30 stories · 30 original illustrations · An Incoprea long read
A village hires a musician and loses its children. A woman discovers that her beautiful new husband is a skull wearing borrowed body parts. A woman goes into the marsh to investigate its monsters, and the monsters bury her: unfortunately for everyone, she is the Moon. These are the kinds of stories that make modern horror look restrained.
These thirty retellings range from place-bound legends and old folktales to modern urban legends and a living Māori ancestral tradition. Each follows an identified version, with sources close at hand. The interpretations offer one reading of the stories rather than a single meaning for an entire culture.
30 stories · 30 original illustrations · An Incoprea long read
A hand reaches out inside a ship on the ocean floor. A teenager survives a falling aircraft and then has to walk out of the Amazon. A doctor in Antarctica discovers that the only available surgeon is himself. These are the kinds of incidents that can make a film seem implausible—until the records show that something very like them actually happened.
Thirty extraordinary escapes, grounded in rescue footage, museum collections, medical papers and survivor accounts. Where a famous detail is disputed or known chiefly through a memoir, the telling keeps that distinction visible.
A small painting of a workbench. A city assembled from decades. An alien shop crowded with impossible customers. A storm over St. Paul. A world built so that you can walk into it.
These are all doorways into Incoprea, the continually changing body of work by Minnesota artist and illustrator Toby Mikle. Seen one at a time, they can seem to belong to different portfolios. Seen together, they reveal an artist returning to a few enduring questions: What is worth noticing? How much can a picture hold? What happens to places after people leave? And how can an imagined world become something another person can experience?
Alien Museum · Digital pen-and-tablet drawing. The Digital Art page captions this image Alien Museum poster and explicitly identifies the gallery as digital pen-and-tablet work, not AI. View the original context.
Incoprea has grown across personal websites, drawing and painting galleries, small Blogger projects, YouTube channels, illustrated books, digital experiments, and virtual spaces. That growth has left some of its most revealing work several clicks away from the main entrance. A brief archive entry or a page with a number for its address can contain an entire visual world.
This is a long walk through those rooms: a showcase of the work, the documented stories around it, and the connections that become visible when older pieces return to view. You can read straight through, choose a medium below, or follow the artwork links and get pleasantly sidetracked. The images come from the existing archive; the captions identify the medium and any useful limits in the original record.
Books built around strange ideas, real places, and the details people overlook.
Independent fiction, nonfiction, art, and illustrated books by Toby Mikle and Incoprea. Projects include hand-drawn, traditional, and clearly identified AI-assisted work; cover images open print editions and buttons show other formats.
New fiction & idea books
Featured · Author’s favorite
Maintenance Required
Midwestern folk horror · adult
In 1974, Warren and Lydia Bell buy a failing apartment building, hoping it will secure their future. After Warren commits a terrible act, the building makes the evidence disappear and rewards its owners with warmth, money, and comfort. A folk-horror novel about grief, complicity, sacrifice, and the seductive proof that an unforgivable bargain can work.
Part road book and part regional history, Three Counties Over visits fifty Midwestern crimes, fires, storms, legends, civic spectacles, and oversized roadside attractions. From Villisca and Peshtigo to the Hodag, House on the Rock, and Carhenge, it follows how facts become rumor, rumor becomes memory, and distant places become the stories a region keeps retelling.
CIA Money, Medici Power, and the Cold War for Culture
Illustrated art history · cultural politics
From CIA-backed cultural networks and Medici patronage to Soviet censorship, covert broadcasting, and Hollywood, Painting for Spies investigates how money and power shape the art and stories people encounter. Documented history, openly invented scenes, and original illustrations explore cultural influence while keeping disputed claims and the limits of the evidence in view.
From art and food to data, AI, archives, and manufactured goods, SOURCE teaches a practical habit: ask what a thing is, where it came from, how it changed, and what evidence supports the claim. Reusable audits and a thirty-day practice turn a philosophical question about authenticity into an everyday way of seeing.
How to Live in the Age of the Multidimensional Beings
Illustrated retrofuturist science-fiction parody
In an alternate 1957 where multidimensional visitors are part of civic life, this illustrated faux-government handbook explains phase-safe homes, school and street etiquette, emergency drills, unusual products, and travel to other worlds. Deadpan bureaucracy and atomic-age design give the book a playful current of gentle cosmic horror.
Orr survives by rules learned before language: feed the fire, answer hunger, trust tools, and keep quiet when danger listens. When he finds a child alone without warmth, he must navigate human customs he cannot read. A spare, brutal novel about care, memory, shame, and the invisible rules used to decide who counts as human.
