Webcomics Today: Krent Able’s ‘KrackLife’ — A Portrait Of London
by Richard Bruton
In the latest Webcomics Today, we give you Krent Able pulling no punches in his usual fashion as he takes a look around his neighbourhood in KrackLife, a new bit of comics work to be found online…
Webcomics Today is a semi-regular attempt by me to highlight various comics published online. Sure, it used to be Webcomics Weekly, but, with the gap between entries there getting into months at times, that was chronically misnamed by the end. As far as what counts for entry into Webcomics Today, that’s completely up to me. The only two definites are that it’s a comic online and it’s free to view. After that, anything goes really.
Able is all about pushing boundaries. His work is rarely easy and rarely comfortable. Thankfully, it’s also quite brilliant, knowing, a master of observation, and damn funny to boot. Throughout the past decade and more, he’s been the master of taking us to the extremes, and you should expect more of the same here in his new occasion series KrackLife…
He describes it as:
“I thought it would be fun to make a continuing comic strip that reflects real life in my local area. Eg. The title panel is literally what I saw a few times on my doorstep. Really inspiring stuff … More scenes and activities from my North London neighbourhood, based on real local characters and things I’ve seen.”
You know, like this …
And it continues in the same vein, getting worse and worse, that woman riding her Lime bike through the streets of a less than wonderful London. It’s full of terrible scenes, just fragments of a scene at times, perfect for you to fill in the rest of the tale. It’s exactly the sort of thing Able takes great delight in, obviously, and does rather well.
He’s the master of taking a look at the world from the gutter, and his work continues to be challenging and brutal, visceral, scatological even. But it’s also vital, pushing boundaries in the way all the best artists do. Definitely worth exploring his world.
If you’ve never experienced his work, you’re genuinely missing out on a talent here. I first had the pleasure of seeing what he could do in the pages of The Stool Pigeon music magazine back in 2010/11. You can find his works collected as Krent Able’s Big Book Of Mischief, published by Knockabout in 2012, and The Second Coming of Krent Able, published in 2018. He’s also put together two anthologies published by SelfMadeHero, I Feel Machine and I Feel Love, and collaborated with Shaky Kane on the anthology Kane & Able for Image Comics. All of it essential, if disturbing works.
For more of his work, go look at his website and buy his books and stuff. You can find the full KrackLife Parts 1 and 2 on Krent’s Instagram here. He’s promising, God help us all, Part 3 any time now.
Just one last image for you now…
And we’ll leave it there — if you want to see just what that woman’s screaming about, you’ll go look at the full KrackLife Parts 1 and 2 on Krent’s Instagram here. But trust me, you’ll see things you can’t unsee.