Hey Apathy is a comic series by Toronto based street influenced graphic artist Mike Parsons, some of his larger pieces were on display today just off College St. Some of these he'd drawn doing that on street painting-as-busking thing you see going on. Remember those children's search books Where's Wally? Well imagine one of the characteristic crowd scenes rendered in black ink, over 12 foot in length and bursting with a frenzied energy and paranoid pressure.

Parson's work is churned out at a ruthless rate, he doesn't stop himself to cover mistakes and his obsession with the anonymity of crowds is a running theme of distaste throughout his larger canvases. Some of the images are similar to rushed HR Geiger rip offs, in one panel the shrill squawk of mobile phones becomes unbearable in a queue until the neural systems of their users burst through their skulls and drag the phones back into the central nervous system.

Parsons work is that feeling of standing in a major city and staring with your neck creaked up at the structures above you, built by us but dwarfing us with that pain of city isolation and social inadequacy too. I don't suspect the bloke is much of a humanist, but if you like those Dystopia cartoons that appear in Totally Dublin - then you might want to check him out.

Labels: cartoons, comics, eye candy, graphic novel, Literature