“I believe making creative work is what leads to new visual ideas”—Austin English
“When mystery and ambiguity dominate the straightforward. When words“I believe making creative work is what leads to new visual ideas”—Austin English
“When mystery and ambiguity dominate the straightforward. When words cannot capture meaning. When one is caused to continually wonder what is going on inside this house”—The Comics Reporter
“It’s my belief that comics can sometimes be viewed as webs of images that carry some kind of emotional punch for standing on the page together”—Austin English
Gulag Casual is a wonderful and strange “experimental” comics collection from Austin English and published by the cutting edge publisher 2dCloud Press. You want to see the future of comics, or the edge that will drive it? Go to 2dCloud:
Gulag Casual is a whirling dervish of style and color, a collection of bizarre stories followed by a helpful note from the author. Characters seem to be configurations of post-Picasso bodies in a free sketching design that connotes movement and accessibility, though the strangeness might just be a little alienating for some, and that would be one point of the process, too. In other words, conventional, straightforward narrative doesn’t teach you anything new about narrative. This isn’t Lucy and Desi, this isn’t Father Knows Best, it is abstraction and artistic form highlighted as one dimension of the storytelling. Matisse is maybe closer than Picasso as a reference point, but those are centuries-old dudes, old signposts for a road left long ago, maybe.
These stories span 2010-2015, after English had been making comics in a more conventional way for several years; this is his “first stab at making art in comics.”
“The New York Story” is one of mutual voyeurism familiar to someone living in any big city with facing buildings, then turns abruptly to an anecdote about a conflict with a friend, then a confrontation from men who had overheard that conversation about the conflict. Some of the physical arrangement of bodies feels like quick sketches of yoga poses, but there’s also the threat of violence. And the stories are overheard, reported, unreliable. Stories and violence.
The Disgusting Room is a more conventional story about a couple wanting to give up their child to people who can better care for her. More abstract approach, but the threat of violence continues. There’s a kind of visual counterpoint for the emotional chaos. When violence occurs, the narrative unravels. There’s a sense of suspense as in many narratives, but also a sense of resolution.
“My Friend Perry” is a reported school incident from friend to friend. As a narrative it kind of proceeds in what feels like a random fashion, capturing the danger of the story and the intimacy of friendship.
In the art there are aspects of the “primitive,” with a sense of child-like innocence, hand-lettered quickly, not without bright colors, fast-painted and sketched. As English himself says, people usually find his work “amateurish,” but he is working out of a pretty consistent vision.
I’ve just been reading Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren and George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, two compassionate and funny modernist portraits of poverty, of the down and out, the alienated. To say “modernist” implies that there is some attempt to convey the sense of reality with words, with images, with details. In English we see something different, the failure of mirrored representation, and in its place fragmentation. The attempt to capture alienation calls for alienating effects. There’s a deliberately imbalanced aesthetic, at times. But never boring! Kind of energizing, sometimes scary, sometimes amusing.
English says a central theme for him across these works is “aggressive forces asserting themselves in the most personal sanctums” and that feels right. It’s challenging art, not comfortable, in content or form....more
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