The New World: Comics from Mauretania

by Chris Reynolds, Seth (Editor), Ed Park (Foreword by), Seth (Designed by)

Overview

A surreal vision of a post-alien-invasion Earth where human beings still have to deal with quotidian frustrations, ennui, and understanding their place in the world.

Since the mid-1980s, the British cartoonist Chris Reynolds has been assembling a world all his own. On the surface, it seems much like ours: a place of cool afternoon shadows and gently rolling hills, half-empty trains and sleepy downtown streets. But the closer you look, the weirder it gets. After losing a mysterious intergalactic war, Earth is no longer in humanity’s control. Blandly friendly aliens lurk on the margins and seem especially interested in the mining industry. The very rules of time and space seem to have shifted: Mysterious figures suddenly appear in childhood photos, family members disappear forever without warning, power outages abound, and certain people gain the power of flight. A helmeted man named Jimmy is somehow causing local businesses to shutter and is being closely watched by the “trendy new police force,” Rational Control. The world is being remade, but in what image?

This new collection, selected and designed by the acclaimed cartoonist Seth, includes short stories, a novella, and the full-length graphic novel Mauretania. It is the ideal guide to all the mystery and wonder of one of the most underappreciated cult classics in the history of comics.

This NYRC edition is a hardcover with foil stamping, debossing, full-color endpapers, and extra-thick paper, and features new scans of the original artwork.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681372389
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	05/01/2018
Pages:	276
Product dimensions:	7.60(w) x 10.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Chris Reynolds was born in Wales in 1960 and studied fine art at the North Staffordshire Polytechnic. He has worked as a filmmaker, publicist, and art teacher but now devotes his time to drawing comics. He lives in Poole in the United Kingdom.

Seth is the cartoonist behind the comic book series Palookaville, and his comics have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Best American Comics, and McSweeney’s. His illustrations have appeared in numerous publications, including on the covers of The New Yorker, The Walrus, and Canadian Notes & Queries. He is also Lemony Snicket’s partner for the new young-adult series All the Wrong Questions. Seth lives in Guelph, Ontario, with his wife, Tania, and their two cats in an old house he has named Inkwell’s End.

Ed Park is a founding editor of The Believer and a former editor of the Voice Literary Supplement and for the Poetry Foundation. His debut novel, Personal Days, published in 2008, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications. He lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

02/19/2018
Welsh cartoonist Reynolds has been issuing “Mauretania Comics” since 1985; this well-designed volume, edited by cartoonist Seth, provides a definitive collection of Reynolds’s enigmatic work. Set on a future earth where humanity has lost a war with mostly benevolent aliens, these comics string together slice-of-life narratives with the abstract tales that arise from a universe where cause and effect no longer meaningfully apply. The protagonist is the helmeted Monitor, who looks like a mod sci-fi movie hero and travels through a mundane landscape where daily life seems oddly unchanged despite the conquest of humanity. “The Dial” explains how the aliens’ religion paved the way toward their quite polite control of humans. Short detective yarns and poetic fragments lead loosely through to the introduction of Jimmy, who joins Monitor in resisting the new order and—perhaps—saving the world. The sheer denseness of Reynolds’s line, which is amply cross-hatched and looks to be drawn with fat Sharpies, pervades the comics with an encroaching sense of dread. In his foreword, Ed Park frames the “aesthetic ecstasy” of these loosely plotted comics, where more questions are raised than answered. The distinctive visual style and familiar themes of paranoia and existential unease will resonate with modern audiences and provide a collectible for those familiar with the series. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Luxuriously published by New York Review Books, [The New World ] gathers together between hard covers a variety of work by Chris Reynolds, the cult Welsh-born artist who remains both underrated and too little known. The result is a collection that isn’t only beautiful to look at and to hold; turning its pages, it strikes you that though these ineffably strange strips were written in another time, they work better in ours. Here, after all, is a world where technology must be treated with suspicion, workers perform random jobs whose nature is essentially pointless, and loneliness is the presiding spirit of the age….As the writer Ed Park suggests in his introduction, to call Reynolds’s comics black and white isn’t quite to do them justice; they’re more like black and white and black – and it’s in that extra layer of darkness that his genius may be found.” — Rachel Cooke, The Guardian

"Since the mid-1980s, British cartoonist Reynolds has self-published his tales of Mauretania, set some years after Earth has been taken over by intergalactic invaders. . . . Over the years, Reynolds’ stories have amassed an enthusiastic cult (including the alt-cartoonist Seth, who designed this volume); this handsome compilation is bound to expand his following immensely.” —Booklist


"Reynolds’ stark black and white frames stop you in your tracks...It’s also mesmerising and hypnotic. You want to read it again once you’re done, and pore over its strangeness...Periodically books find their way to Bookmunch’s maw that we don’t expect and they blow our collective socks off. This is very definitely of that variety.” —Bookmunch

“Spend some time with Chris Reynolds’s The New World: Comics From Mauretania. . . Stark illustrations will envelop you in their contrasts—the blanket blacks of the foreground, the impossible star-bright skies—and you’ll find yourself thumbing anxiously for the uncertain medium of shadows. The characters will elude you—transient, distant, largely muted in their emotions—and their struggles will become your own as you search for meaning in an increasingly mysterious world.” —Christopher Notarnicola, The Paris Review Daily

From the Publisher