D.J. Bryant UNREAL CITY

This collection of short comics by an up-and-coming cartoonist examines relationships spatially and existentially

Unreal City contains five highly charged stories about relationships: “Echoes into Eternity,” “Evelyn Dalton-Hoyt,” “Emordana,” “The Yellowknife Retrospective,” and “Objet d’Art.” The stories address gender, narcissism, marriage, subjectivity, objectification, and the thin line that divides love from hate. Bryant’s characters sometimes feel like they are navigating their way through the darkness in an attempt to make sense of love, sex, art, and life. Existential and elliptical, the stories play beautifully against Bryant’s precise and fully-realized artwork, which echoes such masters as Jaime Hernandez and Daniel Clowes. In Unreal City, characters cannot walk into a room without their world turning inside out. Readers will be similarly upended by the discovery of this major new talent.

Published by Fantagraphics

USA Import

Hardback

104 b/w pages

10.3” x 12.8”

• “Good lord, is this a pretty book to look at. It will be a thrill to watch how Bryant proceeds after this surreal debut.” - Vulture

• “Drawn over nearly a decade, the five stories in Bryant’s first collection show a keen eye for sharp angles, crisply lined backgrounds, creeping eroticism, and an attention to noirish detail.” - Publishers Weekly

• “Unreal City has been seven years in the making, and it shows. Its five freaky stories explore identity confusion, jealousy in relationships, as well as inexplicable time warps and Kafkaesque dream logic.” - The Fader

• “His stories are like a leap off the hallucinatory cliffs of A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron and the X’ed Out trilogy and into some murkier, more disturbing void. As much as Unreal City might make you scratch your head, the surreal stories within it grasp at something very real.” - Seattle Weekly

• “Bryant's art is meticulous and glossy, sexy and hypnotic; Charles Burns with more of an eye for high fashion.” - Page 45