Dead Boys Sketches 2012 - 2013

These are the sketches for James Unsworth's second book that was published by Ditto Press in 2014. They show the preliminary ideas behind the finished published versions. The compositions are taken from Issue 34 of a mid 90’s German porno called Game Boys.

Two of these images were published in Tiny Pencil No. 3: The Beast Issue! Monsters, Machines and Unnatural Things! (2013) the rest have never been exhibited or published.

Unsworth was reading a lot of horrific literature around the time he drew these sketches and became interested in the idea of knowledge being essential for survival but also the brutaliser of innocence. He saw a connection between this and the way the incongruous elements of horror and humour combine to create the internal moral panic of the grotesque. He thought knowledge and innocence would be fertile territory to explore. With this in mind Unsworth wanted to include lots of references to memories of the innocence of my own childhood. He chose to set the images in 1988 (the year he turned 9) but he wasn’t too strict about this and included more contemporary references in some of the drawings too.

Stupid Smiles, Garbage Pail Kids, Boglins and Space Raiders also deserve a special mention.

There are way more 1988 references in the finished versions of these drawings so if you have a copy of Dead Boys or you can get one it might be interesting to compare the two versions of these compositions.