Straight for the art: Monster Brains’ arcade art galleries

Want a trip down memory lane that won’t even cost you a quarter? There may not be a deluxe line of hardcover reprints dedicated to the visionaries whose fervid fantasies festooned the arcades of your youth, but chances are these anonymous artists shaped your appreciation of cartooning nearly as much as the stars of any given DC Archive or Marvel Masterwork. Enter Monster Brains, one of the Internet’s great repositories of weird and wild art and illustration, curated by Aeron Alfrey (himself no slouch when it comes to macabre art). Over the past two weeks, Monster Brains has played host to a daily avalanche of arcade art from video games and pinball machines. It’s a veritable nostalgia button-masher, to be sure (Millipede! R-Type! Karnov!), but it’s also an inspiring look at an area of cartooning with seemingly no rules, where the goal was simply to stand out even among a sea of similarly lurid-looking games. Mission accomplished!