Harvey Knight's Odyssey

by Nick Maandag

Overview

Solarism is a religion that acknowledges there is a balance of light and dark in the Universe. But while solarists believe it is possible to achieve a state of Pure Light by exposing themselves to the rays of the sun (or tanning beds on cloudy days), the Forces of Dark conspire against them and send hooded Shadow Men to eliminate the Light. Subsequently, Solarists must kill these Shadow Men. It’s the only way. When a thief infiltrates the sacred chambers of the Solarists, Assistant-to-the-Master Harvey Knight must test the strength of his beliefs in order to restore order. Or maybe he’s plotting to overthrow the leader and make the religion his own. Either way, it’s an odyssey. Nick Maandag has been making bone-dry and hilarious comics for years, exploring the ridiculousness of human vanity and beliefs. He approaches each comic with the understanding that we are all desperate to be seen and find the most outrageous ways to make that happen. Few cartoonists elicit belly laughs the way Nick does.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781770466890
Publisher:	Drawn & Quarterly
Publication date:	03/21/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	168
File size:	79 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	15 - 18 Years

About the Author

Nick Maandag was born in 1982 in Mississauga, Ontario, and is now based in Toronto. He started making zines in his late teens, and has since produced a number of comics and graphic novels.

Editorial Reviews

03/06/2023

Corporate anomie and the madness of modernity are taken for a spin in this alternately ambitious and shoe-gazing collection of comics short stories from Maandag (The Follies of Richard Wadsworth). The surreal lengthy title piece posits a cultish Church of Holy Radiance whose theology of “solarism” (in a universe divided into light and dark, tanning beds are virtuous) seems kooky but benign. That’s until it’s revealed the church endorses killing anyone deemed a “shadowmen” by the righteous. Over the course of the increasingly violent tale, lumpy-headed fanatic Harvey Knight bends the church to his particular megalomaniacal fervor. Scenes of blasé murder alternate with darkly comedic vignettes, such as Harvey’s acolyte serving “fresh owl” for lunch. Two shorter autofiction selections serve as bookends and feature a mild-mannered office worker named Nick Maandag, who navigates lightly Kafkaesque alienation in cubicle land. His tribulations range from the surprise “daily ritual” office mates create around his making French press coffee to his descent into an absurdist landscape of stone-faced bureaucracy and quotidian persecution. The black-and-white art is simple but dynamic, presenting the fantastic with a relentlessly straight face. Not all the elements tie together, but the mordant package will appeal to deadpan comedy fans of the likes of Nick Drnaso or Jason. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

These stories are both funny-haha and funny-strange. Maandag’s world is a mix of banality and weirdness. Imagine The Office rewritten by David Lynch.” —Tom Gauld, author of Revenge of the Librarians

“Harvey Knight’s Odyssey [is] one of the strangest, funniest books you will read this, or any, year.” —The Irish Times

“[It's] closer to anti-comedy than most of Maandag’s stuff. It builds humor, even suspense, from withholding the punchline. Maandag certainly knows his way around an anti-climax.” —The Comics Journal

“Corporate anomie and the madness of modernity are taken for a spin in this alternately ambitious and shoe-gazing collection of comics short stories from Maandag.” —Publishers Weekly

“Compulsively readable and entirely unpredictable….True humor cartooning is maybe the most difficult genre to work within, and Maandag does so fearlessly.” —Comics Beat

“Both true to life and completely disarming.” —Montreal Review of Books

“Nick Maandag is an astute observer and has an undeniably unique perspective on what it means to live in today’s increasingly fractional, irrational world. We need more voices like his because it is only by acknowledging the inanity of what we spend so much time doing that we can begin to try and change it.” —Broken Frontier

“[Harvey Knight's Odyssey] could only be told by Nick Maandag... The collection features several stories that show drama and even horror in the mundane alongside the mind-boggling surreal.” —BlogCritics

“For Maandag, the humor is found in that repeated defiance of reader expectations.” —Rob Clough, High Low

“[A] well-textured, rewarding experience offering several laugh out loud moments.” —Slings & Arrows

From the Publisher

02/01/2023

Cartoonist Maandag (The Follies of Richard Wadsworth) satirizes the human urge to find profound significance in day-to-day life in this collection of three deeply strange, often hilarious stories. In "The Plunge," an office worker's daily ritual of making French press coffee in his cubicle after lunch so obsesses his colleagues that they begin planning their entire workday around bearing witness to the process. The titular tale follows the second-in-command of a bizarre religious order whose scheme to overthrow the group's leader results in a series of gruesome murders and his writing, producing, and starring in a play entitled Harvey and the Amazingly Multi-Hued Human Flesh Coat. The final story, "Full Day," follows an office worker navigating an increasingly nightmarish series of misadventures that include interrogation by an overly semantic efficiency expert, getting kidnapped by a stranger anxious to share an extremely long and violent story about his experience at the DMV, and being forced to undergo trauma counseling following a disturbing encounter on the subway. VERDICT Maandag's combination of surrealism and deadpan humor makes these stories unpredictable, unforgettably weird, and thoroughly entertaining.

Library Journal