Julia Gfrörer: World Within the World

Julia Gfrörer is quietly one of the most influential cartoonists of her generation. Emerging from the Portland scene at the height of the Obama era, her comics augured the dark times to come, using graphic sex, pitch-black horror, a hunger for exploring the past, and a line cruel as a whip to create her own unmistakable sense of millennial melancholy. Reflecting her DIY ethos, much of her work has only been available in self-published zines or independent anthologies, many of them rare or out-of-print -- until now.

World Within the World features 30 of Gfrörer's short stories, culled from a decade of writing and drawing at the bleeding edge of the art form. Her tales of desire, despair, and the universal need for connection span centuries, continents, and cultures from prehistoric teenagers in love to Christian martyrs in the making to modern-day vampires on the make. Along the way her bold, confident work leads the reader to some unexpected places, whether erotica inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe or a post-apocalyptic parody of Frasier.

In World Within the World, there is no distinction between the realistic and the fantastic, the psychological and the supernatural, the modern and the medieval, the mundane and the sublime -- just the artist's unflinching vision of how it feels to be human, no matter when or where.