Contemporary Authors

• Mauretania ( graphic novel) Penguin Books (London, England), 1990
• The New World: Comics from Mauretania New York Review Books (New York, NY), 2017

1. The new world : comics from Mauretania https://lccn.loc.gov/2017043910 Reynolds, Chris, 1960- author, artist. The new world : comics from Mauretania / by Chris Reynolds ; edited and with cover art by Seth ; foreword by Ed Park. New York : New York Review Books, [2017] pages cm. PN6737.R49 N48 2017 ISBN: 9781681372389 (hardback)

• Amazon - https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1&ei=y8JwW5CpHY20sQXjxIOYCA&q=Reynolds%2C+Chris++The+new+world&oq=Reynolds%2C+Chris++The+new+world&gs_l=psy-ab.3..35i39k1.26837.27299.0.27775.2.2.0.0.0.0.92.182.2.2.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..0.2.180...0i22i30k1.0.WGoLKRwaHlw

  Chris Reynolds was born in Wales in 1960 and studied fine art at the North Staffordshire Polytechnic. He has worked as a filmmaker, publicist, and art teacher but now devotes his time to drawing comics. He lives in Poole in the United Kingdom.

The New World: Comics from
Mauretania
Gordon Flagg
Booklist.
114.14 (Mar. 15, 2018): p31. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The New World: Comics from Mauretania.
By Chris Reynolds. Ed. by Seth. Illus. by the author.
Apr. 2018. 276p. New York Review, $34.95 (9781681372389); e-book, $34.95 (9781681372396). 741.5.
Since the mid-1980s, British cartoonist Reynolds has self-published his tales of Mauretania, set some years after Earth has been taken over by intergalactic invaders. The aliens are blandly passive overlords, mostly interested in the planet's mining opportunities. The human inhabitants are vaguely disoriented and seem to have difficulties dealing with matters of space and time. The sparse details revealed about the events that befell society add to the sense of dislocation and mystery. The stories are light on incident, portraying brief passages in the lives of anonymous individuals as well as longer pieces featuring a few recurring characters, particularly the Monitor, a helmeted figure who possesses slightly more agency than other humans. The artwork is quietly restrained, using thick, woodcut-like lines and focusing as much on buildings and landscapes as the characters, who are often portrayed indistinctly, from behind or in silhouette. Over the years, Reynolds' stories have amassed an enthusiastic cult following (including the alt-cartoonist Seth, who designed this volume); this handsome compilation is bound to expand his audience immensely.--Gordon Flagg
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Flagg, Gordon. "The New World: Comics from Mauretania." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2018, p. 31. Book
Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A533094485/GPS?u=schlager&
1 of 4 8/12/18, 6:06 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
sid=GPS&xid=7654275a. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A533094485
2 of 4 8/12/18, 6:06 PM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
The New World: Comics From Mauretania
Publishers Weekly.
265.8 (Feb. 19, 2018): p63. From Business Collection. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The New World: Comics From Mauretania Chris Reynolds. New York Review Comics, $34.95 (276p) ISBN 978-1-68137-238-9
Welsh cartoonist Reynolds has been issuing "Mauretania Comics" since 1985; this well-designed volume, edited by cartoonist Seth, provides a definitive collection of Reynolds's enigmatic work. Set on a future earth where humanity has lost a war with mostly benevolent aliens, these comics string together slice-of-life narratives with the abstract tales that arise from a universe where cause and effect no longer meaningfully apply. The protagonist is the helmeted Monitor, who looks like a mod sci-fi movie hero and travels through a mundane landscape where daily life seems oddly unchanged despite the conquest of humanity. "The Dial" explains how the aliens' religion paved the way toward their quite polite control of humans. Short detective yarns and poetic fragments lead loosely through to the introduction of Jimmy, who joins Monitor in resisting the new order and--perhaps--saving the world. The sheer denseness of Reynolds's line, which is amply cross-hatched and looks to be drawn with fat Sharpies, pervades the comics with an encroaching sense of dread. In his foreword, Ed Park frames the "aesthetic ecstasy" of these loosely plotted comics, where more questions are raised than answered. The distinctive visual style and familiar themes of paranoia and existential unease will resonate with modern audiences and provide a collectible for those familiar with the series. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The New World: Comics From Mauretania." Publishers Weekly, 19 Feb. 2018, p. 63. Book
Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529357545/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=92dcc881. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A529357545
3 of 4 8/12/18, 6:06 PM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Reynolds, Chris. The New World:
Comics from Mauretania
Lewis Parsons
Xpress Reviews.
(Mar. 2, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Parsons, Lewis. "Reynolds, Chris. The New World: Comics from Mauretania." Xpress Reviews, 2
Mar. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532075567 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=23f68281. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532075567
4 of 4 8/12/18, 6:06 PM

Flagg, Gordon. "The New World: Comics from Mauretania." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2018, p. 31. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A533094485/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=7654275a. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018. "The New World: Comics From Mauretania." Publishers Weekly, 19 Feb. 2018, p. 63. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529357545/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=92dcc881. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018. Parsons, Lewis. "Reynolds, Chris. The New World: Comics from Mauretania." Xpress Reviews, 2 Mar. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532075567/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=23f68281. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.

• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/28/the-new-world-comics-from-mauretania-chris-reynolds-review
  Word count: 893

  The New World: Comics from Mauretania by Chris Reynolds – review
  These unsettling sci‑fi stories by a cult Welsh artist deserve wider attention
  Rachel Cooke

  Rachel Cooke
  @msrachelcooke

  Mon 28 May 2018 03.00 EDT
  The New World: Comics from Mauretania by Chris Reynolds.
  Detail from The New World: Comics from Mauretania by Chris Reynolds.

  Strictly speaking, The New World is not new. All the comics included in it have been published before; the earliest date from the 1980s. But in another, more important way, it is entirely novel. Designed and edited by Seth of Palookaville fame, and luxuriously published by New York Review Books, it gathers together between hard covers a variety of work by Chris Reynolds, the cult Welsh-born artist who remains both underrated and too little known. The result is a collection that isn’t only beautiful to look at and to hold; turning its pages, it strikes you that though these ineffably strange strips were written in another time, they work better in ours. Here, after all, is a world where technology must be treated with suspicion, workers perform random jobs whose nature is essentially pointless, and loneliness is the presiding spirit of the age. Could this be Reynolds’s moment? Perhaps.
  Sign up for Bookmarks: discover new books our weekly email
  Read more

  Welcome, then, to Mauretania, a realm that has nothing whatsoever to do with the Maghreb, or the famous ocean liner launched by Cunard in 1906. It’s a place that looks and sounds a little like the America of Edward Hopper, but it’s also clear that we are far in the future. The Earth having fallen under the control of alien forces, everything is at once the same and vastly different. Nature is in the process of being destroyed, new religions keep appearing, businesses are closed down every day for no good reason, the air reeks of conspiracy. Nothing, in other words, makes much sense at all – neither to Reynolds’s protagonists nor the reader. And then there is Monitor, a Zelig-like figure who always wears a helmet, and whose eyes are always hidden behind a visor. Who is he, and what is his purpose? We never quite find out.
  The New World: Comics from Mauretania by Chris Reynolds.
  Chris Reynolds’s cartoons recall the movies of Hitchcock in his 60s heyday.

  Most of these tales – The New World includes 17 short stories, the novella The Dial, and the full-length graphic novel Mauretania – begin straightforwardly enough: a man returns to his family home after a long period away; a couple say goodbye having lost their jobs when the factory that employs them closes down. Only then the ground shifts. People begin talking in riddles; bureaucracy starts to seem ever more nightmarish; mysterious figures suddenly appear in old photographs.

  The result is unnerving; for the reader, it’s like trying to walk on ice. Resistance, however, is futile. The only possible thing to do is to submit to this sense of disorientation, even of queasiness – and, perhaps, to take comfort in the artist’s marvellously inky drawings, whose thick lines bring to mind both woodcuts and the movies of Hitchcock in his 60s heyday (also, Victorian funeral cards). As the writer Ed Park suggests in his introduction, to call Reynolds’s comics black and white isn’t quite to do them justice; they’re more like black and white and black – and it’s in that extra layer of darkness that his genius may be found.

  • The New World: Comics from Mauretania by Chris Reynolds is published by New York Review Comics (£24.99). To order a copy for £21.24 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
  Since you’re here…

  … we have a small favour to ask. More people are reading the Guardian than ever but advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. And unlike many news organisations, we haven’t put up a paywall – we want to keep our journalism as open as we can. So you can see why we need to ask for your help. The Guardian’s independent, investigative journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe our perspective matters – because it might well be your perspective, too.

  The Guardian is editorially independent, meaning we set our own agenda. Our journalism is free from commercial bias and not influenced by billionaire owners, politicians or shareholders. No one edits our Editor. No one steers our opinion. This is important because it enables us to give a voice to the voiceless, challenge the powerful and hold them to account. It’s what makes us different to so many others in the media, at a time when factual, honest reporting is critical.

