Through the Habitrails: Life Before and After My Career in the Cubicles

by Jeff Nicholson, Matt Fraction (Foreword by), Stephen R. Bissette (Introduction)

Overview

"A magnificent piece of work." ― Dave Sim
This collection of darkly humorous tales chronicles a nameless protagonist's struggle with a stultifying routine of office drudgery. The stories' Kafkaesque vignettes, portrayed in striking black-and-white drawings, offer eerie perspectives on the rigors of everyday life.
Author Jeff Nicholson is best known as the creator of Ultra Klutz, Lost Laughter, Father & Son, and Colonia. Praised by comics artist and publisher Stephen R. Bissette as "one of the seminal graphic novels of the 1990s," Through the Habitrails features semi-autobiographical vignettes that include "Futile Love," "The Doomed One," "The Infiltrator," "The Dark Spiral," "The Gerbil King," and the "Escape" trilogy, one part of which was a 1993 Eisner Award nominee.
Exclusive Bonus Material contains a new Epilogue, written and illustrated by the author, and a new Foreword by multiple Eisner Award winner Matt Fraction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780486802862
Publisher:	Dover Publications
Publication date:	03/15/2016
Series:	Dover Graphic Novels Series
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	10.10(w) x 6.60(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Eisner Award nominee Jeff Nicholson has been writing and drawing comic books since 1981. He received a Xeric Grant to complete his "Lost Laughter" series, and he was invited by DC Comics to write and illustrate an issue of "The Dreaming," a spinoff of Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" series.

Editorial Reviews

04/04/2016
An ordinary workplace is revealed as a hellish dystopia in Nicholson’s excellent but long-unseen brutal pseudo-autobiography. This reprint shortens the graphic novella (originally published in the early 1990s) and adds a newly drawn coda that finds the protagonist at peace with his decision to walk away from comics, mirroring Nicholson’s own history. The visual metaphors are well crafted and chilling, such as showing the main character’s head in a giant pickle jar to reflect his alcoholism, and taps on his body that his bosses use to drain workers’ creative vitality. Some of the material is extremely disturbing, depicting ideas that most just imagine about but this character acts upon. There’s an amazing skill to the linework, including an expert use of shading, the claustrophobic office setting, and the eerie way most of the characters lack mouths. Despite its age, Nicholson’s themes still hold true today, perhaps more than ever. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly