Haunted

A surprising, wry, and deeply moving reflection on despair and the way back out

Ten years after finishing the original French edition of Maybe Later--the book in which the French superstar cartooning duo Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian worked separately for the first time--Dupuy set out on his own again with Haunted. Gone are the tightly constructed narratives and urbane, elegant graphics of his projects with Berberian. In their place, roughed-in drawings give an urgent, spontaneous feeling to a series of hallucinatory stories and dreamlike sequences that register the raw distress of solitude and self-doubt--the dark core of the material held in balance by Dupuy's acid humor and lyrical sensibility.

A jogging Dupuy runs around and sometimes through the stories of the misfit characters that haunt him: a self-amputating dog, a Left Bank artist in search of emptiness, an art-collecting duck, Lucha Libre wrestlers, and a group of single guys at the watering hole imagined as the anthropomorphic "Forest Friends." Heart pumping, gaze turned inward, the ground occasionally giving way beneath his feet, this alter ego concludes that sometimes you need to cross the line to figure out where it is.

The original French edition of Haunted was nominated for the 2006 award for Best Comic Book at the Angoulême International Comics Festival.