220 pages Edited by Roger Gastman Text(s) by Shawna Kenney and Roger Gastman 29.2 x 22.8 cm Language: English Paperback Publisher: Beyond the Streets First edition of 1000 copies 2026
It started by accident in Alabama in 2013 and ran for ten years: Kenny Scharf painting other people's cars, free, in under half an hour each, hundreds of them, until a Karbomb became a normal thing to pull up next to at a red light in Los Angeles. Scharf has spent fifty years doing versions of the same move — the kid from LA who landed in downtown New York at the end of the seventies, shared an apartment with Keith Haring, turned a back room into the Cosmic Cavern and put his blob-eyed cartoon creatures on everything from canvases to television sets. Karbombz is that instinct applied to the least promising surface available: rush-hour traffic.
The book collects more than 600 of them across 220 pages, and the design is half the pleasure — it's built to look like an early-2000s desktop-publishing job, all Photoshop and QuarkXPress, with the layout language of car ads and Auto Trader classifieds. A monograph pretending to be a used-car listing, which is exactly the right joke for the subject.
