The Projector and Elephant

Two surreal, experimental 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 1970's Elephant and 1971's The Projector, linked graphic novels that guide the reader (and a bespectacled everyman) through landscapes built out of both the everyday and the nightmarish. Jampacked superhighways, plummeting horses, vast urban wastelands, colossal businessmen, demented cartoon animals, and interstellar oranges are just a small part of Vaughn-James' 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 Martin Vaughn-James.