The Midgaard Serpent

James Barsness playfully references a Norse myth of a serpent that had grown so large that the god Odin threw him into the sea. The serpent lives deep in the ocean and grows to span the globe, taking its tail in its mouth and ensnaring all of humanity in its clutches. In Barsness' version, comic characters walk the earth, which resembles the surface of the moon and is covered with images from the funny papers. The serpent looks more comical and playful than threatening.

Barsness says: "My art partly has to do with my crackpot ideas about life and living. For me, the complexity is learning to think like a printer, which is partly thinking in reverse and partly thinking in deliberate layers."