Here we have ‘Wont 2 Cant’ by Gavin Owens and Ian Mackay and put out by Cold Cube Press
If you’ve followed me for any significant amount of time on these here social medias, you know I spend the vast majority of the year on the road. And that, this year, I upgraded to an ambulance for my hashtag tiny home vanlife liveyourdreams road ragin fuckfest that is the instagram amaro filter made real. Its great, the tiny home van life life and I get all the heroin and I eat all the pussy. The reason for getting the ambulance was that it had vast storage potential over your class B van or recreational vehicle. I need something that can fit in a parking spot or haul down a two track so RVs and buses are out but I need bus level storage. The ambulance has it in spades.
So, this year, and thanks to the ambulance, I was able to keep a bookshelf of 25 or so graphic novels I would take with me on the road. ‘Wont 2 Cant’ was one of them. I believe this book came out quite awhile ago but I had put off reading it, and many others, so I could have access to them while on the road and during the downtime. So here it is, I finally got to reading it.
There is no other place that a comic like this can come from other than a place of pure love. This is unrefined, not cut with baking soda or diet pill, and concentrated love. This collaboration between the two authors works so well that it feels like this book was made by one person, one uni-mind that is the result of Owens and Mackay spending a lot of time in gelatin and getting all their softer bits, over time, to merge and become one. This dont read like no ‘written by, drawn by’ collab, this has one singular tone and voice that is expressed wholly by the new unity being that is Owens/Mackay and it makes for great comic and I hope it also saves them on rent and food bills- or at the very least on tax day.
This is part one of what I hope is a very long exploration and I feel it is because those of us who pre ordered got a ‘the world of wont 2 can’t’ riso print and anyone who is taking the time to do some D&D style world map of their fiction sure as hell intends to take us down some deep cuts into that world. The place is timeless. Most of the action takes place inside a monastery (and feels like peak era of 5th to 7th century monastic influence) but the tech elements slowly revealed inside its walls, as well as the more modern world of shops and phones of the outside world, reveal a place that seems to be a mix of all at once. The glimpses of the outside seem to be structured a little more like a caste or peasant style society, with merchants and taverns were generic ‘locals’ grumble and scoff at the activities of the influential monastery and its fitness obsessed new leader, and it has all the best elements of any fantasy or fairie tale of those mysterious sights and sounds a pilgrim might encounter on an oft traveled road or on a darkened path through the woods. You know, all the kinda shit we wish we’d see in this shitbox that is modern times. That shit where we wish with all our heart that the cloaked and bearded crackhead passed out in our doorway is just a wizard in disguise, at the ready to set any kind stranger who finally offers them a glass on a 20 year quest and arm them with a mirrored shield and an acorn that can instantly sprout an infinite ladder when thrown to the ground.
The absolutely delightful renderings show us an obviously well thought out and diagramed Vatican of a place for our main setting and the orange and grey hues make for a page that I just want to lick, but dont cuz its my only copy. This is confident graphic illustration with a character design just as well plotted and thought out as the world that is their backdrop. And that the monastery’s main purpose seems to be the manufacture and distribution of a strange orange orb, which seems to serve as some kind of internet or cloud device of connectivity, it is right along with the theme of our last reviewed book, and many books we are reading these days that all are worriedly, and a little comedically, meditating on a society that is, in one form or another, ‘plugged in’ and on the very numbered ill effects of artificial and electronic connection that far outweigh the benefits. People dont seem to happy about their orbs, or indifferent to them, but over all the tone at the inn is that they want to get rid of them and stifle the influence of their manufacturers. Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Gates; maybe they all made our world a little easier but damn if they didn’t wreck us quite a bit as well.
So, yeah, this is just a gem of a book and one of a near infinite number of examples of why I tout underground and self published comics as the finest art form of the 21st century. The internet is cluttered with everyones shitty soundcloud and instagram is an unrelenting tidal wave of hashtaggers desperate for attention and validation, while twitter is a masochistic display of fetishistic self torture and collective suicide and Facebook holds closed the gates and acts like nothing is wrong, but through all that mess we have such wonderful comics being put out by people I will imagine are wonderful; until I find their twitter.
Go buy this book. Its insta so I cant link to stuff here on this post. But you can do this, I believe in you. You get on google and you type in ‘Cold Cube Press’. Then you go to that “cold cube press” website and you hit on the “store” tab. Then you select this book, and maybe a couple others, and then you add it to your “cart”. Then you give them your credit card info, and thereby give them money that you would have otherwise spent on cigarettes or way too much of an upcharge on to get hot wings delivered at 3am on grubhub. You can do this, I believe in you, and if you have any troubles just call me I am here to help.










