Jacob Bladders and the State of the Art

Roman Muradov: Roman Muradov was born in Moscow. He now resides in San Francisco, California. As an illustrator he has worked Vogue, Random House, The New Yorker, The New York Times and Penguin. In 2013, Muradov received a Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators.

"Forget about pens being mightier than swords. Roman Muradov’s pen is more like an exploding bomb. There is so much graphic innovation in this book that Muradov can hardly contain it in a panel. It’s exciting to see this much talent let loose on a piece of white paper. Beauty and chaos in perfect harmony."—Seth, Author of Palookaville"The State Of The Art also reflects his current concern with a kind of parallax aesthetic, seemingly clear but just out of grasp. In a panel, a figure may be clear, but read with the kind of gusto the book invites, images quickly blur into one another; speech balloons from one panel appear to be picked up by a different character in another, and curlicue dialogue trails off or is irredeemably smeared by ink. Muradov builds The State Of The Art on non sequitur, elision, and circumlocution."—Onion A.V. Club"But also cartooning, also comix here—Muradov’s jutting anarchic tangles, often recoiling from the panel proper, recall George Herriman’s seminal anarcho-strip Krazy Kat. (Whether or not Muradov intends such allusions is not the point at all. Rather, what we see here is a continuity of the form’s best energies). Like Herriman’s strip, Muradov’s tale moves under the power of its own dream logic (more of a glide here than Herriman’s manic skipping)."—Biblioklept