How would you color the Mona Lisa? Would you trade the blues in Van Gogh’s Starry Night for another color? What radical coloring choices would you make if you had access to a classic work of art, but without its characteristic colors? With Fanning the Flames, you can answer that question for yourself!

As an essential political artist of the new millennium, Molly Crabapple’s pens and inks have taken her from the cobblestoned alleyways of Paris to the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp. She has illustrated court proceedings, scenes from ISIS-occupied Syria, moments from the Occupy Wall Street movement, and even Marvel anthologies. With Fanning the Flames, fans and fellow artists will have a chance to experience some of Molly’s earliest drawings stripped down to their outlines so they can color in and outside of the lines. Featuring surrealist illustrations of beautifully daring burlesque dancers, Fanning the Flames is a coloring book where adults can be as creative, whimsical, and bold as their hearts desire.

Download these free sample pages and take the coloring book for a test drive! Click the thumbnail to go to the full size image, then right-click and “Save Image” to your desktop.

Fanning the Flames is the second coloring book in the Radix Media catalog. In 2018, we published Be the Change!, a collaboration between Radix Media and the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative.

The Artist

Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer based in New York. She is the author of two books, Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun (with Marwan Hisham), which was long-listed for a National Book Award in 2018. Her reportage has been published in The New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker and elsewhere. Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art. Her animations have been nominated for three Emmys.

See more of Molly’s work at her website. You can also read our Community Spotlight interview with her.

ISBN: 978-1-7377184-0-6

Publication Date: October 13, 2021

Format: Saddle-stitched, 32 pages, 8″ x 10″

“Crabapple draws like a madwoman. Drawings spool out of her.” —Deb Olin Unferth, The New York Times

“An hour with Molly Crabapple is a whirlwind of ideas.” —Marta Bausells, The Guardian

“In a media landscape of tweets and Snaps and Facebook Lives, Molly Crabapple uses pen and ink—and markers and paint and sketchbooks.” —Charlotte Alter, Time Magazine

“Whether scrutinizing the abuses of solitary confinement in a Pennsylvania prison, the day-to-day realities of life in a Syrian refugee camp, or her own personal and political experiences, writer and illustrator Molly Crabapple captures what she sees with conviction.” —Sarah Galo, Guernica