About this item
Highlights
- IGNATZ AWARD Nomination for OUTSTANDING GRAPHIC NOVELWhat prevents you from finishing your life's work?Josh Bayer finds a manuscript of an unfinished play inside his deceased father's desk.
- Author(s): Josh Bayer
- 272 Pages
- Comics + Graphic Novels, Literary
Description
About the Book
"What prevents you from finishing your life's work? Josh Bayer finds a manuscript of an unfinished play inside his deceased father's desk. The play tells the story of Josh's mother's early death (age 35) and his father's struggle with single parenthood. When he attempts to adapt the play into comics, it triggers a series of personal crises. Bayer's limitations and futile ambitions are brought into sharp relief as he grapples with an estranged, unknowable parent and the play's frustrating lack of resolution. Humans worship lore, myth, and fables, but many people's unwritten stories become abandoned. This book looks at the dreams we leave to that abyss and asks, "why?" Bayer's inky line, tangled textures, and kaleidoscopic color boldly fuse on the page into comic book semiotics, flights of grandeur, and tangents inside tangents"--Book Synopsis
IGNATZ AWARD Nomination for OUTSTANDING GRAPHIC NOVEL
What prevents you from finishing your life's work?
Josh Bayer finds a manuscript of an unfinished play inside his deceased father's desk. The play tells the story of Josh's mother's early death (age 37) and his father's struggle with single parenthood. When he attempts to adapt the play into comics, it triggers a series of personal crises. Bayer's limitations and futile ambitions are brought into sharp relief as he grapples with an estranged, unknowable parent and the play's frustrating lack of resolution.
Humans worship lore, myth, and fables, but many people's creative dreams become abandoned. Why?
Bayer's inky line, tangled textures, and kaleidoscopic color boldly fuse on the page into comic book semiotics, flights of grandeur, and tangents inside tangents. Josh Bayer stitches scattered memories into surrealistic episodes permeated with dream logic. Unended is a Promethean quest to excavate the creative fire hidden inside us.
Review Quotes
"The art nods to classic comics, though with a visceral, surrealist bent indebted to Raymond Pettibon's punk LP sleeves as much as Anselm Kiefer and Käthe Kollwitz's haunted expressionism. Long-limbed figures skulk the panels, contorted by anguish and insecurity, and Bayer sometimes draws his father wearing an executioner's hood. Details require close reading in swirling compositions that flood the senses, but the obsessive reckoning with legacy resonates throughout. This charged account of the past's enduring grip is a triumph." -- Publishers Weekly, STARRED Review
"Josh Bayer is a true expressionist comics hero. His relentless self-questioning, analog punk struggle, reifies the eternity of the comics as the greatest artform."
-- Matthew Thurber, Art Comic, Mr. Colostomy
"Heart-rending and sense-flooding, gorgeous, tragic, generous and vulnerable - UNENDED is an artwork I'll never forget." - Jonathan Lethem
"For a graphic novel about unfinished narratives, Unended is incredibly satisfying to read, and a masterclass in the potential of comix that sit outside of the expected." -- Solrad