Distant Ruptures

Goblins, wizards, superheroes, talking animals, and an assortment of fantastical shapeshifting characters populate this book of never-before-collected comics and illustrations, many of them drawn on incidental materials such as scrap paper and notepads.

Pulling from pulp, sci-fi, gag cartoons, fantasy, and thrillers, and populated by goblins, astronauts, magical thieves, and talking owls, CF’s comics break apart genres and forms, then reassemble them into one-of-a-kind stories that reveal an immense imagination and boundary-pushing talent.

Christopher Forgues (better known as CF) roared onto the indie comics scene in the early 2000s, producing some of the most exciting and influential work of the decade. His output was startlingly original and impressively prolific: his collaboration with Ben Jones, Paper Radio; his multi-part epic, Powr Mastrs; and the shorter comics and zines now collected for the first time in Distant Ruptures. These comics--created using scratchy pencil and brilliant color, smudged Xeroxes and scraps of notepaper--capture the extraordinary range of CF’s work.

Fellow cartoonist Sammy Harkham has gathered the best of them into this new collection, which also includes an introduction by Gabriel Winslow-Yost and a new interview with CF. Distant Ruptures offers readers their first chance to see the full scope of this remarkable era of CF’s comics.

CF (Christopher Forgues) is a cartoonist, artist, and musician. Called one of the ＂most important cartoonists of [his] generation＂ (Art in America), he is best known for his graphic novel series Powr Mastrs, published in three volumes by PictureBox in the late 2000s. His work has been featured in the comics anthologies Kramers Ergot and The Best American Comics and has been shown in galleries in New York and Los Angeles. His most recent publication is the comic zine Pierrot Alterations.

Sammy Harkham is a cartoonist and the editor of the influential comics anthology Kramers Ergot. His book Blood of the Virgin was published by Pantheon in 2023 and was selected by The New York Times as one of the best graphic novels of the year.

Gabriel Winslow-Yost is a contributing editor at The New York Review of Books.