At The A.V. Club, Simon & Schuster’s Gallery 13 imprint have announced “Frogcatchers,” a new graphic novel from writer/artist Jeff Lemire due out in September. It tells the story of a man and a boy who wake up to find themselves in an eerie hotel – here’s the synopsis of the plot at Simon & Schuster:
A man wakes up alone in a strange room with no recollection of who he is or how he got there. The padlocked doors and barren lobby reinforce the strangeness of this place. This is—as he reads from an old-fashioned keychain beside his bed — the Edgewater Hotel. Even worse, something ominous seems to be lurking in one of the rooms.
But when he meets a young companion—the only other soul in this vast, enveloping emptiness—his new friend begs him not to unlock the door. There must be something behind it… but what?
A haunted hotel on the edge of reality, an endless bridge spanning an infinite ocean, and a man and a boy looking for a way out. This is the setting for a boundary pushing, genre-defying new work of fiction by one of comics’ master storytellers.
At The A.V. Club, Lemire described “Frogcatchers” as “a simple fable, but beneath that there is something much more personal,” and “a story about looking back, but also [about] looking forward at our own mortality.” Visually, it is heavily inspired by Japanese author Haruki Murakami and filmmaker David Lynch, but it is also an attempt by Lemire to “to get back to making comics the way I used to when I was first starting out in the early 2000s. Back then, things were much more spontaneous and I rarely worked from a full script. I would get an idea and just start drawing it, scene by scene, and let the story surprise me as I worked through it. I longed to get back to the sort of creative freedom and experimentation that this approach can provide. So ‘Frogcatchers’ started as an experiment, drawn all in pencil in my sketchbooks, and quickly became my favorite book of all the work I’ve done.” This is the second graphic novel by Lemire published by Gallery 13, following 2017’s “Roughneck.”
“Frogcatchers,” which is 96 pages long, will be published on September 24, 2019, and will retail for $19.99. Head on over to The A.V. Club for a five-page preview of the artwork.
