The Park: A Mystery

The painter and groundbreaking comics-maker Martin Vaughn-James was born in Bristol during the latter stages of Great Britain's involvement in World War II (1943). He spent much of his youth in Australia and would live in a variety of places around the world before settling into Brussels during a latter stage of his life. He is best known for a publishing sequence from the early 1970s -- the artist lived in Canada for a time, in Montreal -- of books from New Press and Coach House Press that stand as either seminal graphic novels from the generation in which that notion finally began to take hold, books that function in many ways like graphic novels but aren't quite the same thing, or works that have informed the development of or suggested possibilities for those kinds of books. That run of works is: Elephant (1970), The Projector (1971), The Park (1972) and The Cage (1975). Of those four, Elephant was from New Press, the other three were from Coach House Press.