Two Triangle artists -- David K. Rose and Casey Porn -- are perfect examples of a genre we'll call "alterna-noir."

In Rose's unsettling canvases, a bear chops its own head off. Monkeys, robots and improbably busty women prowl what seems like the backstage of a circus you don't want to see.

Think also of Onion Head Monster, who shows up in comics and paintings by Paul Friedrich. Or Keith Norval, whose pigs and elephants enliven the studios at Artspace.

Cartoonish and at least a little ironic, alterna-noir subverts the relics of childhood -- like puppies, kittens, robots and ninjas -- with results that are typically either gleeful or creepy. Occasionally, the work is both, though it rarely veers into truly dark territory. Like the cartoons of Tim Burton, the genre lightly explores the visual pleasures of the macabre and bizarre.

It also marries the aesthetics of mass-produced art -- whether it's vinyl toy figurines or graphic design or cartoons -- with the most vaunted art form in the Western world, painting. But it's less about method than it is about style and content.

Sometimes, that marriage produces pretty good-looking offspring, like Porn's gem-like little canvases populated by alien dogs and octopuses.

Or Norval's playfully deconstructed pigs, chickens, cats, fish and elephants, roughly modeled in rich colors. Although he works with the same animals over and over, he plays with composition and narrative in ways that keep his work fresh.

Others aren't as successful at making the transition. Atlanta-based artist Gus Fink's recent paintings on view at Bickett Gallery in April looked and felt more like sketches than finished paintings, brief flurries of thought whipped forth in paint. That quality might have worked better if the 100-plus works had not been so repetitive.

Wootini itself is a perfect venue for this kind of work. Part art-toy store and part art gallery, Wootini is aimed at the kind of collector who values cool over museum-world markers such as resumeand exhibition history.

Of course, maybe resumes don't matter when the prices aren't investment level. Many of the artists sell original work starting at $75 or less -- or about as much as a decently framed poster.

The Wootini show, "Consume," opens tonight with refreshments and music from 7 to midnight in Carrboro.