Throw Caution to the Wind
Donald Brackett & Lance Austin Olsen
60 page softcover
4.50 x 6.90 inches
2024
$15

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 20th century equivalent of a non-existent Tinderesque social media app, the resulting reverie might somewhat resemble the collaborative experimental book Throw Caution to the Wind. The principal discovery generously shared by this graphic novelette is this tongue in cheek definition: comedy equals tragedy plus time.

Vancouver-based Donald Brackett, author of a recent book on the life and art of Yoko Ono, and Victoria-based artist and composer Lance Austin Olsen, invite you on something of a journey to the end of the night, merged with death, on the instalment plan. It’s a dark noir thriller in which the unnamed protagonist is relentlessly pursued, not merely by the surrealist gangsters depicted in these evocative panels, but also 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 cheque?