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mojo special issue

Ross Allison- He’s Trying

3 page comic. 2x2 (4) panels/page. Read left to right, top to bottom. Black and white, with blue shaded texturing, almost like watercolor. Panel One: An angler sits on a dock in the middle of an urban lake. An unnamed city skyline stretches across the background of the panel. Panel Two: Close up of the pillars that hold the dock and the fishing line entering the calm water. Panel Three: With no causal relationship to the fishing line, a man reaches out of the lake, disturbing the water around him. He has an octopus on his head. Panel Four: Dripping water, the man and the octopus walk past the angler. The angler does not acknowledge the man with the octopus on his head. Page two. Panel one: The man removes the octopus from his head and throws it into the angler’s pail, startling the angler. Panel two: The man peers around a brick wall in a cityscape. Two people are around him, but neither of them are paying attention to him. They are staring at their cellphones. Panel three: The man walks down a city street. For the first time, we can see that he is a young adult. To his left and right are tall buildings. He has messy hair, large square glasses, and a baggy coat over slim fit pants and a shirt. Three people in the background look at their phones. A person to the man’s left is walking and looking at her phone. No one pays attention to the man. Panel four: In the foreground, the man waits to cross the street with his back to the reader. He is facing a café—his implied destination. The people in the café are looking at their phones. Although the pedestrian walk sign is on, he does not cross the street. Page three, panel one: The perspective is reversed and the panel shows the front of the man crossing the street towards the café. The walk sign is off for pedestrians. Panel two: A car hits the man in the middle of the crosswalk. Panel three: The driver gets out of his car, but the man walks away unharmed. Panel four: The man enters the café. The server and a customer are on their phones and do not look at the man.

 

Ross Allison is a twenty-year-old visual artist currently living in Virginia. Primarily self-taught, he began by drawing a comic book a day throughout his elementary years before moving onto singular art pieces during his adolescence.  He has fully embraced the way art is currently consumed (via online) by constantly uploading any finished work of art, be it paintings, digital works, or pages of his many sketchbooks. He has described his art as “vicious depictions of what (he) consider(s) to be ‘the inner eye’, or visual subconscious”, displaying otherworldly landscapes of patterns and color.  He has only recently returned to the comic format, attempting to display his style of obsessive spontaneity in the forms of loose narratives.

His art has been published in 805 Magazine (www.805lit.org) and the Brushfire Literature and Arts Journal (www.unrbrushfire.org).  He can be found on Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter under the title “ross24fps”.