Fantagraphics to Publish Glenn Head’s Memoir “Chartwell Manor”

Fantagraphics will publish “Chartwell Manor,” a “harrowing” graphic memoir by cartoonist Glenn Head this May. The black-and-white book will chronicle the two years Head spent at the titular boarding school for students with special needs in the early 1970s; a school that was headed by sexual predator Terry Lynch. Per the official synopsis, the book will depict “years of sexual and emotional abuse [Head] suffered at a boarding school during his adolescence, and the resultant trauma that took him almost 50 years to process before being able to tell his story publicly.”

In a statement, Head, said, “Chartwell Manor, I always felt, was begging for the comic book treatment. ‘Sir’ was a larger than life figure: clownish, exuberant, florid in his speech patterns, grandiose–almost a parody of a boarding school headmaster. He was also a pathological liar and a serial abuser of children. Too criminal for words, he needed to be drawn!”

Head, 62, is best known for his surreal work in publications like The New York Times and Wall Street Journal as well as various underground zines, but emphasized “nothing in this book is invented, or exaggerated. It happened like this. To the very best of my ability I drew it just as it happened. Drawing ‘Chartwell Manor’ and the truth of it became a matter of life and death to me. Without that truth, there’s nothing.”

Located in Mendham, New Jersey, Chartwell Manor Preparatory School was open from 1970 to 1984. In 1986, Terry Lynch was indicted on more than 100 counts of sexually abusing 14 students, and eventually pled guilty to 17 of the charges. He served seven years of a 14-year prison sentence before being released in 1997, and subsequently began posing as a doctor to prey on patients in Morristown. He pled guilty after being caught again in 2006, and is believed to have died in 2011. In 2019, after Governor Phil Murphy raised the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse survivors in the state of New Jersey, two former students sued former staff for failing to protect them from Lynch. The school has also been the subject of Jennifer Elizabeth Johnson’s memoir Chartwell Manor: A True Story of Childhood Horror, released on Kindle.

“Chartwell Manor” will be released on May 25. The book is available to preorder, and will 240 pages long. You can read a preview of the book now at the The Hollywood Reporter.

If you have been affected by this story, please contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-4673 or online.rainn.org (Español: rainn.org/es) to be connected with a trained staff member from a sexual assault service provider in your area.