The book The Clock Without a Face, for instance, is an illustrated detective wonderland that pulls Teplin’s art into the real world. Produced in collaboration with Mac Barnett and Eli Horowitz, who collectively go by the pseudonym Twintig, and published by the masters of art-and-life line-blurring McSweeny’s, The Clock Without a Face is a story of thirteen rooms in a clock tower (yes, Teplin-esque rooms packed with wild and revealing artifacts), each offering new clues to an overarching mystery narrative. But besides being a critically acclaimed, kid-friendly sleuth story, readers were invited to participate in a real-life mystery and deduce from each page of
the book the whereabouts of real-life artifacts, the twelve numbers of the clock, which were hidden around the U.S. The Clock Without a Face is the four-dimensional manifestation of the magical, childlike sense of the discovery that Teplin’s art inspires, a quality so many in the art world have shed in favor of cynical irony, arrogant punditism or outright despair and loathing. Granted, it took a little prodding to get Teplin to admit to indulging that inner child. He definitely seems more interested in the underlying themes of sex, specifically, and “what’s inside stuff” in general.
But, whether those missiles do represent penises or those are disembodied boners poking up from the sheets in Teplin’s cartoon beds, what kid wouldn’t want to live in a Q house with its fountain in the living room, the mysterious subterranean entrance and the swing set out back?
I use garish or happy colors to stay away from overly ominous statements of death and destruction. I’m also exploring how far I can sexually abstract my representational drawings.”
Teplin digs into the details of his houses with an obsession that marks a great pen-and-ink artists. His meticulous determination to get everything in his imagination on paper set him alongside Albrecht Dürer and Hieronymus Bosch. Child or adult, no one with even an ounce of latent wonder can’t escape being somewhat captivated by the nuance and strangeness of Teplin’s worlds. After pointing the childlike quality his work inspires, Teplin admitted that he’s probably still in a state of arrested development.
“I still have a lot of non-adult like tendencies. I hate the taste of alcohol, beer included. If possible, I’ll always have a white Russian, because if I have to imbibe, why not make it taste like sugary ice cream? Same with food. My wife is a foodie—but I would prefer pizza- and burgers-candy. Better yet, give me food pills and I won’t have to waste time eating at all. Plus I was held back in first grade and expelled in middle school.”
Far from being the artist’s flaw, his admitted arrested development brings about all sorts of hilarious art projects and collaborations. It’s not a stretch to imagine this former New York City skater punk, who would wear disguises like wigs, fake zits and prosthetic noses for his driver license photos (“pre-9/11, of course”), collaborating on Randy Packs, a set of Garbage Pail Kids-esque improbable sex act trading cards.
And it’s this sense of wonder and weirdness that makes Teplin such a good match for the magic factory that is McSweeny’s publishing house. Teplin said that, just as he was giving up on being an illustrator due to the pretension and schmoozing required in the New York publishing world, former McSweeny’s art director Eli Horowitz called him up “out of the blue” to do the cover for the twenty-seventh edition of their quarterly journal. Since then, Teplin has done several collaborations with McSweeny’s, culminating with The Clock Without a Face.
“They’re more interested in working with artists with their own individual, weird vision than with someone who can draw Nick Cage riding a bull through a china shop filled with statues of Hollywood moguls, or something idiotic like that. They don’t bulldoze you with their art-director egos because what they’re after is a collaboration with an artist they trust or are more than happy to take a risk with. I think that’s one reason their work is so different than anything else out there.”