Gloomy Giggles

I grew up with ink on my fingers and static on the screen—raised by a paper trail of MAD and Cracked magazines and the waxy smell of VHS rentals. My early education was in the margins of satire and parody, where Garbage Pail Kids cards and the wild, exaggerated art of MAD and Cracked collided in my brain like a beautiful car wreck. I wasn’t just laughing—I was studying. Artists like Jack Davis, Mort Drucker, John Severin, Angelo Torres, and Tom Bunk weren’t just cartoonists—they were visual assassins, taking down pop culture with crosshatched precision. The detail, the chaos, the character work—they turned every page into a dense, exploding battlefield of ideas. Garbage Pail Kids—especially the work of John Pound, Tom Bunk, and Jay Lynch—felt like their bastard offspring: gleefully gross, color-saturated, and masterfully painted. They were parody at its most visceral.

Even then, I saw the art as cinematic. Freeze-frames from deranged films that never existed but should have. Every card, every panel felt like a movie still—an entire absurd plot distilled into a single, searing image.

The video store was my church. A fluorescent-lit museum of genre, where every inch of wall space was covered in box art more compelling than some of the movies themselves. To me, the covers were portals—painted promises. Heavy Metal, Basket Case, The Stuff, The Thing. I was transfixed by the work of poster art legends like Drew Struzan, Bob Peak, Frank Frazetta, Richard Amsel, and John Alvin. Their art was mythmaking with an airbrush—hyper-real, emotional, and larger than life. Even the most low-budget schlock had its Sistine ceiling in VHS form.

I was an ’80s cinephile and a full-blown video store brat. Horror, sci-fi, action, exploitation—it didn’t matter. I devoured everything. The smell of plastic clamshells, the hum of the tube TV in the corner playing trailers on loop—it was sensory immersion. Film taught me pacing, framing, storytelling. It showed me how tension builds, how absurdity lands, and how genre can be both mirror and escape hatch. I never just watched movies—I absorbed them.

Print always had a magnetic pull. I was that kid who made his own comics and movie parody zines, drawing, stapling, and Xeroxing pages at my mom’s job after hours. She’d do the copying herself, covert-style, behind her management’s back—an undercover printer agent fueling a one-kid underground press. I wasn’t just mimicking what I loved—I was learning how to mash genres, twist tropes, and bend pop culture until it said something new. My fake movie posters, my parody mags, my spoof comic covers—they were all love letters to the absurdity of media and the beauty of badly lit brilliance.

Growing up during the final frost of the Cold War, there was a hum of dread underneath everything—a buzzing awareness that we were all one bad decision away from nuclear lights-out. That paranoia seeped into my worldview and still bleeds into my work. I’m drawn to contrasts: bold, bright colors wrapped around dark ideas. Smiling faces mid-catastrophe. Pop icons dropped into political nightmares. I don’t mock the darkness—I just force it to wear a clown nose.

Social and political satire is my default setting. I use humor the way others use umbrellas: to survive the storm, not avoid it. My art often plays like a broken TV channel—switching between propaganda, pop culture, and punchlines—loud, fast, and a little unhinged.

Victorres isn’t just a name. It’s a broadcast signal. Scrambled, sarcastic, and stubbornly analog in a digital world. Always rolling film. Always hitting “record.”