Gallery: The Guy Behind Garbage Pail Kids Has Been Cartooning With Code for 20 Years
John Pound01faces
John Pound's been drawing cartoons entirely with code for over 20 years.
John Pound02jpound7
It started when he bought his first computer, an Amiga, in the late '80s.
John Pound03jpound-new
He taught himself the early programming language PostScript to draw the comics.
John Pound04johnpound-new9
Here's an example of some recent work, much more abstract and geometric.
John Pound05JP222
Pound's recent output has been in a series of "sketchbooks."
John Pound06facesces
He sets his program to randomly generate one or two hundred compositions. Then he sends them to an on-demand printer and gets back a physical book.
John Pound07jpound4
Everything you see here is randomly generated. Pound codes various modules that draw people, for example, but the code determines the position of the arms and the eyes, where they are on the page, their color, etc.
John Pound08jpound-new2
Some are stark, minimalist pieces; others are dense and colorful, like the cheerful, chaotic work of Haruki Murakami.
John Pound09jpound8
Some, with their slightly-varied repetitions and diagrammatic layout, are reminiscent of Chris Ware’s experimental comics; others feel like the type of graphics you’d find on clothes from a cool skate wear company.
John Pound10jpound16
In every case, it’s hard to believe that they were drawn by a computer program.
John Pound11jpound23
A detail from one of Pound's more chaotic compositions.
John Pound12johnpound-new8
These days, Pound sees randomness as a sort of collaborative partner.
John Pound13jpound-new3
The compositions are random but only within the parameters he establishes. Ultimately, he says, they all exhibit his “accumulated taste and intuition” to some extent.
John Pound14jpound14
See more on his site, [Code Cartooning.](http://codecartooning.tumblr.com)
