The Ephemerata

Drawing upon her own bereavement, renowned comics artist and writer Carol Tyler emerges from a decade-long period of grief to create an allegorical masterpiece.

During collisions between life and death, estrangement and loss, Carol Tyler turned to her pen to face facts and extract meaning from the oddly sacred experience. Exploring realms metaphorical, half-imagined, and all-too-real, she navigates previously uncharted emotional territory for herself and others, in a work that is both painfully intimate and philosophically rich.

An artistic advancement nearly forty years into Tyler's comics-making career, The Ephemerata features her most breathtaking picture-making ever — fine, dense brush lines complemented with occasional colour washes or highlights — and formally stunning cartooning. Combining art and text in multiple ways — in the traditional comics panel grid, as words-and-illustration, and as organically flowing images surrounded by floating text — she depicts the inner monologue of a fallible human being grappling with questions of profound relevance.

Tyler's memoirist skills also rise to the forefront, excavating and colliding scenes from her history, delineating with sensitive intuition the ways in which the inevitability of grief is built into our lives and our loves. To struggle in the face of loss is a universal experience. To turn it into this compassionate, deep, and beautiful book takes a true artist.

Full-colour illustrations throughout.