And now at last it's been reissued, and it entirely lives up to all of that. Its legend around it like a labyrinth, a city, a plain of cryptic totems. Rumors, breathless reviews, a friend at a party: 'There's a library upstairs - they even have a copy of THE CAGE'. Which underscores that I need to read more comics, better comics, particularly those more outre versions of earlier eras.Īnd then, the Cage. I came up with about 15 titles, most from the last 15 years or so, since that's more the period of my attention, and of the availability of the works themselves. I was recently trying to draft some kind of a list of favorite comics ever, not necessarily inarguably best, certainly not most influential or historically significant, but subjectively those that speak to my imagination and aesthetics*. Tellingly, it was put out by Canadian avant-garde literary press Coach House, notably responsible for keeping Nicole Brossard in print. It's utterly unique in the comics form, bearing more similarity of feel (and influence) from 60s/70s film and literature than from the underground comics scene that paved the way for sophisticated visual narrative. Recurring and interlinked motifs - a cage or machine, a hospital bed, an explosive gout of ink or blood, sequential images, architectural desolation, the passage of time, monitoring devices - trace an oblique story steeped in menace and isolation, conveyed through dissociated image (exacting, perfect, cold, still) and narration (hypnotic, abstract, eliding between meanings, slipping unexpectedly from detachment to violence), lapsing in and out of sync but in constant dialogue nonetheless. It's not about where we're going but how - if - we get there.This is flawless.

Read more objects: headphones, inky stains, bedsheets. Cryptic and disturbing, like Dave Gibbons (Watchmen) illustrating a film by Ozu, The Cage spurns narrative for atmosphere, guiding us through a series of disarrayed rooms and desolate landscapes, tracking a stuttering and circling time and a sequence of. The new edition includes an introduction by Canadian comics master and Lemony Snicket collaborator Seth (Palookaville It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken). Considered an early masterpiece of the genre, the Canadian cult comic has been out of print for decades. First published in 1975, The Cage was a graphic novel before there was a name for the genre. The triumphant return of the 1975 cult classic and seminal graphic novel - it's a nightmare you can't awake from. Description for The Cage: Toward Legal Rights For Animals Paperback.

The Cage by Martin Vaughn-James