Publication: Hold on to your brains, Mould Map is back and it's bursting with illustration talent

Date
11 November 2013

Did you ever see a copy of Mould Map 2? That glossy, odd-sized publication blew my little brains out when it popped into my life back in 2011. Unexpected colours, comics like you’ve never seen before and some of the weirdest story lines you’ll maybe ever see adorn it’s fat, juicy pages, probably because it’s pretty much the Who’s Who of young, lo-fi cartoonists and illustrators working today.

The good news is that as winter draws in, Hugh Frost and Leon Sadler have got another issue raring to go and it looks incredible! Mould Map 3 is a voyage into the rare brains of some of the best illustrators working today, and we don’t mean people who get commissions from Waterstones or get asked to make organic food packaging, these are wizard-like storytellers who weave visual elixirs and create baffling, beautiful images of love, magic and future.

The theme of the issue is TRANS-HOPELESS which Hugh says is “influenced by Mark Fisher’s excellent Capitalist Realism and the feeling of being trapped in power structures that we have little to no control over…We really wanted to give the artists more space to develop deeper stories this time and for it to be a richer book to read, one you could come back to. Where we just had one or two page visual spreads in the first book, this one is much more about the writing. A few of the stories are 13 pages long.”

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Mould Map 3: Angie Wang

Seeing as he’s been working on this since January, you can only imagine how excited Hugh is about it going to print. “I love it as it’s so packed with amazingly diverse responses to the initial art direction text we started out with. You get these things going but have NO idea where it’ll all lead. We’ve packed the book with brilliant art, 9 Pantone inks, 224 pages and in 2 formats A4 with A5 section mini comics. I can’t wait to hold this thing, I just hope it works out!”

This is strange illustration, many of these pages give the same feeling as falling into the dark scrap paper bin at a cartoon factory. But it’s okay because it’s a beautiful bin – it’s warm in there, and you can stay in there for a while until someone finds you and coaxes you out.

Check out the Kickstarter to support this magnificent publication becoming real. If all goes to plan, Mould Map 3 will be going to print in December, and there will only be enough to cover the Kickstarter orders – so if you want to get your hands on a copy, you’d better move fast and secure your fate.

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Mould Map 3: Karn Piana

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Mould Map 3: Julien Ceccaldi

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Mould Map 3: Sammy Harkham

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Mould Map 3: James Jarvis

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Mould Map 3: Viktor Hachmang

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Mould Map 3: Yuichi Yokoyama

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Mould Map 3: Daniel Swan

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Mould Map 3: Leon Sadler

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Mould Map 3: Jacob Ciocci and Sammy Harkham

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About the Author

Liv Siddall

Liv joined It’s Nice That as an intern in 2011 and worked across online, print and events, and was latterly Features Editor before leaving in May 2015.

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