Webcomics Today: Krent Able’s ‘KrackLife’ Continues Its Nasty Look At London Life

It’s Webcomics Today once more, with a return to Krent Able‘s KrackLife. Yes, I did it a few weeks ago, but what the hell, it’s so damn good we’re doing it again here … welcome to his twisted, brilliant view of the world!

Yes, it’s Webcomics Today, where I attempt to do something semi-regularly about the world of webcomics. The only two rules are it’s got to be online somewhere, and it’s got to be freely available. After that, there are no rules. Actually, no, there’s a third rule — it’s got to be bloody good. It might be some long-running series, it might be something from years ago that’s still online, it might be a short few panels on social media — it just doesn’t matter, if it’s online, it’s free to view, and it’s just damn good, I’ll cover it here. Well, I’ll try to cover it here — I’ve learned not to make any promises about this sort of thing, and there’s a hell of a lot of webcomics to cover after all.

So, like I said, it’s a return to the wonderfully wacky and downright nasty worldview of Able and his latest, KrackLife.

You should already know this as I told you last time — and I know you follow all my advice and have obviously gone and explored all of his work — but Able’s been on my radar as someone good (well, nasty and good, but you know what I mean) since I first saw him in the pages of The Stool Pigeon music magazine back in 2010 or ’11. Go look at his work online, go get his work collected as Krent Able’s Big Book Of Mischief, published by Knockabout in 2012, and The Second Coming of Krent Able, published in 2018, or the two SelfMadeHero anthologies he put together, I Feel Machine and I Feel Love, and his collaboration with Shaky Kane on Kane & Able for Image Comics.

In those, and in KrackLife, you’ll see this twisted look at the world, Able just a master of getting to the nasty version of things, giving you a view from the bottom of the world, unashamedly down and dirty, twisted, grimy — but always just eminently readable.

I mean, I still remember all those vile things he used to show us in The Stool Pigeon to do with Morrisey, Nick Cave, and all the rest. The dark, weird, disturbing things, full of bodily fluids, sex, blood, guts, and people doing things people really shouldn’t be doing, and certainly not the sorts of things that we’re told by the mass media that we should be seeing and reading.

Well, Krent Able, thankfully, is an artist who sees all that vile stuff and gets it down, showing us everything, just the sort of artist we’ve always needed, never more so than in these troubling days. Oh yes, we need artists to push the boundaries, we need artists to show us not just the beautiful and the wonderful but the absolute awfulness of the world, we always have, and Able’s one of the best in comics at showing us the dark underbelly of the world, exaggerated for sure, but certainly holding up a dark mirror to the everyday world and giving it to us, both barrells, unrelenting, unashamed, unforgiving.

So, KrackLife, just his everyday view of the world outside his window, the real-life things he’s seen out and about in his local North London area.

In parts 1 and 2, we got to follow the Lime bike riding crackhead on a journey of chaos and violence, supping down cans of Monster, riding over children, fatally assaulting the local constabulary, and just generally being a vile thing, her drug-ridden face breaking into a hideous, toothy laugh, pure, unadulterated everyday horror.

Damn, it’s wonderful.

So, onto part 3 and 4, Tesco Terror, where said crackhead runs amok in Tesco, with all the ensuing mayhem, pursued by the police, viewed with absolute horror by the unsuspecting shoppers.

Or, as he puts it, “Inspired by the crack enthusiasts I regularly see stealing stuff in my local supermarket, while the security guards film them.” (Oh, and if you don’t know, Tesco is the UK equivalent of Walmart or Kroger.)

Again, kids and the innocent bear the brunt of the nightmare, but then he ramps it up and gets really, completely, absolutely vile. Seriously, you’ll not be able to get the image of what happens to this dear old lady out of your head for a long, long time…

That’s all from Part 1 of Tesco Terror. I would show you more art from Part 2, but I reckon I’ll leave that particular assault on your senses for you to explore. And yes, he promises more of this. These things will haunt your memories for weeks.

The other thing about Able that you’ll see in KrackLife is that he has this perfect sense of how to stage a story and how to tell it so well. The way he tells the tale of KrackLife online is by individual panels, meaning you have to click through for the next, and the next, and the next, and it’s in that very close-up version of telling a comics tale that you get to see just how good he is.

This is comics that don’t get to fall back on the viewer seeing the imagery of the whole page, where you get the luxury of taking it all in, and then reading it panel by panel to get the finer points of the story.

No, this is pure webcomics, the tale told single panel by single panel by single panel, image by image by image. And in doing that, Able really takes you right up close to everything, whether it’s the scraggy lines on the crackhead’s face, the details of the mayhem she’s causing, or the sweat dripping from the cops chasing her, all of it captured up close and oh so personal here.

Whether he means to or not, presenting it as a series of panels rather than as a page really forces Able, as an artist, to push so hard into the storytelling, ensuring that every single panel stands alone as a storytelling device, rather than allowing it to be merely one piece of the page.

That all means that every single panel demands of the reader that they do the work of creating the story, filling in the narrative in this wordless piece, creating the bigger picture, filling in the gaps, creating the words not uttered on the page, adding in the sounds not heard — and oh, your mind’s not going to be able to forget some of those sounds heard in your head while reading this — I refer you to the image of the old lady once more. Try to forget those any time soon.

Frankly, it’s a tour-de-force in making comics online, pushing the boundaries not just of good taste (and yes, that all went out the window a long while ago when it comes to Able’s work) but also of how we read these comics.

Of course, that’s just one of the things that makes Able’s comics so good and so essential. Because his comics work not only pushes the boundaries of how you read them and how the presentation of the work forces the reader to do their own work, filling in the gaps, but it also pushes the artistic boundaries, doing the vital thing of an artist throughout history, making the reader deeply uncomfortable with what they’re seeing, yet also unable to look away.

In that, Able follows a long line of creatives who push things forward, who break through, who challenge us. And they’re the artists who push things forward. And Able’s worthy of joining their number.

You can find Able’s Kracklife at his Instagram. Specifically, part 1 is here, part 2 is here, part 3 (Tesco Terror Part 1) is here, and part 4 (Tesco Terror Part 2) is here. Absolutely essential reading, albeit reading that will really dirty up your mind.