The Adventures of Om by Andy Barron - Hoss, The Chorus and Pea's Trespass

LUSH, hallucinatory and utterly unique, Andy Baron's Om series is a vibrant, visual tour de force of cartooning, overflowing with style and harbouring a poignant edge of humanity which belies the otherworldly inhabitants of its pages.

First a confession: I've had the three Andy Barron Om comics on my shelf for some time. 

Every now and again I have picked them up and flicked through them and in the end I have had to put them down again, because if I'm honest, I've just not felt ready to appreciate them fully. 

That's because they are out of this world gorgeous and just some of the most accomplished, glorious cartooning I've ever seen in the pages of a self-published comic book. 

Barron's artwork is like nothing I've ever seen before.

It's baffling and bizarre but somehow familiar.

His backgrounds are hyper-real dreamscapes, where bubblegum pink clouds fill the horizon.

The weird and wonderful denizens that inhabit that world seem impossible, yet somehow at the same time, are so well realised we believe that they could just exist ... Somewhere, somehow.

Having finally taken the plunge into the world of Om, it's rewarding to find Barron's storytelling, and particularly his fine grasp of sequential art, is easily as rich as his illustrative style.

He switches adeptly between a variety of panels and layouts, carefully selecting those best suited to share an emotion or a movement, or to grab his audience, drawing them into his bizarre story and framing his weird world. 

In Hoss - the volume I selected randomly after finding no suggestion on the covers or inside pages of any kind of sequential order to the various volumes I found myself with  - we are introduced to (I presume) titular character Om, as it is woken from slumber by the arrival of a mysterious equine-looking beast (Hoss we assume) wearing a mask. 

As Barron's creations size each other up, favourably as it happens - moving to an affectionate petting and embracing in short order - the cartoonist reveals a surprising talent, the ability to imbue these weird and wonderful creatures with a very human warmth, and that is despite the comic being entirely silent, preferring instead to do its 'talking' in other ways. 

As pleasant a surprise as it is to feel this warmth, Barron is lulling us into a false sense of security, which it isn't long before we live to regret, because in the world these creatures inhabit, not all is as it seems. 

Om and Hoss bond, with Hoss retrieving food for its new 'owner', which the pair then share in a genuinely touching moment, before falling asleep together, seemingly safe and assured in their new-found companionship. 

It's only with the appearance of another of Barron's odd creations, a one-eyed green biped, wielding a knife and fork like Wile E Coyote or Sylvester, that an air of threat emerges, and we begin to wonder how sweet a story we might actually be reading. 

This creature sees Hoss as a meal, and armed with his cutlery he approaches the sleeping and unsuspecting Hoss - left alone for now by Om - sinking teeth into it voraciously.

And it's here that Barron chooses his moment to magnificently whip that lush, colourful, warm and friendly rug he's laid out from under us, with a vicious, violent and shocking scene that leaves us questioning everything we thought we knew. 

The mask falls from Hoss, both literally and metaphorically and when Om returns to the scene and surveys the results, the fear etched on his simple features is palpable, perfectly complementing the discomfort and disillusionment we feel as the reader.  

It takes a machiavellian craftsman indeed to so masterfully manipulate our emotions, playing skilfully on our preconceptions and on cartoon tropes to fool us into believing we're safe, before tearing out our hearts and challenging us to look a little closer next time. 

After all, Barron seems to ask us rakishly, I had Hoss wear a mask, what more did you need, to know that it was hiding something? 

Picking up the next book in the trio I've held onto all this time, I wonder if Barron can repeat the trick, or whether he has something new up his sleeve with which to delight me.

While Hoss is shocking and disturbing, unveiling a dark and dangerous world beneath a colourful, cartoonish facade, 

The Chorus  - the second book in my Om read-through - is menacing from the start - and actually distinctly frightening in places.

It expands our experience of Om's world, to paint a picture of an environment where cruelty is the norm, where torture and sacrifice seep from the surface of the stunning landscapes and striking vision Barron so masterfully brings to life. 

And Barron does have more tricks, or perhaps it's just that I am a step further into this world at his point, my blinkers shed and the dark truth laid bare before me.

My first thought, looking deeper into Om is that there is potentially a message here about the violent force which nature can present, often beautiful and beguiling but ultimately merciless, with innocents here ferociously torn apart by stronger species on a whim. 

There is, perhaps, also a comment on religion here.

The Chorus, in name alone, suggests something holy, and the scene our protagonist stumbles on certainly bears the markings of a ceremony of some kind, one which sees one of the green creatures we encountered in Hoss, violently sacrificed. 

The Chorus themselves, a trio of creatures, respectively resplendent in red, green and blue, are imposing from the first, basking in the glow of a fire, the primal 

When The Chorus - an imposing trio of humanoid creatures, with beaked bird-like faces, each resplendent respectively in red, blue and green - pull their captive from his iron cage it is already bloody and battered.

