Webcomic Wednesday: The art and comics of Lala Albert

The third eye is a symbol of enlightenment, usually. After all, it’s a new opening through which to literally let light in. With more eyes to see, you can see more – that’s how the symbolism is supposed to work. But in the context of fantastic fiction, the act of seeing can carry a negative charge. If seeing is believing, what happens to the seer when confronted with the unbelievable? Dave Bowman passing through the stargate. Danny Torrance rounding the corner and discovering two little girls. Bran Stark forced into contemplating the enemy when he’s not even up to the task of walking. Sally Hardesty tied to a chair and forced to witness a nightmarish tableau of cackling cannibals gathered together in a sick Norman Rockwell pastiche. Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood forcing their eyes shut lest they be annihilated by the glory of God. These characters are given a glimpse of some true thing, and in some cases they’re even better off for. But their vision comes at a cost.

In her illustrations and comics, Lala Albert has been poking the third eye for years. Her art style can change, depending on the nature of the project at hand – from scratchy, murky, horror-tinged black and white work to lush, glowing, sensual sci-fi; from bold stand-alone images to dense and demanding narratives; from elegant eroticism to manic mark-making. But two elements remain near-constant presences. The first is a predilection for curvilinear forms that suggest a wavy world where geometry is dominated not by straight lines but by s-shapes, often augmented by a ripple-like pattern of image repetition. And the second is the third eye – unfurling in the center of the forehead, it is the center of her work. It can spread across the faces of her alien characters like a lesion, it can riddle them like holes in a lotus pod, it can bifurcate like an amoeba, it can serve as the vanguard of an entire new face beneath the one we’ve already seen, it can contain multiple irises or none at all, it can be radiant and serene or alive with anger. She comes at the image from a variety of angles, but she arrives in the same place.

Which is not to say she’s a one-trick pony. Indeed, just the opposite: Her obvious conviction that the third eye is saying something important comes with a sense of duty to find a variety of ways to say it. Albert’s sheer bloody-minded willingness to return to this image again and again suggest that it’s not a crutch but a compulsion. “I use the third eye in my work because of what it feels like to me," she says. "I’m not necessarily thinking of the origin or religious/spiritual meaning. I draw it because I feel like it needs to be there and I can create my own mythologies around it.” The eyes of Lala Albert exist because they must, because there are beautiful and terrible things out there to be seen and this is how you see them. What happens to the seer is a question left open, like an eye.