AEROSOL INTELLIGENT GRAFFITI (AIG)

AEROSOL INTELLIGENT GRAFFITI (AIG) v1.0

by Steven James Pratt
Fly Agaric Studio's, Amsterdam NL.
Edited Feb. 11th 2010.

BOOK I. CHAPTER I.

Introduction:
All the innovative Graffiti art provides a testament to a collective Great British spirit of rebellion and revolt, that I heartily support and that I hope to romance here in these lines. I started writing out these ideas for the purpose of creating a book about CHU 51 and his Artwork, which alone requires a great deal of patience and meditation on my part, as I have come to see how writing about CHU is also writing about UK Graffiti and there are a lot of writers out there who also deserve a book, an essay or a blog post article about them by independent investigative journalists like myself, and friends of the artists, and to be shared among the community by the community.

Graffiti Art, Aerosol Art and Urban street, whatever you call it emerged--phoenix like--from the streets, to form a global village of new art perception and language manipulation, in urban cities across the world.

This artform suffers attacks upon it from various authorities, unlike any other, and who act upon the laws that determine Graffiti ART's "criminal damage" impact, in most but not all' cases and, furthermore, variousorganizations remove Urban Street ART on a regular basis creating a unique criminalized merry-go-around, a revolution that highlights the hypocrisy and sophisticated intolerance of modern lawyer run capitalist society, and the all out warfare on street culture icons, on urban artists generally. The global village calls forth Graffiti Art revolutions in the streets, new art for social change, art as a creativity medium for the newtechnological challenges to humanity and global culture.

Personally, I am fond of diverse types of art and culture, 'O Di Diversa Natura' as Giordano Bruno once wrote. Not just Graffiti art, but the culture that fosters it and that unique street level philosophy just appeals to my aesthetic, whever and whatever that is? I grew up during the emergence and mutation of Graffiti Art in the UK (1980's-90's) and feel fortunate to have had the rare chance to spend time with some of the UK's finest, before the Banksy boom, and I soon gathered a rough idea of what Graffiti culture was about: assimilating the corporate advertisement media and infecting the language structures of culture with a super surrealist virus, at it's best. Ugly tags and mindless vandalism at it's worst, and who's 'best' and who's 'worst' are we talking about anyhow? British Transport Police? Local council? Art Critic's guild?
(See Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack vs. Transport For London)

After meeting some UK Graffiti writers, drinking tea, sharing a spliff or two and realizing they were mostly working class lads, I became fascinated with the idea of these warrior poets decorating the streets with wisdom, crushing wit and otherwise censored 'social commentary', and felt that indeed, a new language was being born, a new language culture was hacking the corporate media, that 'pych' virus, growing exponentially in the social sphere, and dragging it out onto the streets, beating it to pieces and lovingly resurrecting the word-image-message for us, the people who have to live in these advertisement parks throughout Britain.

Some writers stuck apart, with the flavour of discordianism and some other past attempts to organize by precise 'disorganization.' Organized Confusion? Others reformed under new names, new crewes, most moved to London. Simultaneously to this organized confusion of artists, huge corporations got fat on real capital in the swinging 1990's, moving in with the missing capital, and bought up a stack of talent, a rack of sneakers, and cranked out replicable fashion objects like all the other junk makers. (See Cory Doctrow)

And the movement went underground again, crewes splintered, letters cracked and bulged in all directions, occasional success stories, amidst the thought-police, the crime-watch-think and all the damned NEWSPEAK they made assimilation's with global village culture through the emerging decentralized--internet--idea infections.

At the same time a sudden influx of cheap imitations and watered down 'Graffiti Ideologies influenced' font styles, and a phalanx of trashy products from 'aftershave to 'breakfast cereal' were referencing the once underground 'Hip Hop and Graffiti culture' in particular (R.I.P). Everything suffered except the language virus of Graffiti itself that eats all: the referential questioning of grammar, rhetoric, logic, control, authority, Identity and signifying.

Graffiti artists rely on word of mouth and physical networks of friendships to get work done and invariably writing' and commentary on Graffiti in any general or regionally exclusive way can stifle the development of the global artists village. In some sense, only the language of aerosol Graffiti, its symbols, colors, size and impact, can describe what aerosol graffiti means. Many non-graffiti writers are set about describing a similar experience of being with justified words, poetry seems to have the closest fit with theartform, poetry, not rap, I think.

