John F. Malta Studio Zine Issue #1

New comics, MoCCA Fest previews, playlists, film inspo, and Haunted Francis in Fantasyland at the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art.

I have been meaning to document and share more of my illustration, art direction, writing, and comic process. This substack is a way of doing so. If you are inclined, you can subscribe to receive updates in your inbox when they are shared.

I had these scarfs manufactured at the end of 2024. I could not be happier with how they turned out.

For the last six months, I have been working on a solo exhibition with the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art. I’ve taken over the entire top floor of the museum from now through the end of May for a two-part exhibition titled Haunted Francis in Fantasyland / Living on Deadlines. I plan to share much more about this exhibition and the process that went into cutting down, painting, and fabricating 30+ oversized woodcuts in six months. There is a reception for the show on Thursday, April 18th at 6 PM at the Daum Museum for those who are in the Kansas City area. For now, here is a picture from the installation:

And a video from the install process:

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I am headed to New York City for the Society of Illustrators MoCCA Fest next week! This is one of the first larger comic fests that I ever tabled at. The first one that I popped up at took place twelve years ago and I debuted a gigantic self-printed newsprint zine that was staple-bound and made at the SVA MFA illustration studios. It’s fun to encounter people at the fest in the present day who remember and still have that comic from so many years ago. This year I will have a new comic that I have not said much about... it’s titled Rotten Metropolis and introduces the character Gunk the Punk as he glides through a future dystopia. Gunk has a computer device mounted to the side of his head that allows him to access memories from days gone by. This allowed me to interject some actual childhood stories that my little brother and I share amidst a purely fictional work. Here’s a preview of the first two panels of the comic:

The comic is inspired by some of the films I have been watching and rewatching recently that take a stab at creating some kind of hypothetical future. I particularly appreciate lo-fi approaches to this like director Albert Pyun’s Nemesis series and Kamikaze 1989 which stars Rainer Werner Fassbinder (who wears one of the sickest outfits I have ever seen - a leopard print two-piece suit, an acid red tuxedo shirt, and a loose bolo tie). While all of these films don’t fit the category of “lo-fi” their aesthetic and narrative qualities were on my mind while writing the story and drawing the comic pages for Rotten Metropolis:

The way some of these movies (especially the aforementioned, Nemesis and Kamikaze 1989) take a minimal budget and find ways to blur reality for it to feel like some sort of far-off world is so inspiring and partly what influenced me to write this future punk Odyssey. Beyond that, I have piled up a few issues of Haunted Francis and wanted to find a way to establish a new universe that could be connected (in some way) to that world, while still existing on its own.

I can’t stop watching this GEL concert. Their song “Honed Blade” from the LP they released last year is one of my favorite punk songs from this decade. I’ve also listened to No Time’s Suffer No Fool a truly psychotic amount of times since its release at the end of last year. We are living in such a great time for punk music - it’s almost unparalleled in quality and perpetual new great, possibly classic, albums being produced (at least during my time on earth thus far). A personal favorite from the 2024 year is The Chisel’s What A Fucking Nightmare. I recently compiled a bunch of my favorite recent (and past) punk albums in this playlist:

If for some reason you are not interested in music that makes you want to clobber cinder blocks to dust with your bare hands (like I am on most occasions), I made this playlist of chill ambient music that I throw on when I am cruising around dungeons in Dark Souls with my friend Marc:

I was psyched to hear that Beyond the Streets reissued their first set of Garbage Pail Kids cards. I was asked to contribute to this series back in 2020 and it’s still pretty surreal to see. It’s the sort of project that you can’t really plan for and I am forever grateful to my friend Allister for linking me to it. We were able to select any Garbage Pail Kid card from the initial base set so I chose Junky Jeff / Stinky Stan. Like a lot of illustration projects, I only had a few days to blast this out:

During the holidays Sio and I drive from Kansas City to Toronto to visit my family in Cleveland and her family in Canada. We also try and schedule these drives with stops along the way (pop-ups in Chicago, antique malls, restaurants, bars, etc). Along the drive back, we stopped in St. Louis to pick up samples of the glassware that I illustrated for Yellowbelly. The glasses were printed using a six-layer screen print technique and they were a little tricky to set up because of the way the graphic wraps around the object. Thankfully, I had some assistance from my studio mate (and glassware illustration master) Frank Norton. Here’s the unedited photo I took of the glasses out on my dusty balcony:

And the final photoshopped image along with the flat art:

Here’s a new sticker I produced for MoCCA. I designed a new set to release at the fest (and will post them online after), this is my favorite of the new batch:

Oh yeah, one last thing regarding MoCCA Fest: I’ll also have copies of my new wrestling zine Exploding Board Barbed Wire Deathmatch with me. This is a new zine of illustrations that features many of the wrestling-related drawings that I created over the last five years. The release has flown under the radar because I published it on the occasion of Renegade Chicago in December, sold out of those copies, and then went away for the holidays. I am currently hand assembling the second printing and will make those available online as soon as I return from New York City. Here’s what the book band and cover looks like:

I got to catch Iron Claw in theatres with the Torture Wracked gang back in December. Hoping we get more quality films produced around the subject of professional wrestling. The film captures the joy and energy of professional wrestling while also handling one of the most depressing stories in the history of the sport with clear care and respect.

I have tickets to Joey Janela’s midnight Spring Break show during Wrestlemania weekend in Philadelphia, if you are reading this and you are going to be there, say hey! The last project I worked on during the 2023 year was this t-shirt graphic for Hook on the occasion of his hometown FTW Championship title defense against Wheeler Yuta on Long Island at AEW World’s End:

Otherwise, I have been working on some new ceramics (took a mold-making demo and have some ideas for a line of figures and lamps), playing street hockey, and junk shopping. Check out this gnarly skateboard deck I came across while thrifting last month… it carried the price of a rare artifact (as it should) so I did not buy it but took extensive documentation of the graphic and the deck:

I have some exciting client-related illustration and art direction projects in my queue that I can’t go into much detail about at the moment. One of them has launched and will be released soon, the other comes out on Go Skateboarding Day (June 21st, 2024). Lastly; here’s a portrait the illustrator Mary Gladbach painted of me and my dog Porky:

Thanks for Reading,
John F. Malta