For those of you who don’t know, Mike Giant is the Original Giant. He’s returning to LA for a show this Saturday at Barracuda.

Mike Giant’s career is the result of genuine curiosity and decades of drawing for five hours a day. He’s been—and remains—a world-class graffiti writer, tattooist and illustrator with his REBEL8 line. He’s made zines, skateboard designs, animations, prints, collages and stacks of interesting artist and company collaborations. He travels all over the world, rides his bikes, practices mindfulness, smokes a gang of weed, and is a fully tattooed goofball that one can bring to dinner parties.

Whether a page drawn in a friend’s black book amid collected signatures of other graffiti writers, or the large-scale works he hangs in galleries, Mike Giant’s drawings will fool you, even up close. The cleanliness, razor edges and solid blacks of the images all come from a Sharpie and Mike’s surgeon-steady hand, but look like they were printed. “In some ways, I took a lot of pride in that,” Mike explains. “As the graphic world has become more fixated on vector graphics, I think I wanted to show that I could replicate the same results by hand, thereby usurping the notion that computers are somehow ‘better,’ which I think is bullshit.”

Partial text thanks to Swindle.