Intricately illustrated otherworlds created by José Ja Ja Ja

The artist known as José Ja Ja Ja not only creates damnedly detailed drawings and works as Professor of Illustration at the European Design School in Madrid; he also brews beer. Unfortunately, as I have yet to sample SALVAJE, I’ll have to laud the brilliance of his illustrations instead.

Last year, Fulgencio Pimentel published his first long comic Culto Charles, 64 colourless but certainly not characterless pages in which geometrics meet delicately striped leaves and twining branches. It tells the story of Culto Charles, “founded in the early 1960s by poet and activist A.S. Brandon” and “based on the belief that an occult dimension lays in the border between life and death.” José explores the mystic notion that "in the short lapse between a cardiac arrest and brain death there is a “black hole” through which one can slide to an unknown supernatural universe…", unleashing a surreal world teeming with red necks and Aztec gods, lucha libre wrestlers and cowboys.

What would you do in this liminal place between life and death? I think I’d join the guys chilling in the giant paddling pool and play with the rubber duck.