Tejaratchi's introduction is a kind of rueful and charming apology for this odd passtime of his, in which he muses on the amount of detail he pours into his designs, especially the ones he thinks of as stupid or unworthy, and talks about how some of his ideas are so big that they require multiple designs to truly capture — several pages out of a calendar, say, or a multitude of clues to a crossword puzzle.
The process he describes is a kind of design fiction, the evocation of a parallel universe though a few well-chosen, well-rendered artifacts, the process that gave us Scarfolk — like an explicitly fictional Piltdown Man, designed not to fool the audience, but rather to jolt them into thinking about their own world by contrasting it with a different one.
I laughed so fucking hard reading this book, and drove my wife nuts by making her look at page after page out of it (but then after I was done with it, I caught her reading it). Tejaratchi's keen eye, outstanding design skills, and take-no-prisoners wit are a winning combination, and much-needed in this weird moment of the 21st century.
Below, some of the images I insisted on showing to my wife.
LiarTown: The First Four Years 2013-2017 [Sean Tejaratchi/Feral House]
(Previously:
Liartown: forthcoming book from master image manipulator Sean Tejaratchi
)
