The Projector and Elephant

Two surreal graphic novels about technology, corporatization, and alienation in the modern world by a cult-favorite comics innovator.

In 1968, the British artist and writer Martin Vaughn-James emigrated to Canada. Over the next eight years, he proceeded to produce some of the most mesmerizing and inventive works in comics, light-years ahead of his contemporaries. Among them were Elephant and The Projector, linked graphic novels that guide the reader (and a bespectacled Everyman) through landscapes built out of both the everyday and the nightmarish. Jam-packed superhighways, plummeting horses, vast urban wastelands, colossal businessmen, demented cartoon animals, and interstellar oranges are just a small part of Vaughn-James’s prophetic vision of society’s turn away from the natural world to the artificial.

Together for the first time in a single volume, designed and edited by Seth and with an introduction by Jeet Heer, Elephant and The Projector stand as a reminder that we have yet to catch up to Vaughn-James.

Martin Vaughn-James (1943-2009) was a British painter and cartoonist best known for his captivating, stylistically experimental graphic novels--Elephant, The Projector, The Park, and The Cage--all published in the 1970s, when Vaughn-James lived in Canada. He contributed to numerous magazines during his lifetime and wrote two prose novels, Night Train and The Tomb of Zwaab.

Seth is the cartoonist behind the comic book series Palookaville. His most recent graphic novel, Clyde Fans, was selected as one of the best books of 2019 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Globe and Mail. Seth lives in Guelph, Ontario, with his wife, Tania, and their two cats in an old house he has named "Inkwell's End."

Jeet Heer is a comics critic and the national affairs correspondent for The Nation. He is the author of In Love with Art: Françoise Mouly's Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays & Profiles. He divides his time between Toronto and Regina, Canada.