For more than four decades, the celebrated Alaskan artist Ray Troll has been luring, hooking, and landing fans around the world with his mesmerizing renditions of the inhabitants of Planet Ocean, past and present. Part natural history adventure and part underground comic, Troll’s art depicts beautiful and accurately drawn creatures of all kinds, with a special fondness for weird fish served up with a twist of Freud and Darwin, along with fossils, resurrections of strange extinct animals, and much more. His acclaimed art is featured in many of the nation’s major natural history museums, as well as in galleries, books, and on a popular line of t-shirts.
Now Clover Press is crowdfunding SPAWN TILL YOU DIE: THE FIN ART OF RAY TROLL, which collects over 40 years of fishy, funny, and inspiring art from this iconic artist. SPAWN TILL YOU DIE: THE FIN ART OF RAY TROLL features a foreword by David Craig of Willamette University, and an introduction by Brad Matsen, author of Titanic’s Last Secrets and Jacques Cousteau: The Sea King. The Kickstarter campaign is now live.
“I’m thrilled to be working with the uber talented crew at Clover Press who’ve curated a lifetime’s worth of my work,” said Ray Troll. “They’ve unearthed some forgotten gems from my deep catalog. Robbie Robbins, a fellow fish head, has done an amazing job with his keen designer’s eye, pulling it all together. This is going to be one very fine and very fishy book.”
“There is always so much to learn in a Ray Troll artwork, and you often get to laugh and wonder,” says David Craig in the book’s foreword. “This book is for all of us (many of us nerds) obsessed with Ray Troll’s intelligent creativity, beautiful attention to nature, and weirdness.”
“It is not in the nature of an artist to enjoy his work becoming ‘iconic.’ The term implies something too final about the creative process, especially when a drawing, painting, or sculpture emerges early in his life and work,” says writer Brad Matsen in the book’s introduction. “Ray Troll’s Spawn Till You Die, though, has the power and genesis of something so inevitable it seems to have existed even before his artistic impulse brought it to life. He was simply the medium for its expression.”
“Troll’s art is deeply thought provoking but also simply fun to experience and never far from an inside joke he seems to be sharing with everyone,” said Clover Press Publisher Hank Kanalz. “Some of his pieces are amusingly tongue-in-cheek, others are beautifully surrealistic and evocative of the interconnectedness of life on Earth. SPAWN TILL YOU DIE: THE FIN ART OF RAY TROLL is the perfect addition to Clover’s growing line of hardcover art books.”
“It’s a pure pleasure to be working with Ray on this art book, expanding his amazing art journey. As a fisherman, I am hooked on his art exploring the creatures of the ocean waters,” said editor and designer Robbie Robbins. “As a comic fan, I am drawn to his Robert Crumb artistic style, and as an art lover, I’m in awe of his attention to scientific detail in his subjects.”
Take an exuberant plunge into the fantastic realities of sea creatures and prehistoric animals that come alive with scientific realism and a quirky sense of humor with SPAWN TILL YOU DIE: THE FIN ART OF RAY TROLL, live now on Kickstarter.
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About Clover Press: Headed by IDW co-founders Ted Adams and Robbie Robbins, along with Matt Ruzicka, Mike Ford, and former DC executive Hank Kanalz, Clover Press publishes a wide variety of collected and original content ranging from re-mastered reprints of Terry and the Pirates and Dick Tracy, to horror graphic novels, and high-quality art books. Clover Press is working with a wide variety of creators including Kevin Eastman, Craig & Clizia Yoe, Dean Mullaney, Steve Niles, Gabriel Rodriguez, Ruben Bolling, Matt Bors, Timothy Truman, Jorge Coelho, Richard Bennett, John K. Snyder III, Stewart Kenneth Moore, Aron Wiesenfeld, Alex Maleev, David Mack, and more.
Brian Isaacs - Executive Editor / Publisher