After a prehistoric ape-man named Homerbuctas masturbates in a field of beautiful flowers, his seed gives birth to the Mounds, a black-and-white-striped plant/human hybrid. Furious with their father, Homerbunctas' rebellious son and daughter incestuously procreate in retaliation, giving rise to the bony and dogmatic Vegans. A long war ensues between the two species. Such is the jolie laide vision of Trenton Doyle Hancock, a young African-American artist from Houston, Texas, who first received national attention when his jaw-dropping multimedia collage paintings were included in the 2000 and 2002 Whitney Biennials. Straddling the worlds of art and comics, Me a Mound is a loose, absurdist narrative that acts as a cauldron for Hancock's heady visual stew, which combines influences as diverse as Vaughn Bode, Gary Panter, Jean Dubuffet, Art Speigelman and Françoise Mouly's avant-comix anthology RAW, old World Book entries, Hieronymus Bosch, and the later paintings of Philip Guston. Hancock himself cites the Garbage Pail Kids as a seminal influence. Hancock writes that the genesis of the project, which covers nearly a decade's worth of paintings, drawings, and ephemera, arose from autobiographical circumstances, in which the meat-loving artist was forced to cohabit with a pair of particularly doctrinaire vegans. It's not surprising, then, to see the self-deprecating Hancock insert himself in the story as an ineffectual superhero who squanders all of his money on "frito pie and heavy metal cds."

Published by Dan Nadel's PictureBox, Inc., a leading purveyor of art comics, Me a Mound's formal inventiveness as an object matches its restless imagination, mixing paper stocks, inserts, and fold outs to create an immersive visual document. The reader becomes lost in Hancock's creepy, vertiginous world. By turns sophomorically scatological and startlingly beautiful, Hancock's work continuously surprises and rewards repeated viewings.

-Greg Zinman