“A story about storytelling...Conjures up the grindhouse movie-making scene in 1970s Los Angeles and tracks an ambitious young man’s flailing attempts to build a family and a career as a film arteest in that debased world...A book with a lot of heart.” —Art Spiegelman, bestselling author of MAUSFourteen years in the making, renowned and beloved graphic novelist Sammy Harkham finally delivers his epic story of artistic ambition, the heartbreak it can bring, and what it means to be humanYOU CAN BURN IN HELL   Set primarily in Los Angeles in 1971, Blood of the Virgin is the story of twenty‑seven‑year‑old Seymour, an Iraqi Jewish immigrant film editor who works for an exploitation film production company. Sammy Harkham brings us into the underbelly of Los Angeles during a crucial evolutionary moment in the industry from the last wheeze of the studio system to the rise of independent filmmaking.   Seymour, his wife, and their new baby struggle as he tries to make it in the movie business, writing screenplays on spec and pining for the chance to direct. When his boss buys one of his scripts for a project called Blood of the Virgin and gives Seymour the chance to direct it, what follows is a surreal, tragicomic making-of journey. As Seymour’s blind ambition propels the movie, his home life grows increasingly fraught. The film’s production becomes a means to spiral out into time and space, resulting in an epic graphic novel that explores the intersection of twentieth‑century America, parenthood, sex, the immigrant experience, the dawn of early Hollywood, and, shockingly, the Holocaust.   Like a cosmic kaleidoscope, Blood of the Virgin shifts and evolves with each panel, widening its context as the story unfolds, building an intricate web of dreams and heartbreak, allowing the reader to zoom in to the novel’s core: the bittersweet cost of coming into one’s own.  

Goblins, wizards, superheroes, talking animals, and an assortment of fantastical shapeshifting characters populate this book of never-before-collected comics and illustrations, many of them drawn on incidental materials such as scrap paper and notepads.Pulling from pulp, sci-fi, gag cartoons, fantasy, and thrillers, and populated by goblins, astronauts, magical thieves, and talking owls, CF’s comics break apart genres and forms, then reassemble them into one-of-a-kind stories that reveal an immense imagination and boundary-pushing talent.Christopher Forgues (better known as CF) roared onto the indie comics scene in the early 2000s, producing some of the most exciting and influential work of the decade. His output was startlingly original and impressively prolific: his collaboration with Ben Jones, Paper Radio; his multi-part epic, Powr Mastrs; and the shorter comics and zines now collected for the first time in Distant Ruptures. These comics—created using scratchy pencil and brilliant color, smudged Xeroxes and scraps of notepaper—capture the extraordinary range of CF’s work.Fellow cartoonist Sammy Harkham has gathered the best of them into this new collection, which also includes an introduction by Gabriel Winslow-Yost and a new interview with CF. Distant Ruptures offers readers their first chance to see the full scope of this remarkable era of CF’s comics.

En ung man lever ett enkelt men lyckligt liv tillsammans med sin fru. När längtan efter världen utanför väcks lämnar han tryggheten bakom sig och går till sjöss tillsammans med sin bror. Drömmen om äventyret förvandlas snart till en serie katastrofer – och resan till en mörk berättelse om förlust, skuld och omöjligheten att återvända till det liv man en gång hade. Sammy Harkhams Stackars sjöman är en modern klassiker inom den amerikanska alternativserien. Berättelsen publicerades ursprungligen i den inflytelserika antologin Kramers Ergot 4 och valdes senare ut till Dave Eggers Best American Nonrequired Reading 2004. Den gavs ut som egen bok 2005 och har därefter nått en internationell publik, med översättningar till bland annat franska, italienska och koreanska. Med ett bedrägligt enkelt bildspråk och en närmast skoningslös ekonomisering av berättandet lyckas Harkham på få sidor skapa något som har tyngden av en betydligt längre roman. Det vardagliga och det katastrofala behandlas med samma återhållsamhet: inga stora gester talar om för läsaren vad som ska kännas, och just därför drabbar berättelsen desto hårdare. Stackars sjöman är samtidigt en äventyrsberättelse, en tragedi och en berättelse om den urgamla mänskliga föreställningen att det verkliga livet alltid finns någon annanstans. Svenska läsare har faktiskt mött berättelsen tidigare. Den publicerades 2017 i Det Grymma Svärdet. Nu får Poor Sailor för första gången en egen svensk bokutgåva och möjlighet att läsas som det självständiga verk den är. Den svenska utgåvan förses dessutom med ett nyskrivet förord av Robert Aman, som placerar Poor Sailor och Harkhams konstnärskap i sitt sammanhang. Förordet innehåller även en intervju med Sammy Harkham om berättelsen, dess tillkomst och hans arbete som serieskapare. En liten bok om den stora drömmen att ge sig av – och om vad som kan finnas kvar när man kommer hem.

