Matt Lassen Gave SpongeBob a Man Bun

It’s late 2016 and we’re still talking about hipsters, which is its own kind of achievement. The subculture has outlasted mockery, trend-cycling, and the ironic adoption of its own clichés, and here we are still unable to fully define what one is or when the phenomenon officially ends. Maybe it doesn’t end. Maybe it just keeps recursively consuming itself until the last fixed-gear bicycle rolls off the last reclaimed-wood shelf in the last artisanal coffee shop outside Portland.

Matt Lassen is an illustrator who works for MAD Magazine—which is both extremely appropriate and slightly heartbreaking given MAD’s current state—and he made a series of drawings reimagining cartoon characters as hipsters. Bart Simpson with a man bun and a record bag. SpongeBob with carefully curated facial hair and a vintage camera. Smurfette with visible tattoos. The joke practically writes itself, but Lassen’s execution has enough genuine affection in it that the drawings don’t read as mean. More like a fan letter written in a language the characters would find completely baffling.

His explanation is the best part of the whole thing: I wanted to create a homage to the cartoons of my youth. I thought it would be funny to mix things I really love, like cartoons, with something I really can’t stand: hipsters. They try so hard to be above everything that they almost become cartoon characters themselves.

That last observation closes the loop neatly. The hipster pose—studied indifference, conspicuous authenticity, the performance of not performing—is already a kind of animation. A simplified character type with fixed visual codes. Lassen just made the resemblance literal, which is what good illustration does: it shows you what was already there.