4 crampons out of 5

The weirdo surreal sexual vibe of Dave Cooper works best for me in the urban landscapes of “Crumple,” the half-explained world where everything looks vaguely like genitalia, every is vaguely funny, everything is vaguely human.  Cooper’s loose narratives stick strictly to the indie playbook in that they don’t seem to go for any particular point or direction, just having a start and an end and some characters in between, but the charm of his work over others (to me) is in how it feels possessed.  Whereas a lot of work in this vibe seems to be loaded with a “point,” Cooper seems to subscribe more to the David Lynch school of dream thought, where he’s very purposeful with his images and words and undoubtedly has ascribed some feelings to them, and is concerned that they be viewable for an audience – Lynch’s films / television looks a certain way, feels a certain way, and is watchable as entertainment – but the exact meaning to it is up to the reader to decide… to decide whether or not they even want to bother with meaning.

His more personal feeling works, like the “Ripple” series from the Weasel books, are a bit harder to stomach for their need to represent something closer to reality, but even with that story (and those in that vein from Cooper’s selective output of work), it’s less of a presentation and more of a need to put the work out there.  This is the possession aspect.

In terms of art, Cooper has Kricfalusi like intensity in a lot of his figures, that mixture of wriggly lines with purposefully exaggerated forms that gives it all a gorgeously sick look, but whereas John K’s stuff leans toward a classic animation influence over all, Cooper’s seems eternally rooted in the flesh, as though even abstracted to the realm of cartoon absurdity, he and his characters cannot escape their baser instincts… hence a lot of sex working its way into the stories in some form or another.

Deliciously obtuse, Cooper’s visual style can be appreciated by a wide range of folk, but his lengthier stories require a bit more dedication to flip through.  Though if you’re in that dedicated group, you’ll find yourself lingering on pages and re-flipping through, re-visiting images, reading it again after a break…