SelfMadeHero is pleased to announce the publication of MAGRITTE: THIS IS NOT A BIOGRAPHY, a hallucinatory journey through fact, fiction, and the imagination of the landmark Surrealist from the creative team of Belgian writer Vincent Zabus and Italian artist Thomas Campi.
When Charles Singular anticipates promotion by buying a bowler hat, one that was once owned by surrealist Rene Magritte, he find himself transported into the artist’s eccentric world. This is the latest in SelfMadeHero’s acclaimed Art Masters that includes Pablo, Baudoin’s DalÃ, Gauguin: The Other World (all translated by yours truly), Munch, and Vincent.
I’ve done a number of biographies for SelfMadeHero now, and the unorthodox approach here made it one of my personal favorites. As  Joe Gordon notes at the Forbidden Planet blog,
This is an approach that wouldn’t really work in a prose biography, but the comics medium can do beautifully; the Ninth Art exploring the world of the fine arts visually, as Charles literally finds himself in the artist’s work. Yes, perhaps cinema could do this visually too, but in comics form we can pause, a still image, just like the paintings, lingering over some panels, allowing ideas and notions to spark against one another in our head as we take it in. This is the sort of work which the comics medium can do better than any other, and here Zabus and Campi clearly understand that, and use it to wonderful effect to explore Magritte’s ouevre.
Lots of lovely preview pages there. Do give it a look!
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