Try and beat this, Mars

Try and beat this, Mars is applied to a group of photographs taken from National Geographic magazines from the 1930’s. They are meant to show how beautiful and strange the earthly landscape is. The works have to do with one’s feeling as if they had been dropped into the world from nowhere. It’s really strange that ANYTHING exists. NOTHING SHOULD EXIST.
The inside is pictured science. I was interested in the depiction of a physical reality within the fictional framework of cartoons — in a sense, going into where Superman lives, and breaking down that reality. Diagnosing the air and the water that exists within this comic book reality which we, as a culture, participate in. The atmosphere as it exists in the cartoon is related to the atmosphere of dreams and the atmosphere of pictures.

Both the cover and the content of the book are from a series of works produced in 1974 around the subject of "details from an imaginary universe."
Matt Mullican