Some drapery studies, from the sketchbook.

A skyline in Buenos Aires, from my hotel window.

These pinbacks are given to the first twelve who purchase Captain Cap, Volume 1.  I based the button on the only known photograph of Albert Caperon, the real Captain Cap.

Alphonse Allais was a peerless French humorist, celebrated posthumously by the Surrealists for his elegant style and disturbing imagination.  Among other things, he wrote a series of wonderful stories about his friend Albert Caperon.  In Allais’s hands, “Captain Cap” became an adventurer and inventor, with a disdain for bureaucracy and a heroic thirst for cocktails.  He collected the Cap stories in his last book, Captain Cap: His Adventures, His Ideas, His Drinks, in 1902.  It remains popular in France, but has never been translated into English.  So, I’m doing just that, in a series of chapbooks for Black Scat Books.

The first installment, Captain Cap Before the Electorate, contains Allais’s dossier on Caperon’s farcical run for parliament in 1893.  It’s published in a limited edition of 125, with illustrations and introduction by the undersigned, and comes with a free Cap campaign button for the first twelve customers.  You can cast that vote at Black Scat Books.

This series of black and white assemblages, made with collage, rubber stamps, and press type, was occasionally exhibited at dance concerts in the ’70s.  That is, they were once black and white, but have taken on other hues with age.  Here are a few: