World Within the World: Collected Minicomix & Short Works 2010-2022

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.

About the Author :
Julia Gfrörer lives on Long Island, where she maintains an extensive collection of black cardigans. She is the author of the graphic novels Black Is the Color (2013), Laid Waste (2016), and Vision (2020), and her work has appeared in Kramers Ergot and Best American Comics. She pronounces her name "ga-FROOR-eh," whether you do or not.

Review :
It really varies in here for these particular stories that are trying to teach you some lessons and also some of them are just [Gröfer] having fun. I like anthologies like this.-- "Near Mint Condition" Taking the title from the dense single page opening strip explaining how there are multiple worlds within worlds, this exhaustive anthology combines the work that preceded Julia Gfrörer's graphic novels alongside strips later published between them. As a unique creator with an extremely individual viewpoint and multiple interests, her shorter material ought to be as fascinating as her longer strips, and so it proves.-- "Slings & Arrows Graphic Novel Guide" To read Julia Gfrörer's comics is to feel her carving profane things on the inside of your skull... Her drawings manage to crawl under my skin and transport me to dark places I would rather not visit, but seem unable to leave.-- "Solrad" It's a delight to explore the fascinating dark corners she's mined in the past decade plus, her own bizarre world within our world.-- "Cinema Sentries" Running throughout [this book] are recurring ideas about violence and eroticism, set atop a deep respect for -- or perhaps curiosity with -- the ineffable nature of existence and life.-- "Comics Beat" Gfrörer's stories would be unbearable if they weren't so funny, and she salts this collection with the occasional page of, say, drawings of Ryan Gosling, or an aside between evil spirits wondering idly how humans even manage to stick to the furniture.-- "The New York Times" The 39 pieces collected here reveal a propulsive curiosity that sends Gfrörer across time periods, locations, and a wide range of human experiences.--Oliver Sava "The AV Club" Lovers of the macabre will savor this cabinet of curiosities.-- "Publishers Weekly Starred Review" Gfrörer's stories feature a mix of elusive reality and foreboding moods, all suggesting something we can't totally conceive and yet understand emotionally.-- "Comics Beat" Julia Gfrörer creates comics about tough situations in dark times.-- "Flood Magazine"