In 1903 St. Paul, Matteo Tomei lives on the Italian river flats while Julia Lindstrom comes from Swede Hollow. After her father dies in a suspicious rail-yard accident blamed on Matteo's brother, grief draws them together and a secret romance leads toward a truth that threatens families, wages, churches, and the railroad profiting from immigrant division.
Former reporter Mara Voss takes an overnight job destroying Briar County records, only to discover twenty-five black files ordered burned unopened. Paired with Tess Mullen, the daughter of a convicted murderer, Mara realizes the files are horror stories and evidence of people erased by official language. One long night becomes a fight over truth, guilt, and who gets preserved.
In 1976, a poor Bellwether family poses for an optimistic department-store display as urban renewal begins destroying their neighborhood. Thirty years later, installation artist Nina Salo finds one damaged mannequin and traces the fake family's strange second lives. Her reconstruction becomes a mystery about poverty, art, memory, betrayal, and the copies that outlast the people they represented.
Set between the Mississippi and St. Croix Rivers, Anxy looks back at landscape, postwar suburban development, and the sometimes tragic stories that unfolded on its framed plywood stages. Compact, reflective, and place-driven, it is a personal work of regional narrative nonfiction rather than a blank journal.
A personal account of perception, technology, and a creative life organized around curiosity. Beginning with visual distortions that can resemble digital fragments, the memoir explores how uncertainty, experimentation, and wonder enter an artist's practice. It offers a reflective companion to the work collected across Incoprea.
Seven illustrated stories move through interdimensional grief, road rage, environmental reckoning, hard-won happiness, and sinister nature. Le Clara, Behind the Stars, Shoulder Driver, Boomacide, Never Give Up, Pete Moss, and Ivy's Arbour range from science fiction and noir to darkly comic cautionary tales.
A luminous interdimensional visitor finds a grieving mother and reveals that her son lives on in other dimensions. Told through images rather than dialogue, Le Clara gives the woman a way to witness those alternate lives. An emotionally direct visual story for readers drawn to quiet science fiction and metaphysical ideas.
Elaborate black-and-white cityscapes combine fluid buildings, flying vehicles, advanced technology, and landscaped environments. Each speculative scene is designed for detailed coloring and visual exploration. This is an activity and art book rather than an architectural reference or written narrative.
Lovecraftian imagery meets stars, runes, tentacles, surreal structures, and otherworldly entities in a collection of large-format black-and-white scenes. The intricate pages turn macabre cosmic imagery into a patient, meditative coloring experience for horror and dark-fantasy fans.
AI-assisted science-fiction and fantasy coloring book
Surreal ecosystems, mythical creatures, interstellar landscapes, and dense alien flora and fauna fill this large-format coloring collection. Built for precision and imaginative exploration, it offers a mindful visual activity for science-fiction and fantasy fans rather than a prose anthology.
incoprea 2021–26: AI Images from First Prompt to Now
Visual archive · art monograph
A chronological art archive tracing Toby Mikle's work from painting, books, geology, and virtual galleries through early text-to-image experiments, prompts, Runway video, lost-camera fiction, and Midwestern world-building. Blog excerpts, source images, studio notes, and gallery plates emphasize process and curation. Choose a full-color or lower-cost black-and-white edition.
BOHEMIAN GROVE: Conspiracy Coloring & Activity Book
Conspiracy-themed activity book
An atmospheric activity book inspired by conspiracy lore and secret-society imagery. Woodland rituals, hidden rooms, mysterious archives, symbols, maps, and radio broadcasts create imaginative scenes for coloring and puzzles. It is presented as entertainment, not a factual exposé or claim about real events.
Archivist Mara Vale discovers her late mother's hidden collection of banned books, censored songs, cut films, challenged school titles, and vanished broadcasts. The literary frame connects to real American censorship history, from Comstock seizures and Hollywood's Production Code to music labels, internet regulation, and modern library challenges.
Fifty-nine detailed drawings—thirty-one windows and twenty-eight doors—span ornate, floral, stone, brick, timber, and weathered architecture from around the world. Pages are spaced to reduce color bleed and welcome different coloring media, making this a relaxed study of the small details that give buildings character.
A resourceful mother helps her child's imagination become a space adventure, ending with a playful return-to-Earth turn. With no printed story text, children and adults can invent narration and dialogue from the illustrations, making every read a shared storytelling experience.
A young fox's playful chase has a serious unintended consequence. His mother helps him understand predation as part of a fox's nature while still accepting responsibility for what happened. The story combines self-acceptance with a candid treatment of the natural food chain.
Inspired by Row, Row, Row Your Boat and the author's grandfather, Gently contrasts gentle and aggressive journeys down life's river. A moving sun and horizon mark passing time as a forceful traveler reconsiders his pace, his choices, and the value of companionship.
