Additional Book Information
Series: New York Review Comics
ISBN: 9781681371078
Pages: 100
Publication Date: November 28, 2017
The Green Hand and Other Stories
by Nicole Claveloux, introduction by Daniel Clowes, translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith
$24.95
While our office is shut down due to COVID-19, we encourage you to purchase this title through bookshop.org in support of independent bookstores. Click here to order.
Nicole Claveloux’s short stories—originally published in the late 1970s and never before collected in English—are among the most beautiful comics ever drawn: whimsical, intoxicating, with the freshness and splendor of dreams. In hallucinatory color or elegant black-and-white, she brings us into lands that are strange but oddly recognizable, filled with murderous grandmothers and lonely city dwellers, bad-tempered vegetables and walls that are surprisingly easy to fall through. In the title story, written with Edith Zha, a new houseplant becomes the first step in an epic journey of self-discovery and a witty fable of modern romance—complete with talking shrubbery, a wised-up genie, and one very depressed bird.
This oversized hardcover NYRC edition, designed and introduced by Daniel Clowes, features new English hand-lettering and multiple paper stocks. It is the perfect opportunity to encounter an unforgettable, unjustly neglected master of French comics.
This NYRC edition is an oversized hardcover and features multiple extra-thick paper stocks, full color, and new English hand-lettering.
Click to enlarge images
Praise
Darkly humorous, existential, erotic, trance inducing — these comics wield a rare and innovative power....The brilliance of [Claveloux's] comics lies in what they require of the viewer, to be intimate with what is not known, both within the work and themselves.
—Leopoldine Core, The New York Times
Like a time capsule, these 1970s stories by French cartoonist Claveloux—largely untranslated and unseen in the States until this collection—are a reminder of just how outrageous and imaginative comics could be back in that freewheeling decade.... Claveloux’s exquisitely detailed illustrations reflect such contemporary forces as underground comix artists from Robert Crumb to Victor Moscoso, designer Heinz Edelman, and the Day-Glo colors of psychedelic posters.... Her amalgam, though, is a singularly remarkable trip.
—Booklist
Nicole Claveloux’s comics come across as odd, mind-bending "What If’s."….The work, certainly, has that air of being created at an inspired moment, with "The Green Hand" in particular presenting as a little-recognized masterpiece.
—The Comics Journal
The artwork...is some of the most beautiful ever created for our lowly form—vivid, dreamlike, with intensely vivid hand-separated colors unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
—Daniel Clowes
Claveloux[’s]...explicitly adult pop-art fantasia delivers emotional insight and imaginative visuals that take the driver’s seat away from the strong logic of the narrative and enjoyably amble readers toward the byways of the subconscious with hauntingly powerful designs and sagacious observation.
—Library Journal, starred review