A chilling collection of wordless horror shorts from the master of scratchboard. Greetings from Hellville consists of four short stories, all told without words, crafted with Ott's trademark black-and-white scratchboard style. Ott creates modern horror comics that have been described as the postmodern successor to EC's infamous line from the 1950s. The final story, "Goodbye!" relates a man's multiple suicide attempts. After each new method the man finds himself miraculously alive, until he pulls his curtains aside and is finally killed by the looming mushroom cloud hovering over the city. "Goodbye!" is a perfect example of Greetings from Hellville's bleak and suspenseful mood.
Despite a large European following for years, especially in France and Germany, and acclaimed short stories published in American anthologies, this book is Ott's first American book. His meticulous scratchboard style is masterful, provoking awe and admiration in the face of the repeated horrors portrayed, and is sure to establish him as one of the preeminent horror cartoonists being published today.
About the Author, Thomas Ott
Thomas Ott lives in Zurich, Switzerland, where he creates animation, is the lead singer of a band called The Playboys, and continues to draw political cartoons, comics and caricatures for various European newspapers and magazines. His books include The Number 73304-23-4153-6-96-8, Cinema Panopticum, T. Ott's Tales of Error, Dead End, Greetings from Hellville, and R.I.P.: Best of 1985-2004.
[H]e is the most innovative contemporary horror cartoonist working today...one of the great masters of the mute comics format.
Publishers Weekly
Swiss cartoonist Ott is well known in Europe, but outside of a few anthologies, this is the first collection of his work to be published in the U.S. Ott's wordless short stories synthesize two nearly forgotten comics traditions: the evocative, text-free "woodcut" narrative style invented by Lynd Ward in the 1920s and '30s in books like Gods' Man; and the compact horror stories with a twist ending popularized by 1950s EC comics such as Shock Suspense Stories. Ott's stories tend to slip into easy irony or B-movie dopiness. In one, a man tries unsuccessfully to kill himself by increasingly violent means, then opens his window and is blown away by a nuclear bomb; in another, a murderous Klansman turns his violence on himself, while it turns out a shoeshine boy has taken revenge by casting a voodoo spell on him. What salvages this collection is Ott's spectacular artwork, done on scratchboard (each page starts out totally black, and he scrapes down to the white pigment underneath). Every panel is composed of a frantic mass of tiny lines, and the characters alternately stand out from the backgrounds or melt into them. Ott's composition is powerful and dramatic, and (as with Ward's work) the form makes it look ageless, with masterful light and shadow effects. It's disappointing that his stories don't always measure up to standards of his drawings. (July)
