"I Have to Entertain Both Myself and My Readers and I Like to Twist and Play with the Truth to Do That" - Owen Michael Johnson on Bringing 'Reel Love' to Unbound
“I Have to Entertain Both Myself and My Readers and I Like to Twist and Play with the Truth to Do That” – Owen Michael Johnson on Bringing ‘Reel Love’ to Unbound
Last week I had the pleasure of chairing a panel discussion at London’s Gosh! Comics focusing on the new graphic novel line from Unbound Books. It was an opportunity to chat to Lizzie Kaye who oversees Unbound’s new line of graphic novels, their Head of Publishing Mathew Clayton, and two creators currently involved in Unbound’s unique crowdfunding publishing model – Ram Venkatesan (Grafity’s…
Panel Borders: Countryside Comics with Owen Michael Johnson
Panel Borders: Countryside Comics with Owen Michael Johnson
Owen Michael Johnson
Continuing a month of shows about architecture and landscape in comics, guest presenter Lizzie Boyle from Disconnected Press talks to writer Owen Michael Johnson , one of the team behind Raygun Roads and the currently-seeking-funding, stunning looking Beast Wagon, about the experience of being a comic book creator in the countryside.
If you weren't up in Kendal a couple weeks ago for the first Lakes International Comic Arts Festival, you missed out on the debut of one of the most exciting, ambitious books to hit UK comics in ages.
Raygun Roads is a BEAST, an A4, full-colour flipbook. While with many comics the flipbook style can come off as gimmicky, Raygun Roads pulls it off perfectly, integrating the concept seamlessly into the greater metaphor of the story, and that's not the only trick RR has up its neon rubber sleeve.
What Johnson has achieved here is incredible: A story that is simultaneously a savage indictment of modern culture and values, a love letter to unshackled creativity and self-actualisation, and a balls-out psychedelic joyride that pulses with enthusiasm in every panel without ever coming off as preachy, naive or affected. Owen's story drips with an honest, fierce optimism that pierces straight through to that furious core of volcanic rebellion that we all carry within ourselves.
As for the art... Okay, picture The Invisibles, Bulletproof Coffin and Yellow Submarine thrown into a blender with four sheets of high-power blotter acid and every colour in Pantone's entire goddamn catalog and you're about halfway there.
Indio effortlessly draws this gleefully manic, incredibly NSFW story, effortlessly rendering cartoon grotesques in compositions that for all their abstract weirdness still manage to read clearly and move the story along at a breakneck pace that practically forces you to keep reading.
And I did keep reading. Twice through on the first sitting, and it's still by my desk as a reminder to keep working harder, because what Owen and Indio have done here, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is raise the bar for British comics.
Find out more here, then go out and grab a copy. You won't be sorry.