Graffiti culture and hip hop culture have been fattened for corporate snakes, bodysnatched, raped and beaten to death. I have watched the motherfucking snakes slither off with the very thing, or cultural artefact, that we have made, and neutralized it, mass produced it, and handed it to thepre-packed consumer, at half price. This kind of 'culture mill' often results in the degradation of the consumer as well as the product, as Mcluhan said 'the tools you use shape you, as you shape them' not to speak of the cultural conditions and challenges that fostered the new artistic breakthrough and new youth movement that went unseen, un-recorded. In science and technology I notice a similar pattern of cultural hijacking and technological piracy, always spearheaded by the biggest private market places, the richest markets and the most powerful market monopolists. One man's pirate maybe another man's king.

GRAFFITI ARTS AND CRAFTS.

In which i explore the role I perceive of the Graffiti artist in 2010 society, the art world vs. the art village, the street art world and the street art village. The invisible interior worlds of creative imagination.

“All words transmitted as sonic or visual signals—sound waves or light waves—rapidly become photons, electrons, neurotransmitters, hormones, colloidal reactions, reflex arcs, conditioned or imprinted “frames,” physiological responses, etc. As they impact upon the totalsynergetic organism. –RAW, Black Magic and Curses.

A good artist will spell properly, have command of logic and grammar, will have good knowledge of languages, mathematics and geometry and how these things fit together to work on the people and the environment.

Symbols combine with the word meanings and are per-mutated to produce imagined auditory snapshots. Captured thoughts, reflected by the good Graffiti artist on the urban street canvas, immediately, where spelling and grammar are exploited 24-7 by the Global Capitalist Advertising Pirates. The new art helps the re-balancing of public thought spaces, in my opinion.

Balancing equations between adverts, between political propaganda, between real estate, and adding footnotes next to the footpaths so that some lucky critters maybe confronted and arrested by OrwellianNewspeak that has speech bubbles and helpful footnotes. Thought-crimes are committed and made flesh. A tit for tat poetry slam playing throughout various global media:TV, Billboards, Radio, Packaging, Newspapers.

A good Graffiti artist fulfills an important role in society as the defence early warning radar system. They can sniff out the bullshit in the language before the thing it refers to manifests itself. Sign and commercial code breaking. To remix the symbols and send them spitting back into the environment as messages, fair commentary,imagist poetry, hologramic prose and stunning visual expressions reaching beyond any textual language – therefore, the good Graffiti artist can show up the Global Corporate Advertising Industry.

Turn on CNN, or most TV news stations and get a dose of that meaningless, indeterminate dribble they spread, the board room executive sales virus, the news-speak of the modern corporate POP monster and his salesman. The great beast of the apocalypse is slayed on many street corners and on walls with an increasing ingenuity, a growing brevity and creative intelligence today in Britain, the America's and throughout Europe. The surveillance culture has made the artist smarter, fitter and made them better players of the game.

Aerosol Graffiti Art is launching a spear through the veil of Marketing language and the corporate codes of mass brain-washing and misinformation programing. Every city in the world has it’s Graffiti and history of writers. Reaching far back to the stone age and the cave dwellers, back to before civilization and cities and agriculture there were Graffiti artists communicating on the walls, drawing what they saw, interacting with mind and sharing messages with the others.Timebinding through artistic expression and representation.

“It’s a very very conservative toff/mercantile alliance (The merchant Ventures and their circle) who still set the social, political and cultural agenda in the city to a remarkable extent. The reality is that Banksy had to go to London to make a name for himself as he was ignored in Bristol.” –The Bristol Blogger

I have noticed regional government failure in the UK, failure to notice local talent and nurture them, especially within the arts, combined with a nationwide criminal stereotype of the 'hooded aerosol villain' or vandal, this failure leads to a lowered possibility of getting paid work for one's art these days.

How can a Graffiti artist have a gallery show unless one partners with some sonsor, or accept a government grant maybe handed over by the same institutions that enforce the Graffiti abatement program and reinforce our cultural rations of Sugar, War-speak, Automobile-pimp, insurance-lies and banking business bullshit? It has always been hard for the artist, and Graffiti Art is the blues story of Hip Hop. Million's can sing of the Graffiti blues, sitting in a cell for learning to spell in public.

