Meskin and Umezo (2022) pg.53

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Artwork Details

Title:	Meskin and Umezo (2022) pg.53
Artist:	Austin English (All)
Media Type:	Mixed Media
Art Type:	Interior Page
For Sale Status:
Views:	124
Likes on CAF:	1 2
Comments:	1
Added to Site:	9/6/2023
Comic Art Archive:

Description

Austin English is an editor, distributor, retailer, instructor but for our purposes here, cartoonist. I've admired Austin's comics for awhile but it wasn't until Meskin and Umezo where, for me, he started working at an extremely high level of cartooning. Starting with a very simple story of two people who, on some level with varying degrees of investment and success, try to communicate with each other.

One of the main themes of the book is communication, it appears to be at the center of the two main characters meetings and Austin fills the rest of the book up with both details that signal the idea of communication, like characters visiting a multilingual bookstore, and references specifically to the medium that the story is being told in, as most of the characters and locations are names of comics or cartoonists (ie Barnaby, Mort Meskin, Kazuo Umezu, Ramona Fradon, etc). We are always reminded we are reading and looking at a comic, as what seem like pen and color test marks are shown on the margins of the page. All of which seems to speak to the endless ways we have come up with to communicate to one another, but still our leads can't seem to do it.

English's cartooning throughout the book is superlative, and with his tendency to have characters appear multiple times within a panel, making them gesticulate and appear to go through fits and starts, illustrates a wonderful synthesis with the dialogue which does the same.

This page could be considered the climax of the book, Meskin is able to successfully convey an idea, that he cares about speaking to Umezo, only to be laughed at, making him feel like the butt of a joke, a figure of fun. This page broke my heart the first time I read it and shattered it upon my second read through, when I knew it was coming. While pushing his characters almost towards abstraction Austin is able to express and convey emotions that feel more real than most comics.
Happy to be able to have this as it's my favorite page (and Austin's too!) from a very special book.

Pencil, ink, colored pencil, watercolor and paste up on paper.

Roughly 14" x 24"

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About the Owner

	Griffen E
Joined:	May 2022
Last Login:	September 2025
Country:	UNITED STATES
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Dave H
Member Since 2011

1 - Posted on 6/26/2024

Trippy page! I really like this.

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