A visual-puzzle tour through a cluttered yard, garage, living room, kitchen, pantry, den, bedroom, closet, attic, basement, and laundry room. Readers search for listed objects across thirty-four densely packed coloring scenes, so the book works as both an activity and a piece of environmental storytelling.
Artist's Path: A Beginning Artist's Field Handbook
Art instruction · practical nonfiction
A structured handbook for beginning artists covering observation, tools, value, color, composition, critique, safety, and professional habits. Time-scaled practice menus, twelve lessons, progress markers, worksheets, a thirty-day studio path, and QR-linked resources make it a working guide rather than general encouragement.
When billionaire Julian Vane lands eighteen minutes later, infrastructure remains but humanity is inexplicably one day ahead. Trapped in a decaying empty world, he must learn the practical labor his wealth made invisible and rebuild a route back. A novel about time, work, isolation, and earned competence.
Overlooked permit clerk Eleanor Voss becomes suddenly valuable when a rushed ordinance places a lucrative approval in her hands. Gifts, corruption, and an intimate persuader from her past turn invisibility into leverage—and possible liability. Adult suspense about attention, revenge, and the ledgers people keep.
Dying billionaire Dorian Vale escapes mortality aboard a near-light-speed ship: six months for him, eighty years on Earth. Each return confronts him with descendants, laws, memories, and institutions that have moved beyond him. A cold satire about relativity, wealth, consequence, and refusing to share time.
Books built around strange ideas, real places, and the details people overlook.
Independent fiction, nonfiction, art, and illustrated books by Toby Mikle and Incoprea. Projects include hand-drawn, traditional, and clearly identified AI-assisted work; cover images open print editions and buttons show other formats.
New fiction & idea books
Featured · Author’s favorite
Maintenance Required
Midwestern folk horror · adult
In 1974, Warren and Lydia Bell buy a failing apartment building, hoping it will secure their future. After Warren commits a terrible act, the building makes the evidence disappear and rewards its owners with warmth, money, and comfort. A folk-horror novel about grief, complicity, sacrifice, and the seductive proof that an unforgivable bargain can work.
Part road book and part regional history, Three Counties Over visits fifty Midwestern crimes, fires, storms, legends, civic spectacles, and oversized roadside attractions. From Villisca and Peshtigo to the Hodag, House on the Rock, and Carhenge, it follows how facts become rumor, rumor becomes memory, and distant places become the stories a region keeps retelling.
From art and food to data, AI, archives, and manufactured goods, SOURCE teaches a practical habit: ask what a thing is, where it came from, how it changed, and what evidence supports the claim. Reusable audits and a thirty-day practice turn a philosophical question about authenticity into an everyday way of seeing.
How to Live in the Age of the Multidimensional Beings
Illustrated retrofuturist science-fiction parody
In an alternate 1957 where multidimensional visitors are part of civic life, this illustrated faux-government handbook explains phase-safe homes, school and street etiquette, emergency drills, unusual products, and travel to other worlds. Deadpan bureaucracy and atomic-age design give the book a playful current of gentle cosmic horror.
Orr survives by rules learned before language: feed the fire, answer hunger, trust tools, and keep quiet when danger listens. When he finds a child alone without warmth, he must navigate human customs he cannot read. A spare, brutal novel about care, memory, shame, and the invisible rules used to decide who counts as human.
In 1903 St. Paul, Matteo Tomei lives on the Italian river flats while Julia Lindstrom comes from Swede Hollow. After her father dies in a suspicious rail-yard accident blamed on Matteo's brother, grief draws them together and a secret romance leads toward a truth that threatens families, wages, churches, and the railroad profiting from immigrant division.
Former reporter Mara Voss takes an overnight job destroying Briar County records, only to discover twenty-five black files ordered burned unopened. Paired with Tess Mullen, the daughter of a convicted murderer, Mara realizes the files are horror stories and evidence of people erased by official language. One long night becomes a fight over truth, guilt, and who gets preserved.
In 1976, a poor Bellwether family poses for an optimistic department-store display as urban renewal begins destroying their neighborhood. Thirty years later, installation artist Nina Salo finds one damaged mannequin and traces the fake family's strange second lives. Her reconstruction becomes a mystery about poverty, art, memory, betrayal, and the copies that outlast the people they represented.
Set between the Mississippi and St. Croix Rivers, Anxy looks back at landscape, postwar suburban development, and the sometimes tragic stories that unfolded on its framed plywood stages. Compact, reflective, and place-driven, it is a personal work of regional narrative nonfiction rather than a blank journal.
A personal account of perception, technology, and a creative life organized around curiosity. Beginning with visual distortions that can resemble digital fragments, the memoir explores how uncertainty, experimentation, and wonder enter an artist's practice. It offers a reflective companion to the work collected across Incoprea.