Few comic book series can claim to have influenced a generation of cartoonists, comics fans, and comedians the way Joe Matt's Peepshow did during its fourteen issues from 1992 to 2006. With an often alarming and always hilarious compulsion to confess, Matt found no aspect of his life that wasn't more grist for the humour mill: his dysfunctional (and sometimes abusive) relationships, his Catholic repression, his horrible social skills, his addiction to pornography, his masturbation habits, etc. Yes, the character Joe Matt was usually an insufferable outsider, but in the hands of Joe Matt the writer/artist, his life was depicted with an eye and ear for human folly that rivalled R. Crumb, as well as an entertainer's instinct and sense of comedic timing to rival Larry David, and it made Peepshow one of the most essential reads of its era. This book collects for the first time the entire original fourteen-issue series in one hardcover volume, as well as the posthumously-published fifteenth issue from 2024 (detailing Matt's move to Los Angeles in 2003 to pursue an ill-fated HBO adaptation of his work), each presented as painstakingly-restored facsimiles of the original issues. This definitive Joe Matt collection also includes other art and ephemera from the artist's personal archives, including a hand-written introduction to a complete Peepshow collection that at the time was purely hypothetical and was only discovered after his death in 2023. Peepshow is rounded out with an insightful afterword by Diana Schutz, the Will Eisner Hall of Fame comics writer and editor, and longtime friend of Matt's (and sister of Trish, Matt's ex-girlfriend and key player in Peepshow's cast).

“A story about storytelling...Conjures up the grindhouse movie-making scene in 1970s Los Angeles and tracks an ambitious young man’s flailing attempts to build a family and a career as a film arteest in that debased world...A book with a lot of heart.” —Art Spiegelman, bestselling author of MAUSFourteen years in the making, renowned and beloved graphic novelist Sammy Harkham finally delivers his epic story of artistic ambition, the heartbreak it can bring, and what it means to be humanYOU CAN BURN IN HELL   Set primarily in Los Angeles in 1971, Blood of the Virgin is the story of twenty‑seven‑year‑old Seymour, an Iraqi Jewish immigrant film editor who works for an exploitation film production company. Sammy Harkham brings us into the underbelly of Los Angeles during a crucial evolutionary moment in the industry from the last wheeze of the studio system to the rise of independent filmmaking.   Seymour, his wife, and their new baby struggle as he tries to make it in the movie business, writing screenplays on spec and pining for the chance to direct. When his boss buys one of his scripts for a project called Blood of the Virgin and gives Seymour the chance to direct it, what follows is a surreal, tragicomic making-of journey. As Seymour’s blind ambition propels the movie, his home life grows increasingly fraught. The film’s production becomes a means to spiral out into time and space, resulting in an epic graphic novel that explores the intersection of twentieth‑century America, parenthood, sex, the immigrant experience, the dawn of early Hollywood, and, shockingly, the Holocaust.   Like a cosmic kaleidoscope, Blood of the Virgin shifts and evolves with each panel, widening its context as the story unfolds, building an intricate web of dreams and heartbreak, allowing the reader to zoom in to the novel’s core: the bittersweet cost of coming into one’s own.  

