Elephant Projector
Two Surreal Early Graphic Novels
Martin Vaughn-James (1943-2009) was a British artist who was living in Canada in the early 70s. At that time, Vaughn-James made a series of avant la lettre graphic novels that are some of the most intriguing artworks of their period. For a long time, Vaughn-James works were legendary but unknown—his publisher was an experimental small press, Coach House Press. Back in 2009, I found a copy of The Cage (1975) from a rare-book dealer. I paid a pretty penny for it, which was ironic, because Coach House Press brought out a 2nd edition in 2013. I would rank The Cage as one of the best graphic novels ever.
I had heard that he produced other books besides The Cage, and for some reason I assumed they were done after The Cage. It turns out that Elephant and The Projector were drawn in the early 70s before he drew The Cage, and now the have been republished in the beautifully-designed omnibus edition from New York Review Comics. It is presented as a flip book—if you read from one side, you get Elephant and from the other side, The Projector.
Jeet Heer writes an introduction which unsurprisingly locates Vaughn-James’s inspiration in the surrealist movement of the early 20th century and the Nouveau Roman movement of the 50s and 60s as exemplified by the works of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Claude Simon. These are influences that Vaughn-James expressed in interviews, but when you look at Elephant (1970) and The Projector (1971), you can’t not see the influence of 60s counter-culture.
Elephant in particular feels similar to its comic book contemporaries—the underground comix of people like Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, the Air Pirates, etc.
As Vaughn-James progressed, he started excising figures and characters from his work. It gradually became more and more like a Nouveau Roman in comic form. The Projector moves closer to that ideal without quite getting there.
The Projector still feels like an especially surreal underground comic, but one can see the visual elements that will dominate The Cage sneaking in—the plants with heart-shaped leaves will sprout all over The Cage. But all people will vanish. The Cage depicts an unpopulated world.
The Cage for years has seemed to me like a singular work of art, utterly unlike any other comics. And that is still true, but with Elephant and The Projector in print, we can see how Martn Vaugh-James arrived at The Cage, and how the earlier books place him firmly among the underground cartoonists who were his contemporaries.
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Thanks for this! I have never heard of this cartoonist. I need to get his books and check him out post haste!