One option open to the up and coming artist, who happens by chance not to have been born into great wealth or into a geographical area with high employment for artists and the opportunity to pursue any cutting edge cultural activities, is to simply move location, go, go , go to where the action is and where the employment may exist, move to London, New York or Paris, the heart of Modern cultural policing and monopoly on what (is) hip. Closer to the source of the language of Graffiti, the city pulls in and push's out billions of symbols per second, some are captured on walls without borders.

Corporatism seems to be at the center of this phenomena of artist exile, as I view it, and accepting the ground rules of society without question often leads to apathy and the rise of totalitarian control while you were sleeping. This phenomena seems widespread around Great Britain and with the anti-Graffiti programs as a case in point I can see why. I feel saddened that communities that might benefit most from these artistic visions, village humour and tireless town promotion are purged of local talent, probably after they attain a certain threshold of popularity and cannot find the local support and are forced to move on out.

This artist in exile phenomena, seems a bit like what’s termed the 'Wimbledonization' of Great Britain and her entire world culture, by osmosis, whereby we often host the biggest global corporations without giving our own local players a competitive chance of competing on a fair and equal playing field. Consider the full resistance to Graffiti Art and Urban Street Art by the British Government and the puritanical mobs of cops contrasted with the history of UK Graffiti culture, the starving artists and they’re underground Olymic stamina.

The seeds of revolt are being nourished, and the Graffiti artists from one time or another are unified by their poetic interpretation of reality or their figuring out for themselves that language manipulates “reality” in different ways, and can modify your perceptions and the perceptions of others, at least temporarily, and taking the language-system into their own hands, writing hands, and translating some parts of it onto walls and buildings, re-creating “reality” in full colour pictographs, all in their own individual perceptions, not learnt in school, college or University but a new synthesis, a totality of these exeriences on the street itself.

Graffiti artists of no school or class but the chaos of the streets, or, organized confusion. Artists of a more discordian persuasion influence universe by striving for the original, always spontaneous, on high alert and prepared for co-operative partnerships with other language-systems and “reality-constructs”. Mobile artists continually revising updating and expanding the class of all scientifically meaningful statements available to us at this date, and some deliver the news painted in the streets five stories high!

ART DEAL?

"To be aware of what is going on, I must take a semantic jump beyond appearances and "realize" it, make it become real for me." --J. Samuel Bois. Our space-time world.

Agents and Art Dealers exert an influence on the manufactured “realities” of the art world and have a certain monopoly of the languagestructure and the means to distribute it throughout the village, by using the same global corporate media enterprises that keep in place the consumer labyrinth we inhabit, albeit temporarily. Some have said that the ART world really consists of around 666 people, most of them in New York and this has been the scene for over the last 60 years approximately.

“ART theory, pure and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled by vision, flat, flatter, flattest, a vision invisible” Tom Wolfe writes in The Painted Word, hinting, in my opinion approx. that ART and the ART World and the public perception of these 'things' may have been hijacked by the multi-media corporations that reproduce THEORY in 'type', and manipulate neuro-Semantic highways along which the 'reality of language' and the 'language of reality' are transported.

Art can hope for no success unless 100 Million people “know what it is” and the process of defining “things” and their “meaning” by way of relationships is the heart and craft of the good Graffiti artist, andcrewe network, a lone assassin of knowledge working in the streets, but tuned into the village heart radio, working without sleep to wrestle the language of “reality” back from the greedy corporations and their ART world off-shoots back into the village milk float.

“All forms of Black Magik therefore, depend on confusing and mingling these two classes: the nonverbal experiential and the verbal nonexperiencial.” RAW

If money and status are influential in ART movements then such a movement might be distinguished from those which emerged from comparative poverty: low income areas with high crime rates and a hijacked community infrastructure.

Jacked by the RICH economy and the capitalist system of might makes right, a system in which the RICH have control and influence to get richer quicker. In the UK it was the invitation of what I view as the worst part of America, right into our village, our shops and our front living rooms, that helped me developed such a critical view of business and trade enterprises with the giant American companies.

Mcdonalds, KFC and Burger King are just the tip of the iceburg , beneath the surface Billions of Pounds are swapped for Dollars and real estate, our future land resources traded by millionaire's and their friends in Government, both national and local, whereby handing our culture over to the worst viral entities from the USA. Who's 'lovin' it now? But this 'pych' operation was simply assimilated by Graffiti ARtists and poets, more grist for the grind sir'.

