HEY APATHY! Surreal Monster Comics and Alternative Art! Reviews:

Mike Parsons's black-and-white drawings, of both small and massive scale, invade the gallery like the bombardments they depict. Cartoon-like in quality, these drawings pulse with the growth and destruction of compressed worlds. Not a single straight line exists within these fluid ink squiggles, swashes, and poured blotches. Bombs are depicted like candy wrappers with one end of the wrapper missing, and curlicue clouds look as if they should be attached to brightly coloured rainbows. The ominous darkness and mayhem would make Dr. Caligari proud.

Mary McKenzie

Mike Parsons is an emerging Toronto artist who is attracting attention for his dramatic large-scale black and white drawings. Exploding buildings, cities of bones, mushroom clouds and frenzied crowds are metaphors for the anxieties of contemporary urban life. Born from an interest in graphic novels and Japanese manga, Parsons' virtuoso application of ink to paper transforms familiar urban settings into something fantastical.

Sascha Hastings

He renders images of overcrowding images of overcrowding, violence and loneliness in vivid black inks, his messy, disordered style blending with the dark tone of the work…Simple -- and truly unsettling. His is a world where monsters do exist.

Thomas Hirschmann

His work is extremely engaging; there is a story in each of canvasses, like a single panel comic, if you study them long enough. His style has remained constant but his technical skills and deft commentary on city living have continued to mature.

Robin Sharp

...he can be seen almost any day of the week compulsively producing ink drawings, in all scales, from postage stamp to mural scale, on the sidewalk of Toronto’s busy Queen St. West - a studio setting not common to today’s breed of aspiring contemporary artists. His subject matter and unconventional approach to art making is at once highly compulsive, obsessive and personal, yet speaks of and takes place directly in the public realm.

David Lass

This guy is either absolutely crazy or he’s a genius.

Ernest Barenscher

“HEY APATHY!” is an ongoing artistic investigation into the metropolis, people, monsters, and the mechanics of being. In the earliest comics & artworks (2001) the city is announced as an ominous gear, propelled by an endless sea of anonymous denizens. “WHAT IS THE CITY?”, “WHO ARE ALL THESE PEOPLE?”, and “WHERE DO I FIT IN?” At that time I was working out of the seclusion of a suburban basement studio and envisioned the big city as a nihilistic conglomeration of misdirected commercial, and superficial, ideologies. To better understand the phenomenon in question, and in hopes of creating artworks of social significance, I decided to externalize my inquires, and investigate the lives, goals, and motivations of other metropolitan dwellers. I have since executed a strange and "Unconventional Interview” through a series of progressively public experiments involving outdoor murals, festivals, exhibitions, interventions, street, gala & gallery performances. Forsaking the introverted nature of the private studio, I have continued to immerse myself in the public forum thus permitting unparalleled interactions and experiences with peoples from all over the world, and of all walks of life. As a result of this constant public exchange, both the illustrations and myself have evolved immensely. In more recent artworks the city remains a giant gear, only now it is an unimaginably diverse collective of unique individuals, not faceless cogs, who fuel the machine. The primary objective of “HEY APATHY!” is to express an optimistic warning towards our future using monster comics, ink drawings, animations, performance based, multi-media and interactive artworks. Simultaneously intellectually provocative and accessible to viewers of all ages, HEYAPATHY-COMICS-ART.COM collects the first volume of the exploration (2001-2008), a seven year, 13 chapter, drawing-art-performance investigation, and presents for the first time, the second volume, the all-new ongoing comic book series, “HEY APATHY!” (2009-present)

MONSTER COMICS

GIANT TECHNOLOGICAL TENTACLES ARE ASSIMILATING HUMANITY! ENTER THE SUPERHERO, SAMURAI, WITCHDOCTOR & MUSICIANS…BUT IS IT TOO LATE?! The city is a giant gear, propelled by all the different kinds of people, creatures, and strange occurrences moving through it. Amidst the chaos MONSTERS, ROBOTS, CARS & COMMUTERS attempt to co-exist in a mechanically diabolic orchestral frenzy. Giant Technological Tentacles are annihilating the denizens at an inhuman pace and all systems of mass communication have been corrupted by a villainous business demigod. When a tiny hero attempts to retaliate, the metropolis rises against the protagonist, annihilating the individual! Welcome to the CITY of GEARS! Part fantastical, part autobiographical and completely insane, “HEY APATHY!” is a 13 issue mini series featuring a cross-genre anthology of fables all told from the perspective of a young street artist sitting in the middle of the madness. The objective of my monster comics is to continually explore the abstracted themes of the “HEY APATHY!” ink drawings, and to document the personal, social, political, and unusual experiences of my life as an artist & street performer. 32 PAGES, B & W, SIGNED LIMITED EDITIONS $10

MONSTER INK DRAWINGS

THE CITY IS A GIANT GEAR PROPELLED BY ALL THE DIFFERENT MONSTERS, PEOPLE, AND STRANGE OCCURANCES THAT MOVE THROUGH IT! The “HEY APATHY!” artworks (Jan 2001-Jan. 2008) include hundreds of black & white cartoon style ink drawings. The drawings range in size from postcards to giant wall murals and vary in complexity from crude to microscopic. Each drawing is made with black India ink on white paper, as a single study, start to finish, without the safety of preliminary sketches, and absolutely no corrections are ever made. The “HEY APATHY!” images continually investigate and reinvent ideologies in an ongoing examination of , people, monsters, systems of communication, and the terrifying embodiment of the metropolis. The initial drawings, an extensive collection of simplistic hieroglyphics, depict the city as a cold, lifeless, machine comprised of anonymous crowds and tomb-like towers, accompanied by horrific images of apocalyptic forces eradicating the landscapes. The artworks deconstruct expressions of alienation and the illusion of conformity, while simultaneously offering the viewer a stern, yet optimistic, warning towards our future. In each of the subsequent artistic investigations, the drawings, the artist, and the spectator, are pulled further into the city as part of a mythological quest to identify the surroundings. The entire first volume of “HEY APATHY!” comics and art including 13 unique investigations, each examining the subject from a new perspective and through a variety of experimental drawing & presentation techniques, reads like an unconscious narrative, slowly revealing the true nature of the city, the artist, and possibly that of the audience itself.