Gary Card creates hyper-surreal cartoons for new zine

Gary Card made ‘Happy Breakfast’ as ‘a big fuck you to taste’

Remember those pink monsters that took over the runway at Charles Jeffrey’s SS18 show last month? They were the handiwork of talented Gary Card, who has also created sets for Balenciaga campaigns – including the one with the logo carpet, and the one with the Lynchian red curtain – and has regularly contributed to Dazed.

His newest venture, however, is outside the world of set design: a zine called Happy Breakfast. After being commissioned to create a collage project in Japan, Card was so obsessed that he continued making them and eventually had enough to make his own zine. “This is reminiscent of the work I used to make when I was starting my career in 2006, it's quite 'new rave',” Card told us.

An explosion of colour, the images are almost too much to take in all at once, something Gary was keen to push.

“The project is really about exploring all my creative impulses, no matter how insane! I wanted to make something that was so full on it would be almost hard to look at. Super saturated, super detailed, the way my sketchbooks were when I was a kid,” he said. More than just that, he wanted to bring out the “happy” element in the name – “God knows right now we need it”.

And if you’re just as obsessed with the images as he is, you’ll be pleased to hear that he has already begun working on the next volume, with plans to make four issues before collating them into one book. Overall, the set designer wanted to explore a more childish nature. “For years, I’ve battled these themes in pursuit of a more 'grown up' aesthetic, Happy Breakfast is about embracing those instincts again, a big fuck you to taste!”