The Projector and The Elephant – Martin Vaughn-James
The Projector and The Elephant by Martin Vaughn-James, edited and designed by Seth, introduction by Jeet Heer / ISBN 9781552452875 / 212-page hardback published in 2023 by New York Review Comics
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Two surreal graphic novels about technology, corporatization, and alienation in the modern world by a cult-favorite comics innovator.
“Vaughn-James remains a significant figure in comics history because his work was singular, literate, experimental, and often unsurpassably good.”– The Walrus
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 British painter and cartoonist best known for his captivating, stylistically daring graphic novels—Elephant, The Projector, The Park, and The Cage—all published in the 1970s, when Vaughn-James lived in Canada. He contributed to numerous magazines during his lifetime and wrote two prose novels, Night Train and The Tomb of Zwaab.
