Editor’s note: We are so proud to present an exclusive excerpt from this great new graphic novel by Donald Brackett and Lance Austin Olsen. See the publisher’s website for more about the book.

Query: isn’t it possible that what today we call Graphic Novels (or for the uninitiated, Comics) are really only an update of a very ancient form of non-linear narrative message tome taken to new heights, or depths, in our current age? This collaborative book is a contemporary exploration of the emblem, an arcane communication device which combined words and images in order to convey usually moral lessons in an often oblique manner. Perhaps the digital internet age is an ideal time to reexamine human nature itself, our virtues and vices, in light of how much we have changed over time since the original emblemata books of the late middle ages, and perhaps, even more importantly, how much we haven’t really changed at all. Thus one opens the pages of Throw Caution to the Wind at one’s peril, as its deceptively straightforward graphic and text panels tell a disconcerting story that may have been centuries in the making. As such, these neo­classical image/text combinations also serve us as cautionary fables for easy contemplation. First developed in the 16th century, emblems consisted of three basic parts: a symbolic picture (pictura) with a motto or title (inscriptio) and an explanatory poem or epigram (subscriptio). Emblem books proved popular for more than two hundred years and thousands were published across Europe. The purpose of the emblem is to indirectly convey moral, political or spiritual values in forms that needed to be decoded by the viewer via all of their inherent allegorical meanings. In a sense, our emblemata actually shares some similarities with our contemporary detective stories, and with our favorite anti­hero, the enigmatic gangster, the kind who speaks with a universally recognizable noir accent.

The visual artist Lance Austin Olsen and the curator critic Donald Brackett have collaborated on the production of a new digital emblem book which references some of the human traits first explored in the advanced book printing period of medieval Germany. Ironically, but not surprisingly perhaps, our basic situation remains the same even though it has been enhanced by highly sophisticated tools which enable us to imagine that we are all one global village interconnected through devices which now control us as much as we use them. The connections which we devised to melt our communities together might in fact be turning us into something utterly unexpected, something similar to science fiction in terms of unforeseen consequences. What follows are the first emblem images in our series, which invites us to pause and reflect, to consider the nature of human nature in a new light, one providing an entrance to the deceptively simple yet deep question: what is true? Do we really know who our fellow passengers are on board this big floating cultural steamship we call the digital world? The ship of fools metaphor is perhaps a very apt one: the digital domain itself is an electronic vessel, traveling to and from the capital of troubling dreams, with its passengers ready to reacquaint ourselves with the night. The esteemed visual artist/musician Lance Austin Olsen and I both hope you enjoy your journey over the emblematic edge of the salient known world, where terra incognita awaits our slow arrival with bated breath. Together we propose a unique variety of nostalgia for a place we’ve never visited.
— Donald Brackett, Vancouver, 2024

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If the pulp novel author James M. Cain and the science fiction novelist Philip K. Dick went on a blind date with Weimar artists George Grosz and Max Beckman, after meeting accidentally on the 20^thcentury equivalent of a non-existent Tinderesque social media, the resulting fever dream might somewhat resemble the collaborative experiment of Throw Caution To the Wind. The principal discovery generously shared by this short graphic novel is this tongue in cheek definition: comedy equals tragedy plus time.

Vancouver-based writer Donald Brackett, author of a recent book on the life and art of conceptual artist/activist Yoko Ono, and Victoria-based artist/composer Lance Austin Olsen, co-curator along with designer Jamie Drouin of Infrequency Arts, have merged mutual interests in a uniquely mesmerizing reverie. In Throw Caution to the Wind we are invited to accompany the protagonist on something of a journey to the end of the night merged with death on the installment plan. 

It’s a dark noir thriller, narrated sotto voce, in which the unnamed protagonist is relentless pursued, not merely the surrealist gangsters depicted in these evocative panels but by the readers themselves. Once the readers finally catch up to their evasive quarry, the tale ends exactly where it began, in a future unspooling cinematically, a romantic montage wherein the only question remains: who picks up the existential cheque? Their graphic novel project is currently available from Infrequency Arts.