The ensuing sacrifice is vicious and brutal, Om looks on, the fear etched in his face echoing our own horror at the violence of the ritual. 

Barron works overtime here, again showing his ability to utilise layouts and framing devices to better tell his story. 

Om watches in a series of small, circular down page panels, which recall looking through a telescope, escalating our sense of voyeurs of the macabre scene. 

As The Chorus gets into full swing, their horrifying dance around their burning victim takes on an additional fervour for the sharp irregular panels in which it's presented, which serve to take the reader further from their comfort zone into the dangerous and threatening environment Om has stumbled.

Without spoiling the story's climax, Barron pulls no punches and is happy to carry things through to their bleak bitter end, emphasising that this world is a pitiless one, it's inhabitants assert their power over weaker species with violence and brutality, silently, efficiently and without remorse. 

A cynic might argue, that is not very different from our own world. 

In Pea's Trespass, a limited edition six page Om Adventure - At which point I realise Om is probably the world rather than the character - our focus shifts to one of the green creatures we have seen suffer in two previous books. 

The name, and the cover - on which dozens of the creatures march in unison - paints an image of a creature that perhaps appears in abundance in this world (a 'common garden pea' so to speak), something of which there are many, and is perhaps deemed disposable by the other inhabitants of Om. 

Or perhaps it's just a reference to the colour and shape, a large globular head with huge staring eyes, perched on top of a pair of long legs and frog's feet with a similar pair of long green arms sprouting from where we might expect ears to. 

Suffice to say, becoming the focal point of the story doesn't spare the pea from the violence we have seen meted out to it in every story so far.

But Pea's Trespass offers something unique again - a slight psychosexual edge to the surreal vision Barron puts before us.

The trespass of the title could relate to a few things, the first and most obvious would relate to the mountainside assent our protagonist makes at the story's outset, suggesting it is perhaps crossing a territorial line in doing so, stepping somehow into enemy territory (perhaps hinting that the fate it suffers is of its own devising). 

The other interpretation is only slightly less overt and relates to the milk pea steals from the yellow-teated breast of the headless, limbless, white, female creature it finds when it crests the mountain. 

After gorging itself, suckling on the creature - who vaguely resembles the chalk-white protagonist from the two previous comics - the pea falls asleep, only to be awakened suddenly and violently by the arrival of another being.

This one is the same bone-white, with the same yellow nipples, but with muscles and sinew that suggest masculinity (also, notably, with arms, legs and a head - albeit a featureless one adorned only with a yellow nose-like shape tied on with string). 

Pummelling the pea in an explosion of blood the 'male' asserts dominance over the pea, as every character it has encountered on Om has to date, Barron jolting his audience into shock by washing the panel in a blood red hue, accentuating the violence of the act and its consequences. 

Left for dead, bleeding, our last look if of this creature, battered (killed?) again, and for a second time as a result of it attempting to sate its appetite. 

Is there judgement here? We might see, in the 'trespass' of the title, a suggestion the pea knew the risks it took and knew it had broken some rule or law. 

Or is the 'trespass' in the implied sexual assault of the 'female' creature?

Three times now, these creatures (this creature?) has suffered brutal violence at the hands of cruel, stronger beings. 

Is Barron making a comment about survival of the fittest? The natural order of things? 

Or can we see the pea as the common man, unfed, used and abused by beings who 'have' more, striving to survive, but bludgeoned back down at every step.

These are some of the many questions my visit to the World of Om has left fighting for space inside my head. 

There's no doubt Barron has made me a fan. 

In his art style alone, there is something so unique, so other-worldly, that I find it hard to look away. 

His grasp of the mechanics of the page are thrilling and I find myself staring at panel shapes and layouts way more than I would normally. 

And then there's this other layer to his work that challenges me deeply. 

I doubt very much whether the things I'm postulating come close to what beats within Barron when he writes these tales, but in a sense that doesn't matter.

That they challenge me to wonder is enough, because not all comics are capable of that, and the ones that are, are worth coming back to time and time again. 

Barron told me on Twitter that there are more Adventures of Om that I haven't read yet. 

You can read all them on his website at the link below, but part of me wants to hold the books in my hands. 

Some are out of print, which kills me, but Barron says he's considering collecting all the stories he's done to date. 

He also said he'd like to print them in a larger format than the A5 mini comics he sells currently. 

I'd like to see that. I think it would suit his style and I told him I'd support a kickstarter along those lines in a heartbeat. 

I advise any comic fan to take a trip to the world of Om, and if you finish feeling anything like the way I did, take the time to tell Barron. 

Because perhaps, if we all do, we'll be a step closer to that beautiful, oversized Adventures of Om collection I can see in my head. 

Andy Barron can be found at www.andyillustrates.com on Twitter @omcomics and reached by email on om@andyillustrates.com