Writer / Penciller / Colour Artist / Letterer: Liam Cobb / Edited by Tom Oldham / SC / Breakdown Press
31st October 2023 (Released: 5th October 2023)
The Pitch: Breakdown Press is thrilled to release What Awaits Them, the long-awaited and complete collection of Liam Cobb’s short-form comics.
Bringing together the previous Breakdown Press releases “The Inspector” and “The Fever Closing”, this new anthology includes strips and stories from every part of Cobb’s career. Readers will be transported to exotic luxury islands, the darkest rainforests, snow-swept frontiers, and a bizarrely run Michelin-starred restaurant, and will discover the unique mix of lush extravagance and bleak realities that his comics bring to the form. Cobb’s comics reflect the relative loneliness of contemporary life with gleaming, monolithic architecture. Metaphysical love blossoms in the dank humidity of the jungle in a whirlwind of melancholy and mundanity. His clean, unmistakable lines razor the page through rich colour, transporting the reader to a clinical oasis, a gleaming utopia laced with irony and sweat. With these stories, Cobb invites you to submerge yourselves in his uncanny waters and discover, once and for all, What Awaits Them...
There's something wrong with Liam Cobb.
No, wait.
Actually, there's something wrong with the world and Liam Cobb might just be the one who gets to deliver the bad news. This is my first exposure to Cobb's work and it hasn't been a warm bath, I can tell you. This is a cold shower on your sensibilities. If you're still harbouring any middle-class wet dreams of shopping at Waitrose for a cosy Sunday lunch, then settling down to watch antiques roadshow as you fart your way through the rest of the evening, wondering how your investments are doing, then Cobb is ready to show you how much the capitalist infection has crept through lives and is now wreaking havoc on any notion of peace and quiet you might have. Contained in this volume are six short comics, created between 2016 and 2018, that speak to the unending unease that has surrounded the Western world since the re-emergence of right-leaning, capitalist-backed ideologies into the mainstream conversation. If the question is 'Are you scared?', then Cobb's book says 'Don't be. You've already lost, anyway.'
Don't get me wrong. There is hope in Cobb's work. It just isn't hope for you or me. People won't be the victors. The world we move on and through will win, even if it's a victory of glass and concrete. If there's a thread running through these stories, it's that of lost people trying to get home or save their homes, out of their depth, chewed up by first their own consumptive attitudes, then eaten by everything else. Even the comforting icons of consumerist culture are devoured. Nothing's more cuddly and benign than Bibendum, aka the Michelin man, is there? But the cars aided in their mobility by Michelin tires eat our air. We use them to travel to Michelin-starred restaurants to eat over-indulgent, over-priced food. Shit. Maybe we're the problem! I think in Cobb's view, there's no 'maybe' about it.
We definitely did this. We killed the world and each other. Civilisation as mass murder. With Cobb, you get to witness and be part of the indulgence of the ultra-rich at a party on a yacht, realising that you're just being fattened for the kill. You explore the jungle, only to see your compatriots turn on you in a Kurtzian series of moments. You don't where these people are, where they're going, or indeed what or who they are looking for. But the desire to be comfortable overtakes the desire to discover, to quest. The book becomes a warning to the curious. Cobb treats us as missionaries who should have been explorers. Explorers go into the jungle, meet the indigenous people, and become one with them, learning, and adopting. Missionaries turn up, scolding the tribe for their Naked bodies and uncouth behaviours and force them to adopt singular Gods. They change the world for the worse, and we've done much the same. Cobb's book is not a stark warning, but more that feeling that you can't can't shake. That little bit of anxiety that creeps up on you now and then. And his work suggests that he feels it's been with us all the way, no matter how far we go into the forest or the desert, no matter how far back in time we hypothesise. We were always monsters.
Cobbs's style is free-flowing, and fast. It changes from story to story, embracing the absurdist nature of modern life in one chapter, shifting density and becoming more opaque in the next. Glass and concrete versus jungles and snow. His panelling creates uncomfortable silences filled with anger, or yearning, for what might be and what may happen. He often keeps to just a single colour, as if saying 'There's only one way to see this. Your hopes don't matter.' When more colour is introduced, it is sparse. The world is being drained of colours, so why not start here? There's some beautiful black-and-white work here, too, recalling Tyler Landry's Old Caves, with a lonely bleakness to match. As I mentioned the end isn't entirely depressing and he suggests that underneath our slow acceptance of oppression, there might be a quiet power building that will one day be ready to rage. What Awaits Them, indeed.
Buy What Awaits Them direct from Breakdown Press. Join Liam for the What Awaits Them launch party at Gosh! Comics on Wednesday 8th November.
