I also enjoy the way Rice uses metatextual references to create humour from the way the strip is physically put together.

Rice also makes totally awesome dioramas to display at comic events. Below is the one from Thought Bubble a couple of weeks ago. How many of the comics on display have you read?

The Society for the Promotion of Vestibules and Vestibule Awareness

By The Society
vestibules.tumblr.com

Vestibules are those weird little corridor/hall bits some people have just inside their front door. Usually there are piles of shoes and umbrellas lying there. Or at least that’s what I thought vestibules were until I read this zine.

Vestibules may be those specific hallways, but they can also be those weird little bits connecting train carriages, the part of the mouth inside the lips and before the teeth (!), the space between dimensions (!!!), and airlocks for spaceships! I never thought I would be reading about astronaut related things when I picked up this zine, how exciting!

Unfortunately there are no pictures of astronauts included here, but there is a super awesome pop-up book style page that shows you what the vestibule of a house might look like, and the doors on the cover actually open. Totally awesome.

Intricate Dwellings

By Philippa Rice
thejuzzard.etsy.com
thejuzzard.blogspot.com

This collection of Rice's drawings might as well be called "Impossible Dwellings" as she draws countless cities that could not exist in real life. There are a bunch of different drawings here, ranging from medieval to futuristic.

There are cities that exist suspended from something we can't see, made up of square and spherical unites connected by ropes, ladders, and string.

Cities that are built precariously on top of themselves, each level seeming to be bigger and heavier that the one below it, held up by sticks and pillars.

Cities created below the waves, with the pods and the connectiosn between them looking almost organic, and the entrances making me wonder what type of inhabitants live there.

And in the final piece, a city filled with people (unlike the rest of Rice's strangely empty cities) travelling by train, car, bubble ship, and strange helicopter pods.

I love the detail that Rice puts into each of these drawings. None of the cities really seem like anywhere I'd want to live, but I do want to visit all of them and explore their many buildings, rooms, tunnels, and towers.

Eco Dwellings

By Philippa Rice
thejuzzard.blogspot.com
thejuzzard.etsy.com

When I first looked through Philippa’s drawings of weird little houses in “eco” surroundings, I thought that they looked like buildings that tiny elfs (elves?) or fairies (faeries?) would live in. “How cute!” I thought. “Look at all the gigantic flowers, the houses made in mushrooms, it is so adorable.”

And the houses are adorable! They are something I wish I could find at the bottom of my garden. Entire villages made in the branches of trees, rope ladders leading from one house to the next, plants growing from the rooftops. It’s sort of like somewhere I’d like to live.

However, as I kept looking through the drawings, they became increasingly sinister. While I somewhat doubt this was Philippa’s intention, page after page of drawings of completely empty cities became sort of creepy. Where did all the inhabitants go? Were there always so many plants and flowers growing in these towns, or did they just spring up after months, or years, of neglect?

Some of the later drawings look like they could have buildings that have cracked open and are otherwise falling apart. Are they supposed to look like that or am I just creating additional decay with my mind?

The drawings are still lovely, but I can only wonder what happened, why the towns were seemingly abandoned so that only the occasional snail, bug, or strange bear creature were left to roam them, and where the inhabitants went.

Futuristic Dwellings

By Philippa Rice
thejuzzard.blogspot.com
thejuzzard.etsy.com

Robots. Spaceships. The future.

This zine is pretty much aimed directly at me. It’s just page after page of beautifully drawn futuristic cityscapes. They’re completely ridiculous and unrealistic, but the intricacy in the art is just incredible.

The details on some of the pages are kind of insane, and there’s lots of little hidden easter eggs in the pictures (the zine even comes with a “things to find” insert). However it’s not just the details that are impressive. After looking at the pictures close up I went through it again and looked at everything at arm’s length, allowing myself to take in the full picture all at once. I wish I had bigger versions of these images.

Here’s a video of Philippa drawing one of the pictures! Amazing!

My Cardboard Life Vol. 6

By Philippa Rice
www.mycardboardlife.com
thejuzzard.etsy.com
thejuzzard.blogspot.com

Sometimes I think “Yeah, I totally made something awesome today”, and then I read a comic like this and all my faith in my collage ability is shattered.

This is a collection of comic strips that are done almost entirely in collage. Can’t draw? Well you can certainly cut out a piece of cardboard and then draw simplistic eyes and a mouth on it. Oh. Em. Gee. The two characters here are the cardboard thing, and a girl made of paper that requires slightly more artistic talent to create. Or at least slightly better cutting ability.

The strips themselves are just short humorous one or two pagers, but, as you can probably tell by now, I am completely blown away by the art and the style. It’s an incredibly simple idea, but Rice uses it really well. Sometimes she utilizes the fact that the characters are just pieces of paper really well.

Really, the only negative about this comic is that it’s not a ghost on the cover (it’s a girl’s head). I can’t wait to get more.