Welcome to the market ART economy world of 'The Makers'. If the ART world turns out to be just another arm of the bourgeoisie 'makers', with it’s connected 'Agents, Dealers and promotional markets', then what can we ever know about ART? or art theory without actually experiencing it with our own neuro -semantic nervous system? Why then, is Graffiti Art illegal and criminalized by the United States and United Kingdom law makers, and most other National Governments? Money, control, paranoia, making our village pretty?

If only the artists and the public at large could interact and understand each other better, and using these new social network tools emerging like magic mushrooms. Artists are the antenna of the race, visual healers of social ills and cooperative language interpreters for us all. Street artists and street news journalists all-together, wrestling with the symbols, the rhetoric, the grammar that produce spontaneous feedback, but open-source and fair: thinking globally and acting locally. Always on' and in contact with the other writers faced with the same daily predicament and correlating group feedback into good research. The Global Village walls are now become writing tablets. Grammar, Rhetoric, logic?

RELATIVITY

"FUCK SOCIALISM --Paul Krassner.

Urban Graffiti artists and street culture at it’s most poetic dwells in the sewers of language and trash of our culture, with the flies, rats, pigeons and the plague, with Burroughs and Joyce and the French Symbolists--Graffiti artists--are like chameleon commando's that can survive on anything the city labyrinth leads them to: war, famine, pestilence, economic disaster, racism, abuse, celebrity culture, false flag terrorism anything you can imagine, brutal, bigoted and/or dogmatic as you can imagine, turned inside out, synthesized and reconstructed as art and poetry, leading us to a temorary salvation, at least.

Good Graffiti artists, in my estimation will find a way to amplify, nullify, beautify and fry-up these linguistic invaders from the grey board room, and will shake the language-structures out through a simple aerosol cap into 'illuminated epiphanies from the streets', radical new sign-age of the struggle to balance the equation by any means necessary, fingerprints of what democracy looks like. Struggle, synthesis, renewal. A unique illustration of the painted-word in the depraved streets of the modern Urban Warfare zones. Culture warfare and information warfare waged in fairness?

"going beyond a form means passing from one form to another." --Jean Baudrillard, recovering radical illusion.

Good Street Graffiti has found a new way to gain agency to social change and it involves the manipulation of symbols and signs, image and casting the shadow of a new language into the “reality” construction process.

I think a pandemic of sane street Graffiti languages pose a threat to the centralized totalitarian monopoly on thought and, I that publicly repressed knowledge concerning the relationships between language and reality, and the high probability of an 'observer created universe' or perceived co-created “reality” constructed, and influenced by the sense impressions left by symbolic languages.

The coincidence of you being there and the Universe being there at the same time, or simply a sort of magical worldview where manipulation of language can effect “reality” and a view wherein everything counts and is connected, all is networked into a meaningful whole, a gestalt 360 panoramic.

Maybe the Gods of human conceptions are merely further symbolic inscriptions, scrawling attempts to grasp the ineffable angels, or exhaust fumes created from our co-created human experience of “things” and "motion in things", but sensed to be out there, beyond language or beyond human language developed thus far.

Urban Street Graffiti, for me, molds the keys to a revolution in the minds of the people where the centralized systems of control and coercion are short circuited and turned inside-out by non-violent means, adding beauty and alternative tribal 'meanings' to the Urban environment and bringing good news to the CCTV camp walls of Britain.

GRAFFITICK

“In the existential world—in the sensory -sensual continuum—Thoth still reigns and language still has Magik. All communication contains sorcery and/or hypnosis...” –RAW, Black Magic and curses.

The ruler oriented minority of publishers perish at the wall down the street my friend. Strict control over the press in the interest of the safety of the state has run it’s 400 year course, we are at the 'end of the word' in my humble opinion.

Maybe mass mediated alphabet cultures are literally turning insane, in part due to the lack of precise meanings, or precise distinguishing values between word/symbols and the “things” they represent. The words and symbols you use, write, speak and process, co-create, the “reality tunnel” that you experience, and Graffiti Art and Street Art and artists are dancing with these principles outside of the usual urban control parameters.

