Australian cartoonist Tomi Parrish released his latest graphic novel with publisher Fantagraphics earlier this month. This graphic novel is a collection of more than a dozen short stories, diary entries, photographs, and other multimedia images presented as something like a hybrid of a scrapbook and a comic anthology. Today, The Beat published an exclusive preview of a book titled The Past Is a Grotesque Animal.
Here’s the full synopsis:
Extensive collection/scrapbook of over 20 short stories, diaries, photos, and other images. Driven by trends in understanding how we relate to each other, it is told with visual and lyrical beauty and raw emotion that collectively reaffirms the power of art.
Tomi Parrish is an Australian transgender cartoonist and one of the most distinctive voices in modern comics and graphic novels. Balancing emotional honesty and a keen awareness of the human condition, Parrish navigates fear, loneliness, identity, body politics, queer desire, masculinity, fear, and the ever-fluid nature of all relationships. The Past is a Grotesque Animal includes more than 20 short stories of varying lengths, interspersed with ephemeral elements from Parrish’s own life, including diary entries, photographs, illustrations, and paintings.
Parrish’s autobiographical elements convey their voices as writers and the way their characters find each other, constantly adrift in a sea of their own experiences, current situations, traumas, and desires. How these characters coexist and are complicated by external and internal forces influences our fixed need for meaningful connection. The book also showcases Parrish’s unique and authentic visual style, which blends clear lines, expressionistic character designs, and beautifully intricate hand-drawn colors.
Check out an excerpt from The Past is a Grotesque Animal below.
“Grotesque Animals of the Past” is available now wherever books are sold.
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