We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

Okay, genius designer Brian Lichtenberg’s Gizmo Skirt looks cute and cuddly now, but just wait until it chows down on some frozen yogurt after midnight. Don’t get stuck with a spider-gremlin mutant wrapped around your waist! However, if you think you’re responsible enough to adhere to those three simple rules, this is pretty much the raddest piece of clothing on the planet. Bedazzled with Swarovski crystals, Gizmo’s beckoning eyes are sure to set any self-respecting nerd’s heart aflame. The girl who sports this skirt for a stroll through Comic Con is the luckiest girl in the world.

London-based illustrator and cartoonist Tom Gauld makes books that double as art objects—books that come in weird shapes with unusual covers and paper stock that you just want to rub your cheek against (go ahead, Gauld would be cool with that.)

His newest, The Gigantic Robot is a minimalist fable about human folly and the passage of time rendered in fifteen flawless images and just as many sentences. The book has the appearance of a children’s book but the resonance of something far darker and probably inaccessible to the most innocent minds. As Glen David Gold puts it, Gould’s “black humor makes Beckett look timid.”

Without spoiling the story, we’ll just say that the moral of The Gigantic Robot is chilling (in a good way) while the perfection of the artwork is something to admire with untrammeled wonder. The particular cocktail of light and dark that Gauld cooks up is something to behold, especially at the start of a brand new—and heretofore unmapped—decade.

Art objects that are labeled “enigmatic” are oftentimes one of two things: totally amazing or utterly head-scratching. In rare situations—let’s call it the intersection of metaphor and reality—they can be both things at once. Folks, it’s not easy!

Souvlaki Circus homes in on the target. Amanda Vähämäki (of The Bun Field fame) is the author of the magnetic little collection co-created with Michelangelo Setola and lovingly produced in a pocket-sized volume with a silkscreened canvas cover. The mostly-wordless assemblage of pencil drawings explores man vs. nature themes with humor and delicacy, resulting in bubble-like epiphanies for those who choose to study the pages carefully.

Needless to say, the Finland-born Vähämäki also has the rad distinction of a triple-umlautted last name. So as you can see, there is nothing not awesome about the artist.