Linguistic and semantical review in the face of mass cultural implosion and apocalypse requires a moments contemplation...which positively results in meditation, analysis and scientific research into language mediated “reality” constructs.

I would imagine a big rush to implement these new findings into the public “meme-sphere”, to try to help those who may not have had a University education to recognize the “fnords” and to better distinguish between different value systems, humanistic and economic, and to better navigate through constellations of different meanings, thedamnbiguation of our times, readying the mind-body interface between the language virus and the human hardware for the big show down, or the big future in general. But no big rush to teach NLP to the kids, just the adults and CEO's. No rush to legalize Graffiti and acknowledge the primal symbolic features of human beings.

Good urban Graffiti artists are a glimmer of hope, as they hold the keys to make change in conformity with will and write out the equation concerning the pressing questions. What makes civilizations go insane, what (is) identity, society, ART and Reality doing, Postmodernism, multiculturalism, nouns, verbs andpreffix's?

TELE COMMUNE EQUATIONS

“The first rule of politics is to use the language precisely. Otherwise nobody understands anybody else, and everything falls into chaos –Kung Fu Dzu.

Communication between Graffiti writers, in the language of Graffiti, keeps their nervous systems tuned in with their surroundings, and local environment, and can lead them to study the human symbol systems and languages that they re-produce in their own street more closely, even scientifically sometimes, the rare times you get artists doing local socio-linguistic study and keeping notes, to enable the conversation to continue and stimulate new thought with these recorded artefacts.

The practical situation of painting in the street can cause friction and stress upon the individual writers, and the community, often amplified by the anti-graffiti police, whitewashed press, major media and art world boasters, all working to turn original street culture into a saleable readymade commodity' to replicate and mass produce, to mass distribute, and working at the ultra-mega massive scale: Universal, Sony, Disney,Pixar, EMI Time Warner etc., these pirates have held a massive advantage so far in the game, based on might makes right logic, and massive amounts of capital investment to back what they like, but the tides are turning and the BlackMagick of corporatism seems to be wearing off a little, consuming itself in the primal tribal fires rekindling in our community.

The capitalist game maybe loosing any scraps of meaning and sane purpose it may have held up until 2010, once more product and the consumer inter-twinned, but with the new interfaces of the WWW the balance seems to be returning somewhat to the individual artist eccentrically.

Good Graffiti Artists and sly advertising CEO’s and mafia run marketing executives are doing a similar process, after all, but at different levels of magnitude and under different social, economic and cultural conditions. They are manipulating language in conformity with will, with different instruments for their personal science/entertainment program and different survival parameters. And they share their artistic vision and social commentary. The art of sharing is the art of spreading your language.

Like the airy quality and concept of 'success' measured by the amount of meals one eats per day, contrasted with the number of Billion square feet in real estate a company may own, such as Tesco . A modern David and Goliath scenario, echoing the unbalanced problem with the centralized world economic platform, where the majority of people and made to feel powerless and insignificant against the multi national giants of culture, agriculture, banking, warfare and closed system curses, that magically somehow own the world, with the help of 900'000 lawyers, and anything that can be hijacked by a label, a category of a state. Language hijacked, but for a closed group of private individuals. The good Artist has always tried to share knowledge with others.

But optimistically speaking, a scenario dependent upon crooked language systems and exploited hypnosis techniques has it’s Achilles heel’, and will also boom and burst, hijacked by way of the swinging backdoor and inoculated by a more powerful andefective antidote in the forms of new perceptions and the emergence of new scientific and research based - new language - cultures! Graffiti tribes of free and uninhibited citizens of Universe.

Street Graffiti language, when charged with the highest possible meaning and spread as far and wide throughout every Urban environment on earth, can resist the thought police and advertising vultures that encircle the apocalyptic circus of the postmodern corporate controlledmediasphere .

Organize and do your homework, think for yourself, write questions to authority in pictures on your streets, our streets? why should we allow the corporations to invade our communities with their death trip, sex trip and tax trip slogans and to cast hypnotic spells that we are told are supposed to warn us, but, as I see them contain a stereotypical guilt technique developed from the government agencies, presented in Newspeak 2.0, leading to mass-confusion deployed upon our families, friends and loved ones. Fair play I spray!

