Reignite the greatness of clip art with ‘NXOEED’

These days, “clip art” is a third generation obsolete technology. Many of the under 40 set will instantly think of pixelated pizza slices, early emoticons and goldfish, the stuff of the dial-up internet era and MS Paint. The OG Clip art — real paper art to be copied, clipped and composed for maximum effect — has left the memory for many. But these magazine-sized publications have been around for ages, chock full of images of your favourite flowers, marquees, and unfortunate fifties stereotypes since before the dawn of xerography.

Zinesters never forget this stuff, though. Many are at least familiar with our scene’s own holdout clip art magazine Craphound. Well, make room! Here, the affable, prolific illustrator NXOEED offers some images and lettering in a different but related vein — think hatch heavy cryptozoological skulls, high contrast symbols, and similar punk fare. It’s all free for anyone to use how they please, and the artist clearly champions the original DIY sharing economy (which is you know, sharing) — even the basic suggestion of including an image credit pains the artist, ridden with forgiveness and caveats if for some reason you “can’t.” The only requirement is that anyone borrowing art produces the layout analog-style, with scissors, glue, and paper instead of software. I love the spirit of this Zine and hope other artists are inspired to do the same — imagine a booming new genre of clip art zines! Shout out to NXOEED and to Fluke Publishing which, formerly a one-punk operation, expands into putting out other people’s work with this project. Keep it up!