  If everyone who reads our reporting, who likes it, helps to support it, our future would be much more secure. For as little as $1, you can support the Guardian – and it only takes a minute. Thank you.
  Support The Guardian
  Paypal and credit card
  Topics

  Comics and graphic novels
  Graphic novel of the month

  reviews

• The Paris Review
  https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/05/02/black-and-white-and-black-on-the-comics-of-chris-reynolds/
  Word count: 1723

  Black and White and Black: On the Comics of Chris Reynolds
  By Ed Park May 2, 2018
  Arts & Culture

  Around the start of the first millennium, a territory on the northern coast of Africa fell under control of the Romans, who dubbed it “Mauretania,” possibly derived from a native word or from the Greek for “dark” (or “obscure”)—the root that eventually informed the term Moor. Centuries later, the Cunard Line affixed the name to a giant ship, built in Newcastle and launched in 1906, which for several years enjoyed distinction as both the world’s fastest and largest ocean liner, beloved by many, though called by Kipling “the monstrous nine-decked city.” It was scrapped between 1935 and 1937, and parts of the interior found a home in a pub in Bristol.

  Eight decades after the RMS Mauretania’s maiden voyage, Chris Reynolds, a Welsh-born artist in his mid twenties, embarked on what would be his life’s work, a beguiling series of loosely connected stories that he called Mauretania Comics. The work had nothing to do with that remote place or with seafaring vessels of yore, and the name was just one of its many elusive mysteries. The stories were and are easy to consume but tantalizingly difficult to characterize. Droll dialogue gives way to utterly melancholy voiceover; locales like “The Lighted Cities” and “Mouth City” are mapped on the same imaginative terrain as some version of England, one where a blasted figure out of J. G. Ballard might run across Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. Monitor, Mauretania’s signature character, always dons a helmet with a striplike visor masking his eyes. (Today he wouldn’t look so out of place: it resembles nothing so much as a virtual-reality headpiece.) The architecture alone is worth the trip: lipstick-shaped temples of music, a house like a geodesic dome crossed with a web made by a spider on acid.

  The stories start on solid ground, then twist like dreams. Reynolds sets everything in uniformly sized panels, edged in black like funeral invitations. His impossibly thick line lends weight to these uncanny dramas of lost time. Calling the comics black and white feels insufficient; they’re more like black and white and black. This starkness, and the stabs of poetic word-image interplay, can call to mind his stateside contemporary Raymond Pettibon, while the silent, depopulated spaces that loom throughout—abandoned houses, vacant cinemas, phantom transportation—suggest any number of uneasy de Chirico vistas.

  Reynolds never deploys Mauretania as a name in his work: it doesn’t denote a vessel or a country or a planet. Yet it’s perfect all the same. In a 2013 interview, Reynolds deflected the issue: “Mauretania is called that because that’s just what it had to be called. There were no two ways about it at all.” So much of his world feels broken, voluptuously ruined to the point of enigma. Even the height of technology feels like a mistake: In one story, a man returns to his hometown and visits a professor who had solved the problem of time travel. The inventor is frozen in the same position as he was years ago, the last panel a virtual reproduction of the earlier scene.

  The roots of the word itself—“dark,” “obscure”—befit the graphic qualities of the art as well as the reception of these perpetually perplexing comics. They’ve surfaced, briefly, in the mainstream. In 1990, Penguin published the graphic novel Mauretania in the UK, a slim masterpiece of corporate paranoia that’s somehow as gentle and lyrical as it is eerie. (“A mystery and a love story from a darker world,” ran the tagline.) Susan loses her job when Fern Ltd. shutters, then immediately gets hired by Reynal, where her superior is weirdly fascinated by her former gig: “Because, I mean, the lessons learned in a failing business can be really very useful,” he says, unconvincingly. “I’d really like to know what you felt about working at Fern Ltd.” She finds herself in a new world, one that seems to run on dream logic. When Alf, her old-employer-turned-Reynal-colleague, suddenly leaves for a job at Intercell Paint, Susan mockingly predicts that she’ll come home to find that her mother’s done up her room in “a nice shade of ‘Intercell’ pink!”—which is in fact what happens. (The punch line is that the art remains staunchly monochrome.)

  In 2004, a Glasgow publisher, Kingly Books, outlined another piece of the puzzle with The Dial and Other Stories, containing material from 1985 to 1992—that is, stories over a decade old, yet oddly ageless. The title story itself bends chronology. It begins in full science-fiction mode, with the “demobilisation of the interplanetary fleet after Earth’s defeat by the A.U.S.” and murmurings of the titular alien religion; like Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the protagonist finds his house on the verge of obliteration. But the story drifts ineluctably into the past, the futuristic frame falling away, until we’re left with what might be a more somber take on New Order’s “Love Vigilantes.” In a sequence called “The Golden Age,” a boy named Robert goes on a psychic adventure with his schoolmistress.

  Then, nothing. Or so it could seem—it was easy to lose track of Mauretania Comics, an ocean away. Reynolds, in fact, has been self-publishing his older stories and continues to bring out new titles, some in color (and available à la carte in a bewildering array of electronic editions). But his work has never reached these shores in traditional trade form until now.