Goblins, wizards, superheroes, talking animals, and an assortment of fantastical shapeshifting characters populate this book of never-before-collected comics and illustrations, many of them drawn on incidental materials such as scrap paper and notepads.Pulling from pulp, sci-fi, gag cartoons, fantasy, and thrillers, and populated by goblins, astronauts, magical thieves, and talking owls, CF’s comics break apart genres and forms, then reassemble them into one-of-a-kind stories that reveal an immense imagination and boundary-pushing talent.Christopher Forgues (better known as CF) roared onto the indie comics scene in the early 2000s, producing some of the most exciting and influential work of the decade. His output was startlingly original and impressively prolific: his collaboration with Ben Jones, Paper Radio; his multi-part epic, Powr Mastrs; and the shorter comics and zines now collected for the first time in Distant Ruptures. These comics—created using scratchy pencil and brilliant color, smudged Xeroxes and scraps of notepaper—capture the extraordinary range of CF’s work.Fellow cartoonist Sammy Harkham has gathered the best of them into this new collection, which also includes an introduction by Gabriel Winslow-Yost and a new interview with CF. Distant Ruptures offers readers their first chance to see the full scope of this remarkable era of CF’s comics.

En ung man lever ett enkelt men lyckligt liv tillsammans med sin fru. När längtan efter världen utanför väcks lämnar han tryggheten bakom sig och går till sjöss tillsammans med sin bror. Drömmen om äventyret förvandlas snart till en serie katastrofer – och resan till en mörk berättelse om förlust, skuld och omöjligheten att återvända till det liv man en gång hade. Sammy Harkhams Stackars sjöman är en modern klassiker inom den amerikanska alternativserien. Berättelsen publicerades ursprungligen i den inflytelserika antologin Kramers Ergot 4 och valdes senare ut till Dave Eggers Best American Nonrequired Reading 2004. Den gavs ut som egen bok 2005 och har därefter nått en internationell publik, med översättningar till bland annat franska, italienska och koreanska. Med ett bedrägligt enkelt bildspråk och en närmast skoningslös ekonomisering av berättandet lyckas Harkham på få sidor skapa något som har tyngden av en betydligt längre roman. Det vardagliga och det katastrofala behandlas med samma återhållsamhet: inga stora gester talar om för läsaren vad som ska kännas, och just därför drabbar berättelsen desto hårdare. Stackars sjöman är samtidigt en äventyrsberättelse, en tragedi och en berättelse om den urgamla mänskliga föreställningen att det verkliga livet alltid finns någon annanstans. Svenska läsare har faktiskt mött berättelsen tidigare. Den publicerades 2017 i Det Grymma Svärdet. Nu får Poor Sailor för första gången en egen svensk bokutgåva och möjlighet att läsas som det självständiga verk den är. Den svenska utgåvan förses dessutom med ett nyskrivet förord av Robert Aman, som placerar Poor Sailor och Harkhams konstnärskap i sitt sammanhang. Förordet innehåller även en intervju med Sammy Harkham om berättelsen, dess tillkomst och hans arbete som serieskapare. En liten bok om den stora drömmen att ge sig av – och om vad som kan finnas kvar när man kommer hem.

Few comic book series can claim to have influenced a generation of cartoonists, comics fans, and comedians the way Joe Matt's Peepshow did during its fourteen issues from 1992 to 2006. With an often alarming and always hilarious compulsion to confess, Matt found no aspect of his life that wasn't more grist for the humour mill: his dysfunctional (and sometimes abusive) relationships, his Catholic repression, his horrible social skills, his addiction to pornography, his masturbation habits, etc. Yes, the character Joe Matt was usually an insufferable outsider, but in the hands of Joe Matt the writer/artist, his life was depicted with an eye and ear for human folly that rivalled R. Crumb, as well as an entertainer's instinct and sense of comedic timing to rival Larry David, and it made Peepshow one of the most essential reads of its era. This book collects for the first time the entire original fourteen-issue series in one hardcover volume, as well as the posthumously-published fifteenth issue from 2024 (detailing Matt's move to Los Angeles in 2003 to pursue an ill-fated HBO adaptation of his work), each presented as painstakingly-restored facsimiles of the original issues. This definitive Joe Matt collection also includes other art and ephemera from the artist's personal archives, including a hand-written introduction to a complete Peepshow collection that at the time was purely hypothetical and was only discovered after his death in 2023. Peepshow is rounded out with an insightful afterword by Diana Schutz, the Will Eisner Hall of Fame comics writer and editor, and longtime friend of Matt's (and sister of Trish, Matt's ex-girlfriend and key player in Peepshow's cast).