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A
PENNY DREADFUL (ISBN 1-894663-41-1)
Trade paperback: 2-colour cover,
perfect-bound
160 sepia pages interior / 5.75" x 7.5" page size
design by: Origin Obscure / gustave m.
print run: edition of 1500 copies
release date: May 2003
Canada $21.95 · US $16.95
· UK £9.95
In nineteenth-century England the penny dreadful was a form
of popular literature, lavishly illustrated with garish and grotesque
pictures depicting lurid crimes and shocking romance, circulating cheaply
among the lower classes. A century and half later, this motif is revisited
metaphorically in gustave morin's A Penny Dreadful. This time
around, the crimes remain the same but all the romance is gone.
A decade in the making, A Penny Dreadful is a large suite of
works that are neither literature nor graphic art, but a hybrid of the
two. Informed by several marginal strains of literary activity, A
Penny Dreadful is ultimately a blueprint for "borderblur."
As the reader meanders through the nine chapters, a crazy quilt of twentieth-century
imagery collides with mongrel semiotics to produce a dizzying, culminant
effect achieved all too rarely in graphic literature.
A species of flip-book that invites multiple readings and a veritable
newsreel of possibility for the uninitiated, A Penny Dreadful
is both a comic book for shit disturbers and a tour through the margins
where personal and social collapse are filtered through the lens of political
impotence. Includes an "appendix" by celebrated concrete poet
jwcurry.
 
This Common Ground Editions
book was sponsored by the Ontario Arts Council during its manuscript
phase; it was later made physical by Insomniac Press (published
under their short-lived Implosion Imprint).
• a review of the book by The
Danforth Review can be found here
• a review of the book by Geof Huth can be
found here
• an interview with the author (conducted
by Kevin Thurston) can be found here
• for a 38 page PDF-versioned taste/trailer
of A Penny Dreadful, visit Ubuweb
here
morin extends the tradition of "Concrete" poetry into a space
of incredible visual subtlety, such that one can link him, without embarrassment,
to the works of image-makers ranging from Goya to his countryman Guy Maddin,
from the deep prehistory of Radical Graphic artists (where Marshall MacLuhan
and Quentin Fiore of The Medium is the Massage hold court) to the low-tech
work of those working in zines and the traditions of "dirty concrete."
More than sophisticated "one-liners," morin's work encourages
one to look closer: even as one rationalizes and "consumes"
the various components of the image, settling on a static, reproducible
"meaning" is difficult without betrayal of the semantic aura.
This "trailer" (as in movie preview) of his sepia-tinged
A Penny Dreadful should encourage many to go the extra yard and purchase
this graphic "novel" that is also a valuable satiric commentary
on the benighted paths our planet is treading.
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