Bizarre illustrated scenarios and cowboy tales in this new book

I think I might never have seen two illustrators as well paired as Faye Coral Johnson and Mike Redmond, the duo behind this charming new book Behind the Wild Heart. Faye’s work – sketchy, sweet and imperfect – seems to slot right in with Mike’s dynamic cartoony characters, and the two work together so often that it’s difficult to tell where one’s work ends and the other’s begins.

The book consists of 124 drawings which are “loosely based around a deconstructed story of the movie Romancing the Stone which features the hot babes Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner,” as Mike’s blog explains. The drawings are printed in three colour Risograph on three colours of paper, with each included in a different order to make every copy unique. There is some “moderate horror” included among the drawings, as the cover warns, but it’s interspersed with monkeys on branches, handwritten warnings, naked telephone calls and depictions of all manner of odd but enchanting circumstances. It’s like an adventure story squished in with some romance, some biting humour and some plain weird fantasy, and it’s all the things that we love.

Behind the Wild Heart by Faye Coral Johnson and Mike Redmond is available to buy now from Editions FP&CF.