Bring Out the Gump

The theme for our class letterpress exchange was “forest”. Simple thinks I: Forest -> Forest Gump.

But letter pressing like a box of chocolates? Too Etsy. Keep recursing.

So now, “Gump”. Hmmm… Well the only other “Gump” I know is the Gump in Return to Oz. That Gump is a green, talking moose head mounted on a sofa. Also it can fly. Tom Hanks can’t fly. Seriously, they made an entire movie about how bad Tom Hanks is at flying. It was nominated for nine Academy Awards. Return to Oz on the other hand was only nominated for one measly little Academy Award. And we must be getting humid now because guess where you find moose? That’s right, the forest! I know because I saw one there once.

Buy you can’t bring up Baum Oz without thinking HBO Oz. They are basically the same really, although come to think of it I don’t remember the merry ol’ Em having much in the way of talking green moose heads. Not even figuratively. So while there’s almost certainly a Forest Gump link somewhere in there, the whole Oz exploration is probably just a digression because let’s step back and consider the obvious: Gump -> Gimp. As in: “Bring out the gimp”.

Which isn’t actually from either Oz but from a story set in another magical city called Los Angles (which also played a prominent role in my moose sighting). And check it: that story was called Pulp Fiction, and pulp comes from trees, and you know where trees come from? The forest! Where the moose are!

So for my “forest” print, I naturally printed around thirty 5x7 cards that say “Bring Out The Gump”. Half feature Forest Gump’s head, half that other Gump’s head.

The heads were printed using laser cut linoleum halftones. The texture for the card was pressure printed using fake leather from a big old purple purse I got for five bucks at a resale store. The texture probably could have been a little less alligator-y and a little more gimp-y, but at least the leather is in there. Real pulpy too. And speaking of pulp and texture, the cards were printing on paper, and paper is made from wood pulp, and wood pulp—as we learned—comes from the forest. Goddamn! That’s just self indulgent.