London-based cartoonist and illustrator Abigail Rai brings her titanic green antagonist to life through an experimental screen print series rooted in South Asian mythology, the cycle of transformation and the insatiability of time.
The Devourer is a giant green feminine force. She is the spirit of the wilderness, of transformation, of time that never stops consuming. As the main antagonist of Abigail Rai’s ongoing comic book of the same name, she is also the product of a deeply personal mythology, one that reaches back through Rai’s upbringing in Nepal and a childhood spent with religious stories and picture books steeped in South Asian symbolic narrative.
The screen print series presented here studies this character at a key moment in the narrative, using a monotype technique applied to exposed silk screens to produce something deliberately unstable. Colour is laid down sporadically, layers building and colliding rather than resolving into clean registration. The effect is expressive and unpredictable in a way that mirrors the character herself: a force that cannot be neatly contained or defined. The process and subject hold the same energy.
That connection between making and meaning runs through everything in Rai’s practice. Her earliest influences come, as she describes, from “folk and traditional arts and crafts of Nepal, India and Tibet, such as Thangka painting, Mithila and Madhubani painting, and Nepali textiles, weaving and embroidery.” These are traditions in which image and narrative are inseparable, where pictorial forms carry cosmological weight and characters embody forces far larger than themselves. It is within that lineage that The Devourer finds her shape: a figure drawn from a childhood immersed in stories about the cycle of life, death and rebirth, and about what it means to exist alongside, rather than apart from, the natural world.
The prints function as a study as much as a series, each one pulling at the same character from a different angle of colour and texture. Rai’s comic practice is image-led at its core, and these works carry that quality fully: they do not explain the character so much as inhabit her, letting the visual logic of layered, tactile screen print do the work that words might otherwise reach for. As the broader comic continues to take shape, this series offers something like a material sketch of an inner world still being mapped.
Abigail Rai is a cartoonist and illustrator based in London, graduating from Camberwell College of Arts in 2024. Her narrative-led practice spans illustration, comics and self-publishing, combining scenes of gore, death and natural disaster with serene landscapes, moments of contemplation and humour.
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Screen prints, monotype technique on exposed silk screens. All images courtesy Abigail Rai.
