All the Reliving

new book out now

At last, the English version of my last graphic novel, All the Living is out from Fantagraphics. You can find it in the more discerning bookstores, or, more likely, online.

I had a lovely launch party at Gosh Comics in that there London, and if you missed it, you can get a copy with a sketchcard, directly at the shop, or online here.

If you life in NY, you can catch me for the second and last event at Desert Island on March 12th.

There’s been some nice reviews (so far) that seem to get what I was going for with this book, so I thought here I’ll share some thoughts on making it, but first, a few discarded pages and panels to share something that isn’t in the book:

Some of these got redrawn, others just got deleted or replaced. The one below was significantly simplified in the book, because I thought it was giving too much attention to the underworld, as cool as it looks.

A lot of them are pretty good, I’m actually not quite sure why I killed this one, but oh well. It probably felt too overpowering. I was constantly going back and forth, tweaking the flow and the level of visual information, wanting the images to ‘read’ with a certain pace.

Another glimpse of the underworld that just felt too unrelated, and quite a bit too gory. As with many of my stories, what’s in the book is only a small glimpse into the world that it inhabits.

There’s a lot more in the pages that did make it, here’s what the demons used to look like in the sketch and here’s what they look like in the book.

Also it was originally called just ‘the Living,’ but I wanted the reference to be more overt, plus ‘All the Living’ has a nice double meaning, as pretty much all of my books do.

It’s a very quiet, slow book, full of small interconnected details that tell their own story. Unlike my convoluted and incomprehensible earlier books, all that stuff is pretty subtle here, and you can easily blaze through the narrative without getting confused (although I would advise against it).

After the first ‘final’ version of the book was, I removed tons of pages and added some 40-50 more, layering and trimming the thing to maintain the lightness of a half-remembered dream, both in the story, and in the style.

It channeled a lot of my early obsessions, from manga to abstract art, and the narrative is a kind of very roundabout accounting of personal grief told through an inversion of two well-known short stories (one is referenced in the title, the other in the first few pages).

It’s a rather sad book, but drawing it did help me find beauty and warmth within our dumb lonely modern lives (most of the book was drawn during the pandemic), and I hope it can bring some of that to the reader.

I was so burned out on all that melancholy afterwards, that I started making things like Terrible Father, and the much more grounded book I’m currently working on, but having revisited All the Living, I can see that all these comics inhabit that same melancholy, and this melancholy will probably never leave me, and that’s fine—it’s nice to have some peace in that acceptance, after years of shifting identities and styles in a futile attempt to escape myself.

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PS. My various rants on gen-Ai got featured in this report as a case study. Hopefully it will lead to some regulations, though I’m not optimistic.