that much jealousy is dangerous to men used to getting what they want

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It’s fair to say Raymond’s startlingly cold, bleak wit carried a punch ill suited to the lighter, pithier zings such cartoons typically practised. He would find a clearer, more natural and even more unsettling voice as he moved away from cartooning, onto subsequent works that preserved the compacted narrative tension of a single-frame strip as works of fine art. These pieces – a violent flood of which poured untrammelled from his ever-present notebook – foregrounded images echoing hard-bitten noir comics, recreated in Raymond’s slashes of blackest ink, and juxtaposed with hand-lettered captions that often spoke in the voice of the principal character, or some omniscient, wise narrator, little snatches of prose that obliquely suggested background for the story unfolding in the illustration. This context was often jarring, suggesting a deeper, more disturbing, more perverse layer of meaning to the image than originally suggested.