NO. I state that the culture wars are fought non-violently in the streets with revolutionary language, charged with maximum meaning and sincerity, deployed back into the hearts and minds of the people – fresh, spontaneous, creatively and beautifully, and in contrast to the dull black “newsmagick” spook-speak, currently oozing out from almost every consumer-able product, street corner, shop front, roadside and transport route.

“i am working on every level, artistic, commercial, advertising...” – Andy Warhol.

60's UPSIDE OUT AND INSIDE DOWN.

"If our symbol system is three-dimensional, as in Euclidean geometry, the structure of the world is assumed to be three dimensional, if our logic is multi-valued, as in modern science, the structure of the world is assumed to be multi-dimensional. -- J.Samual Bois. An Important Distinction.

Street artists are an antenna of the race, beaming out across the urban streets, and in Great Britain for roughly 25 years. Among the hundreds of unrecognized and under-acknowledged Street Graffiti artists, who in my humble opinion – taking into consideration the manic police tactics and government snooping used against them – deserve a huge congratulations in the shape of some funding and resources to continue to set up new Urban environments, to share dreams through paintings. And support for those that are not phased by the violent and sly attacks upon British youth culture, art, music and the freedom to share this art, and to explore one's own consciousness without getting banged up in jail.

Some Graffiti and some Hip Hop culture in Britain mutated into an early engine room for anarchy and 60's spirited counter-cultural ideals. Building a new culture within the shell of the old, together with the rise of the globalinternet , and the uprising of underground art and music seemed to be gathering force, infecting the others, everybody could now feel the 90’s cultural landscape changing as the new Millennium approached..

LEGOCY

The four magical weapons of Hip Hop culture: Breakdancing, DJ’ing, M.C’ing and Graffiti; were develpoed all-at-once around New York in the 1970's, and then spread to Britain; mixed in with TV shows like Dallas, 'Disco music and 'McDonalds during the 1980's, and although only a wee trickle back then, the few messages and signals that did get through began to take hold of some young artists and early pioneers of streetlanguaging.

Like the slow, awkward, half-assed move to digitize all music in Britain, leading to Apple’s quick monopoly of the technology, Graffiti art and culture is lacking in support, to repeat myself again: Graffiti remains a CRIME in most urban areas, where it still thrives and grows in new hearts and minds of all ages, throughout all the genetic-soup packets and nationalities brewing in Great Britain, and around most of the world.

Australia seems to have a particularly destructive policy concerning Urban Street Art, along with the UK, and the U.S. I would propose that cultures and environments with a healthy and blooming Urban Street Art movement are the sign of a healthy community: New York, Paris, Brighton, Berlin, Bristol all have a recognized Graffiti culture, but even in these culture capitals Graffiti is still defined as a criminal offence and punishable by law.

The emergence of internet and the means for everybody to communicate with the rest of the world, at least for a few moments and turn each other onto alternative versions of historical and cultural events, probable causes, new models and metaphors, hidden influences etc, the centralized power structure has failed, the bullshit has piled up so high that nobody can breath anymore, let alone see, choking on our own entropy and bullshit, to be negative.

The creativenegentropic processes at work in manipulating "reality" and "Language" by way of what I call 'Good Graffiti, on the other hand, may help save some of the collective mind of humanity from going totally insane due to the alphabetical virus gone wild, and the enhanced redundancy of information in our daily messages. Information = surprise.

--Steve fly agaric 23.
Amsterdam
EDITED Thursday 11th Feb. 2010

SOURCES:

Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word. William S. Burroughs, the electric age. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake. Robert Anton Wilson, email to the Universe. Hakim Bey, The criminal Bee. Marshal McLuhan, The Gutenburg Galaxy & Understanding Media. Jean Baudrillard, The conspiracy of art. Ezra Pound, Cantos. Orson Welles, F For Fake. Alfred Korzybski, science and sanity. J. Samual Bois, Explorations in Awareness.

Crispin Stillwell Henry Chalfont Rammellzee Simon Reynolds Kodwo Eschun Part 2, John Sinclair. Plus...Hakim Bey, Frank O’ Hara. Allan Ginsberg and Kerouac. Karl Popper, T.S Elliot, Pound, William Empson, W.B Yeats, Ernest Fenollosa, Wyndam Lewis, Andre Breton, Dali, Picasso, Alan Moore, Mouse/Kelly, George Herriman.