I Am 8-Bit by Jon M. Gibson

Holy crap, what a find! While browsing through the Art section of the bookstore last night I came across (and instantly acquired) I Am 8-Bit: Art Inspired by Classic Videogames of the ’80s by Jon M. Gibson (and featuring a foreword by Chuck Klosterman).

This book combines some of my greatest loves (pop surrealist art, ’80s pop culture, and videogames), so I probably would’ve bought it even if most of the art was only so-so, but actually the artwork is spectacular, and I like just about everything in here. Sorry art critics, but my favorite art tends to be quirky, representational, and narrative, and this stuff fits the bill perfectly. In Amanda Visell‘s Level 1016, Frogger hopelessly contemplates an endless landscape of criss-crossing traffic-heavy highways. Ryan Bubnis‘s Mourning the Loss of the Princess depicts Link with vacant eyes, rotten teeth, and threadbare clothing. The artist explains, “I was never skilled enough to beat Gannon and save Princess Zelda … So I thought it would be funny and interesting to revisit Link years after his defeat and see how he was coping.” In Martin Cendreda‘s Luigi Bros., Lugi stares dejectedly at an arcade machine and laments, “How come it’s never called ‘Luigi Bros’ …” In Greg “Craola” Simkin‘s Pac-Man in Hospice, a decrepit Pac-Man sits in a rocking chair and is fed an IV drip of pac pellets while characters from other videogames of the era cavort about him. And finally, in Jason Sho Green‘s Putting the Super in Mario, Mario faces a bed upon which the princess is splayed, naked and seductive, and an uncertain Mario checks the cheat sheet he’s written on his palm, which reads “up up down down left right B A start.”