I grew up with ink on my fingers and static on the screen—raised by a paper trail of MAD and Cracked magazines and the waxy smell of VHS rentals. My early education was in the margins of satire and parody, where Garbage Pail Kids and the wild, exaggerated art of MAD and Cracked magazines collided in my brain like a beautiful car wreck. I wasn’t just laughing—I was studying. Artists like Jack Davis, Mort Drucker, John Severin, Angelo Torres, and Tom Bunk weren’t just cartoonists—they were visual assassins, taking down pop culture with crosshatched precision. The detail, the chaos, the character work—they turned every page into a dense, exploding battlefield of ideas. Garbage Pail Kids—especially the work of John Pound, Tom Bunk, and Jay Lynch—felt like their bastard offspring: gleefully gross, color-saturated, and masterfully painted. They were parody at its most visceral.

Those cards and mags weren’t just funny—they were dense with meaning and menace. They taught me how to slap commentary into every wrinkle, every prop, every grotesque grin. I’d sit for hours marveling at the art, how a single warped face or background gag could carry an entire narrative. These were my art books.

The video store was my church. A fluorescent-lit museum of genre, where every inch of wall space was covered in box art more compelling than some of the movies themselves. To me, the covers were portals—painted promises. Heavy Metal, Basket Case, The Stuff, The Thing. I was transfixed by the work of poster art legends like Drew Struzan, Bob Peak, Frank Frazetta, Richard Amsel, and John Alvin. Their art was mythmaking with an airbrush—hyper-real, emotional, and larger than life. Even the most low-budget schlock had its Sistine ceiling in VHS form.

Print always had a magnetic pull. I was that kid who made his own comics and movie parody zines. My mom would Xerox pages at her job after hours, covert-style, behind her bosses back—an undercover printer agent fueling a one-kid underground press. I wasn’t just mimicking what I loved—I was learning how to mash genres, twist tropes, and bend pop culture until it said something new.

Growing up during the final frost of the Cold War, there was a hum of dread underneath everything—a buzzing awareness that we were all one bad decision away from nuclear lights-out. That paranoia seeped into my worldview and still bleeds into my work. I’m drawn to contrasts: bold, bright colors wrapped around dark ideas. Smiling faces mid-catastrophe. Pop icons dropped into political nightmares. I don’t mock the darkness—I just force it to wear a clown nose.

Social and political satire is my default setting. I use humor the way others use umbrellas: to survive the storm, not avoid it. My art often plays like a broken TV channel—switching between propaganda, pop culture, and punchlines—loud, fast, and a little unhinged.

Victorres isn’t just a name. It’s a broadcast signal. Scrambled, sarcastic, and stubbornly analog in a digital world.