Every day in July we're spotlighting books from our month-long Hidden Gems Sale, wherein we're featuring some of our under-the-radar backlist titles and encouraging you to try them by offering them at a nice discount of 25% off!
Today's installment features Francesca Ghermandi, who is justly lauded in her native Italy but remains underappreciated here in North America. Hopefully that will change with her new graphic novel Grenuord, coming soon from Fantagraphics.
One of the brightest lights in the modern Italian comics firmament, Ghermandi infuses her work with a gorgeous full-color palette of stylized graphics and a decidedly hard-boiled (but very funny) story sensibility. Set in her crazy, surreal universe, The Wipeout is half Double Indemnity, half Mulholland Drive — a violent, dream-laden fantasia with enough twists and turns to delight any adventurous comics reader. Jo Tartaglia, who works for a global cleaning-products company, is putting the finishing touches on a revolutionary new fluid that would clean everything at once — the only drawback being that, when mixed with milk, it becomes a deadly poison. Nagged nearly to death by his hair-transplant-obsessed wife Belle, he falls in with the lovely Virgin Prune, a lady with a shady past who enlists him to get her out from under a villainous loan shark (who happens to be an exact double for Jo). In typical film-noir style, there are plots within plots, not everyone ends up alive at the end of the story, and those who are dead aren't necessarily dead for good.
80-page full-color 9" x 12.5" softcover
regularly $19.95 • ON SALE $14.96
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