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.

Martin Vaughn-James (1943–2009) was a painter and groundbreaking comics artist who published three of his early works with Coach House Press: The Projector (1971), The Park (1972) and The Cage (1975). He was born in England and spent much of his youth in Australia, before moving to Canada to do his groundbreaking comics work in the 1970s. Vaughn-James is widely recognized as a pioneer in the development of the graphic novel. Later in life, Vaughn-James moved to Belgium, where he focused on painting. Vaughn-James also published two works of prose fiction: Night Train (1989) and The Tomb of Zwaab (1991).

Martin Vaughn-James' profile page

“Jeet Heer is a cultural journalist and academic who divides his time between Toronto and Regina. He has written for many publications including the Globe and Mail, Slate.com, the Boston Globe, the Walrus, the American Prospect, the Comics Journal, the Virginia Quarterly Review and the Guardian of London. He has co-edited eight books and been a contributing editor to another eight volumes. With Kent Worcester, Jeet co-edited A Comics Studies Reader (University Press of Mississippi), which won the Peter C. Rollins Book Award given annually to the best book in American Studies or Cultural Studies. He's been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship. His articles have been anthologized in both The Best American Comics Criticism (Fantagraphics) and The Best Canadian Essays collection for 2012. With Chris Ware, Jeet continues to edit the Walt and Skeezix series from Drawn and Quarterly, which is now entering its sixth volume.

Jeet Heer's profile page

Seth is the cartoonist behind the comic-book series Palookaville, which started in the stone age as a pamphlet and is now a semi-annual hardcover. His comics have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Best American Comics, and McSweeney’s Quarterly. His illustrations have appeared in numerous publications including the cover of the New Yorker, The Walrus, and Canadian Notes & Queries. He is the subject of a recent documentary from the National Film Board of Canada, Seth’s Dominion. Seth lives in Guelph, Ontario, with his wife Tania and their two cats in an old house he has named “Inkwell’s End.”

Seth's profile page

"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)