BELLEVUE, WA.- Bellevue Arts Museum is presenting the first museum exhibition for Simon Hanselmann, creator of the New York Times bestselling Megg, Mogg & Owl graphic novel series. Bad Gateway, which opened at BAM in the spring of 2019, brings Hanselmann’s characters to life through hand-crafted installations, zines, and original artwork.

Timed to coincide with the publication of a new volume of Megg, Mogg & Owl, also titled Bad Gateway (Fantagraphics Books, 2019), the exhibition features 176 hand-watercolored pages from the book, which demonstrate Hanselmann’s mastery of sequential art.

The installations in the exhibition present vignettes of Hanselmann’s dysfunctional comic characters in the real world. Megg, Mogg, Owl, Werewolf Jones, and Booger abjectly protrude into three-dimensional space, doing what they do best: anxiously smoking weed, watching DVD boxsets of Seinfeld, and weeping alone in their rooms, terrified of reality and society.

During the run of the exhibition Hanselmann will appear in person, in character as the green-skinned Megg, to perform his own quiet, buzzing odes to lost friends and lost time.

Originally from Tasmania, Simon Hanselmann began his artistic career in Australia by producing small-run zines and moved his work to the web in 2012. His dynamic saga of low-rent, drug-addled loser-dom, Megg, Mogg & Owl began as an obscure underground zine series in 2009 and virally took off within weeks on his Tumblr blog, Girl Mountain. His characters, the depressive Megg (a green-skinned witch), her boyfriend Mogg (an actual cat), and their normie roommate Owl (a vaguely humanoid owl), soon became ubiquitous in the world of comics, both online and in print.

Collected into a series of volumes by Seattle-based publisher Fantagraphics Books, the adventures of Megg, Mogg, and Owl have become New York Times bestsellers and garnered an international following. The series is currently published in thirteen languages and was awarded a top prize at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in 2018.

Simon Hanselmann: Bad Gateway is organized by Bellevue Arts Museum and curated by Benedict Heywood and Simon Hanselmann, with thanks to Fantagraphics Books, Seattle.