Curiouser and Curiouser

To celebrate his creation and it’s sequel Alice: Madness Returns, McGee worked with Los Angeles venue Gallery 1988 to commission several artists, including Chet Zar, Dr. Romanelli, Luke Chueh, Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda, Kevin Tong, Angryblue, and Phantom City Creative, to reinterpret his titular character for a showing during video game expo E3. “The art show really drove home my sense that this interpretation of Alice is a very natural and appropriate one. In creating the franchise, my goal was to create a branch in the Alice universe that would always feel like a natural, logical extension to the original stories everyone knows and loves. To see how that new telling is then re-interpreted, while still capturing the essence of a darker, more mature Alice has been like witnessing a shared dream.”

“We’ve been approached by many different video game properties and it’s not always a good fit, so we say no,” says Gallery 1988 director Jensen Karp about the collaboration. “But with American’s game, he’s an artist in his own right. He makes games that have a real painterly, one-of-a-kind feeling to them. I know there’s a huge debate out there arguing if video games are art, but with the Alice series especially, it’s pretty obvious. These aren’t handheld shoot em ups, they’re beautiful. So when deciding if artists could find inspiration in American’s work, it was a no-brainer to us, as we saw American and the rest of his team as artists themselves.”

Lithographs for the show are available at the Alice store.