Glen Baxter: Exhibition poster. "His Entire oeuvre soon began to attract the attention of the leading New York art critics."

San Francisco: Modernism, 1998. Poster. 81 x 49cm. Glen Baxter: I grew up in a Northern industrial town after World War II. The only escape from the boredom, the grit, and the grey was the local Library and perhaps more importantly the Cinema. I often used to go three times a week (they changed the program three times each week). I remember walking into this darkened cavern with the flickering screen already alight with scenes of derring-do…...Glen Baxter has been creating strange, perplexing, delightful pieces that blur (and possibly erase) the lines between art and comics since the 1970s. His work comprises a fully realized and delightfully odd world of cowboys, Boy Scouts, knights, wimples, snoods – a vocabulary of authority and adventure turned on its head that puts one in mind of a sane Henry Darger. He cites the collages of Max Ernst as an influence, and indeed his work has much of the straight-faced drollery of an Ernst collage, the same sense of playful subversion. Edward Gorey was an early champion, and there’s a certain shared DNA in their respective oeuvres – a Surreal shiver, a laugh earned not by a traditional joke, but through tension built up by the juxtaposition of the quotidian and the utterly strange. Baxter makes his home in London, and was kind enough to answer my questions via email. His new collection, Almost Completely Baxter: New and Selected Blurtings, is available now from New York Review Comics.