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New series charts Evolution of the Emoticon

Maziar Mehrabi exhibiting work at North Vancouver District Library in Lynn Valley
Maziar Mehrabi
Maziar Mehrabi’s exhibit at the Lynn Valley branch of the North Vancouver District Library features 31 faces of the villains who threaten to doom Gotham City and the heroes who keep finding a way to save it.

Maziar Mehrabi: Evolution of the Emoticon at Lynn Valley Main Library, Aug. 27-Oct. 21.

More than 70 years after his face first cracked into a rictus of dark glee as Batman's mocking adversary, The Joker has slithered into the world of high art.

Maziar Mehrabi is the artist responsible for bringing one of the most frightening faces to ever adorn a comic book panel into the Lynn Valley library's gallery.

The exhibition, titled Evolution of the Emoticon, features 31 faces of the villains who threaten to doom Gotham City and the heroes who keep finding a way to save it.

Each face is drawn to resemble an emoticon - those frowny, smiley faces that infuriate grandparents and dominate the vocabulary of the text message.

The emoticons are a creature of the present but the roots of the exhibition go back more than 20 years into Mehrabi's childhood.

Cartoons came on in the afternoon in Kuwait.

Growing up attending a British private school, Mehrabi got his first artistic inspiration from the animated images that stood for justice or competed to become Pokemon masters in the hours after school and before dinner.

"To me that was art," Mehrabi says. "I never took it seriously, I just did it for fun."

The notion of pursuing art for his livelihood was alien to Mehrabi - as far-fetched as the notion The Joker might one day kill Robin.

But without shouldering the expectations that afflict the ambitious, he was free to draw what interested him with nary a second thought.

He sketched, he scribbled, he lovingly reproduced the illustrations that accompanied Playstation video games.

"It starts from there," Mehrabi says with a laugh.

Still, art wasn't a viable career for Mehrabi until Christmas day, 2001 - the day he arrived in North Vancouver.

He applied to Emily Carr, and as good fortune had it, was rejected, which forced him to enroll at Capilano University.

"I know the program doesn't exist anymore. It's a shame because it's by far the best," he says.

Working with instructors like Toni Latour and satirical sculptor George Rammell helped him hone his craft.

He also found a world of comic book stores.

"Where I lived, there's literally one place," he says of his life in Kuwait. "And it wasn't like here where you have everything."

He was thumbing through back issues one day while waiting on a friend when he stumbled on the Human Torch, issue #3. "I didn't know you could draw comics like that," he says, his eyes widening as he describes the flashy, graffiti influenced cover art.

He delved deeper into superhero comics, admiring Alex Ross' ability to weave realism into the Marvel Universe and smiling at the playful exaggeration of Spider-Man illustrator Humberto Ramos.

Not everyone shared Mehrabi's appreciation for comics.

After transferring to Emily Carr at least one instructor told him to stay away from superhero books.

"He was really against me creating art the way I did," Mehrabi recalls.

Undeterred, Mehrabi sketched faces on the bus and snapped photographs to help him visualize challenging angles.

If a character's hand is in the foreground, Mehrabi soon realized it should loom enormous to create depth, like Jack Kirby's rendering of Galactus reaching off the page.

When it came to creating the emoticons for his exhibition, Mehrabi used Adobe Illustrator to get clean lines.

He begins with a square and adds the eyes, mouth and hair. He goes over each feature, adding small details and playing with shading to make the face seem threedimensional.

With square jaws and bold colours, the heroes were fairly easy. The villains were more challenging, and in the case of the Joker Mehrabi realized his first pass was too tame.

"He has that smile. .. you know he's smiling, but he's not smiling because it's funny," he says.

He broadened the mouth until the Joker's grin was almost too big for his face, later picking a font that gave the background a rough, corrupt look.

His renderings of villains like Scarecrow and Two-Face were a bit too dark for the gallery's taste, according to Mehrabi, but he said he insisted on including Batman's oldest enemy.

"The Joker, to me, had to be in the show. You can't have Batman without The Joker."

The show runs from Aug. 27 to Oct. 11.