Everything Together: Collected Stories

With Kramers Ergot, Harkham helped collect and show to the world what’s most glorious in modern comics. In this stunning collection, he shows why he deserves to be as well-known as a creator as for editing the volumes with which he popularized the work of others. The book is essentially a repository for two great long-form pieces, with intricately drawn comic interludes (Napoleon as an anxiety-ridden artist, a riff on Where the Wild Things Are) as interstitials just as worthy as the main pieces. “Somersaulting” is a long looper of a piece about Australian teenagers wrapped up in anger and ennui; its understanding of the angsty boredom of adolescence twins nicely with Harkham’s spare and open-ended drawings. In “Poor Sailor,” he goes further afield with a bigger story based on de Maupassant, of a sailor who goes to sea against all good advice and suffers wildly for it. Between the blood-crazed monsters and blue loneliness, it’s a curiously effective little masterpiece of mood. There are few graphic artists who can combine the tragic and the comic with Harkham’s smashing accuracy. (Oct.)