The Projector and Elephant

by Martin Vaughn-James, Jeet Heer (Introduction), Seth (Designed by), Seth (Editor)

Overview

Two surreal graphic novels about technology, corporatization, and alienation in the modern world by a cult-favorite comics innovator.

In 1968, the British artist and writer Martin Vaughn-James emigrated to Canada. Over the next eight years, he proceeded to produce some of the most mesmerizing and inventive works in comics, light-years ahead of his contemporaries. Among them were Elephant and The Projector, linked graphic novels that guide the reader (and a bespectacled Everyman) through landscapes built out of both the everyday and the nightmarish. Jam-packed superhighways, plummeting horses, vast urban wastelands, colossal businessmen, demented cartoon animals, and interstellar oranges are just a small part of Vaughn-James’s prophetic vision of society’s turn away from the natural world to the artificial.

Together for the first time in a single volume, designed and edited by Seth and with an introduction by Jeet Heer, Elephant and The Projector stand as a reminder that we have yet to catch up to Vaughn-James.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681374840
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	04/12/2022
Pages:	212
Product dimensions:	8.96(w) x 11.73(h) x 0.97(d)

About the Author

Martin Vaughn-James (1943–2009) was a British painter and cartoonist best known for his captivating, stylistically daring graphic novels—Elephant, The Projector, The Park, and The Cage—all published in the 1970s, when Vaughn-James lived in Canada. He contributed to numerous magazines during his lifetime and wrote two prose novels, Night Train and The Tomb of Zwaab.

Seth is the cartoonist behind the comic book series Palookaville. His most recent graphic novel, Clyde Fans, was selected as one of the best books of 2019 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Globe and Mail. Seth lives in Guelph, Ontario, with his wife, Tania, and their two cats in an old house he has named "Inkwell's End."

Jeet Heer is a comics critic and the national affairs correspondent for The Nation. He is the author of In Love with Art: Françoise Mouly's Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays & Profiles. He divides his time between Toronto and Regina, Canada.

Editorial Reviews

★ 03/07/2022

This handsome repackaging of two classic titles by proto–graphic novelist Vaughn-James (1943–2009) deserves to be considered essential reading by fans of the form. A politically tinged surrealist of the André Breton school, Vaughn-James first released “The Projector” in 1971, but it resonates as contemporary. The story tracks in three acts a bespectacled everyman winding through a kaleidoscope of dystopian drudgery and the madness of crowds. The art scans at times as a stoner take on Metropolis, but its anxieties about consumerism, conformity, and the dominance of screens and surveillance retain their power. Non sequiturs are spliced with random scenes: a man in a space suit wanders through an endless parking lot; spiky desert plants grow into a subway car. “Elephant,” also surrealist in its dreamlike, illogical procession and similarly satirical (an ad suggests people deal with the problem of “Mind Odour” by replacing their heads with toilet bowls), lands as more chaotic and fractured while speaking to humans’ inability to connect with one another. But Vaughn-James retains his comic sensibility, interrupting another everyman’s ruptured reality with a frame of an elephant whose thought balloon reads, “I have a funny feeling it’s Wednesday.” This is a lovingly produced introduction to the greatest anarcho-comic-surrealist readers likely have never heard of (yet). (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"His first two books, 'rediscovered' in this handsome edition, remain astonishing innovations. Vaughn-James takes the jejune language of cartooning – funny animals, advertising art – and torques it into the realm of the surreal." —Sean Rogers, The Globe and Mail “Top 5 Graphic Novels of the Year”

“This handsome repackaging of two classic titles by proto–graphic novelist Vaughn-James deserves to be considered essential reading by fans of the form. . . . This is a lovingly produced introduction to the greatest anarcho-comic-surrealist readers likely have never heard of (yet).” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From the Publisher