Eel Mansions - by Derek Van Gieson (Paperback)

About the Book

A funny, heady, noir inflected neo-satanic conspiracy that reaches all the way down to the origins of comics.

Book Synopsis

Van Gieson thinks like cinema. Big. Epic. For the reader, the question is simple: do you wanna ride along? VROOM!--Comics Bulletin

Eel Mansions, Derek Van Gieson's first full-length graphic novel, is a supernatural soap opera noir. Set in Mill City: a grimy place inhabited by new wave satanists, secret agents, booze-hounds, record-store clerks, conspiracy theorists, murderers, and cartoonists. Derek Van Gieson skillfully unweaves a knotted sweater of intrigue, suspense, and dark humor.

Derek Van Gieson is a Minneapolis-based artist, writer, and musician. His work appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Stranger.

Review Quotes

From a graphic standpoint, Derek Van Gieson lays on the ink with a jackhammer; thematically, he's dredging some infernal pits of the collective psyche for images, characters, and surreal situations that add up to a nightmarish skull-fuck of a book. [...] It's the sort of David Lynch-inspired phantasmagoria that Daniel Clowes flogged to great effect in Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron--but Van Gieson slathers on a retro-hip, record-store-shopping aesthetic that owes just as much to Clowes' earlier, lesser masterpiece, Lloyd Llewellyn. That said, the contorted flow and retina-clouding grotesquerie of Eel Mansions are all Van Gieson's own.--The Onion AV Club

Van Gieson manages to blend a lifetime's worth of influences into one heady brew."--Rob Clough, High-Low Comics

Van Gieson thinks like cinema. Big. Epic. [...] For the reader, the question is simple: do you wanna ride along? VROOM!--The Comics Bulletin

If all of this sounds too wacky to be understood, you're only half right. This comic isn't meant to be linear, nor does it inspire to cohesion. In fact, part of the success of Eel Mansions is in its fragmentation. It's as if Van Gieson is asking us to let go of narrative sense-making, to temporarily suspend those cognitive devices that puts things together, and just enjoy the ride. --The Comics Alternative

About the Author

Derek Van Gieson is an artist, writer, musician, currently living in Minneapolis, MN. His art has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Stranger, and his short comics have been published in the literary MOME anthology by Fantagraphics Books.