Seven illustrated stories move through interdimensional grief, road rage, environmental reckoning, hard-won happiness, and sinister nature. Le Clara, Behind the Stars, Shoulder Driver, Boomacide, Never Give Up, Pete Moss, and Ivy's Arbour range from science fiction and noir to darkly comic cautionary tales.
A luminous interdimensional visitor finds a grieving mother and reveals that her son lives on in other dimensions. Told through images rather than dialogue, Le Clara gives the woman a way to witness those alternate lives. An emotionally direct visual story for readers drawn to quiet science fiction and metaphysical ideas.
Elaborate black-and-white cityscapes combine fluid buildings, flying vehicles, advanced technology, and landscaped environments. Each speculative scene is designed for detailed coloring and visual exploration. This is an activity and art book rather than an architectural reference or written narrative.
Lovecraftian imagery meets stars, runes, tentacles, surreal structures, and otherworldly entities in a collection of large-format black-and-white scenes. The intricate pages turn macabre cosmic imagery into a patient, meditative coloring experience for horror and dark-fantasy fans.
AI-assisted science-fiction and fantasy coloring book
Surreal ecosystems, mythical creatures, interstellar landscapes, and dense alien flora and fauna fill this large-format coloring collection. Built for precision and imaginative exploration, it offers a mindful visual activity for science-fiction and fantasy fans rather than a prose anthology.
incoprea 2021–26: AI Images from First Prompt to Now
Visual archive · art monograph
A chronological art archive tracing Toby Mikle's work from painting, books, geology, and virtual galleries through early text-to-image experiments, prompts, Runway video, lost-camera fiction, and Midwestern world-building. Blog excerpts, source images, studio notes, and gallery plates emphasize process and curation. Choose a full-color or lower-cost black-and-white edition.
BOHEMIAN GROVE: Conspiracy Coloring & Activity Book
Conspiracy-themed activity book
An atmospheric activity book inspired by conspiracy lore and secret-society imagery. Woodland rituals, hidden rooms, mysterious archives, symbols, maps, and radio broadcasts create imaginative scenes for coloring and puzzles. It is presented as entertainment, not a factual exposé or claim about real events.
Archivist Mara Vale discovers her late mother's hidden collection of banned books, censored songs, cut films, challenged school titles, and vanished broadcasts. The literary frame connects to real American censorship history, from Comstock seizures and Hollywood's Production Code to music labels, internet regulation, and modern library challenges.
Fifty-nine detailed drawings—thirty-one windows and twenty-eight doors—span ornate, floral, stone, brick, timber, and weathered architecture from around the world. Pages are spaced to reduce color bleed and welcome different coloring media, making this a relaxed study of the small details that give buildings character.
A resourceful mother helps her child's imagination become a space adventure, ending with a playful return-to-Earth turn. With no printed story text, children and adults can invent narration and dialogue from the illustrations, making every read a shared storytelling experience.
A young fox's playful chase has a serious unintended consequence. His mother helps him understand predation as part of a fox's nature while still accepting responsibility for what happened. The story combines self-acceptance with a candid treatment of the natural food chain.
Inspired by Row, Row, Row Your Boat and the author's grandfather, Gently contrasts gentle and aggressive journeys down life's river. A moving sun and horizon mark passing time as a forceful traveler reconsiders his pace, his choices, and the value of companionship.
A visual-puzzle tour through a cluttered yard, garage, living room, kitchen, pantry, den, bedroom, closet, attic, basement, and laundry room. Readers search for listed objects across thirty-four densely packed coloring scenes, so the book works as both an activity and a piece of environmental storytelling.
Artist's Path: A Beginning Artist's Field Handbook
Art instruction · practical nonfiction
A structured handbook for beginning artists covering observation, tools, value, color, composition, critique, safety, and professional habits. Time-scaled practice menus, twelve lessons, progress markers, worksheets, a thirty-day studio path, and QR-linked resources make it a working guide rather than general encouragement.
When billionaire Julian Vane lands eighteen minutes later, infrastructure remains but humanity is inexplicably one day ahead. Trapped in a decaying empty world, he must learn the practical labor his wealth made invisible and rebuild a route back. A novel about time, work, isolation, and earned competence.
Overlooked permit clerk Eleanor Voss becomes suddenly valuable when a rushed ordinance places a lucrative approval in her hands. Gifts, corruption, and an intimate persuader from her past turn invisibility into leverage—and possible liability. Adult suspense about attention, revenge, and the ledgers people keep.
Dying billionaire Dorian Vale escapes mortality aboard a near-light-speed ship: six months for him, eighty years on Earth. Each return confronts him with descendants, laws, memories, and institutions that have moved beyond him. A cold satire about relativity, wealth, consequence, and refusing to share time.
