Keith Haring‘s art has always been special to me in that it is immediately recognisable — the broad, clear lines, the cartoony figures and the pop culture sensibilities set him aside from all his contemporaries.
I didn’t know he also made actual comics, however, until I saw them at the current retrospective in the Brussels Bozar museum. One of them is a quick biographical sketch in seventeen panels, bizarrely ending in his ascending up to heaven. It provides a concise but surprisingly complete overview of his influences and themes, including religion, homosexuality, drugs, money and, of course, Andy.
A second series is a set of strips that are form a loose narrative featuring aliens, a golden calf, and a hero with some kind of light sabre and a ferocious sexual appetite. Wouldn’t have been out of place in an underground comic of some kind, but as it happens, it’s High Art and as such presented in a glass case.