  *

  The enthusiasm of the Canadian cartoonist Seth, whose 2005 Comics Journal appreciation hailed Reynolds as “the most underrated cartoonist of the last 20 years,” likely accounts for most of his readership on this continent (present fan included). In selecting the contents for The New World, Seth has done more than gather some beautifully representative work. He’s siphoned the ocean that is Mauretania Comics so that we can see, more clearly than ever, the tension between unconscious forces and those of reason. The former compel wanderings, incessant returns to hollowed-out homes, random jobs that seem to serve no purpose and yet provide the key. (A day’s work for one character consists of buying a kite for some kids.) The latter finds its culmination in the “trendy police force” known as Rational Control.

  “If it’s God telling him what to do, and it works, then there’s nothing we can do,” one conventional soul muses in Mauretania, baffled by Jimmy, the strange figure—and possible business competitor—who’s set up shop across the street. (Unsurprisingly, one of the Rational Control men dismisses any theory of the divine.) In reading The New World, I was struck by the religious themes that flood the book, a concern echoed all along, perhaps, in the forceful composition of black and white. Should we see some link between the Dial, a religion brought to a conquered Earth, and Christianity, which we first glimpse in a two-pager called “Railway Town”? A panel shows the towering statue of Christ in Rio, one scene in the life of a stewardess-turned-usherette—it didn’t register with me the first few times. But then I noticed other things. In “Monitor’s Human Reward,” the paneling of the door he sits in front of is cropped to resemble a cross; the spherical house is revealed, in the final wordless panel, to be topped by devil’s horns.

  Is Monitor some sort of interdimensional savior, or a “fruitcake,” as one character suggests? (Does his omnipresent headgear suggest a superhero or just a variation on Doonesbury’s B. D., superstitiously unwilling to remove it?) He works mundane jobs at various points—café worker, freezer salesman (refrigerator magnate?), gold-mine agent—but his name suggests he’s the one keeping this world in order.

  Has Jimmy, who idolized Monitor as a child, stepped in to save this same fallen world? (He wears a similar ping-pong-ball lid, marked II instead of M.) Was Monitor God—and is Jimmy … Christ? (Which makes one reconsider Monitor’s close friendship with Jimmy’s late mother.)

  These questions—never so baldly stated, but there in plain sight—struck me with a kind of aesthetic ecstasy, particularly upon revisiting the penultimate piece, “Soft Return.” Positioned right before Mauretania, it’s told in a voice we’ve heard intermittently throughout the book, a confessional first-person: “This is my story: The story of someone who lost everything, and then found it again. It’s about how I remembered my dream.” The narrator relates how as a young man, despite being newly unemployed, he had refused to fight in the war, leading to a family schism. “We had all been Christians,” he half-explains. Though the conflict isn’t given a name, the narrator has one. When he joins the army, he drives something called a “foot-ferryboat.” “They gave me that job because of my name: Christopher,” he says. “It was my new life.”

  There’s someone else with that name: our author, Chris Reynolds. We needn’t read the story as autobiographical, but I like the idea that the creator of this world—its God—is literally in the details, tucked away in one of the shorter pieces, only visible once in silhouette.

  Or maybe the author is present everywhere. On page seventy-nine of The New World, Monitor sits at a table, pen poised above paper, having “decided to do a survey—make a map showing all the mines.” Something about the stillness of the panel, the will to order, the blankness of the page makes this resemble a self-portrait, one in which nothing and everything is revealed.

  Ed Park is a founding editor of The Believer and a former editor of the Voice Literary Supplement and for the Poetry Foundation. His debut novel, Personal Days, published in 2008, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction.

  Excerpted from the foreword to The New World: Comics from Mauretania, by Chris Reynolds, published today by New York Review Comics. Copyright © 2018 by Ed Park. Courtesy of New York Review Comics.

• Broken Frontier
  http://www.brokenfrontier.com/new-world-comics-mauretania-chris-reynolds-new-york-review-comics/
  Word count: 1014

  The New World: Comics from Mauretania – A Welcome Return to the Compelling and Mysterious World of Chris Reynolds

  by Tom Murphy
  May 4, 2018

  New World: Tales from Mauretania by Chris Reynolds (New York Review Comics)

  As recently as the not-actually-that-long-ago pre-internet days, comics were a perilously ephemeral form – especially in the short-run circles of the small press. With no way to keep a comic ‘on tap’, once it was gone, it was gone.

  The world moves on. Serendipitous moments end and creative clusters break up: then as now, artists are forced to put comics aside for work that will pay the bills; people move away, start families, maybe decide that they’ve said all they need to say. And then a new generation of hip young pen-slingers steps in to declare Year Zero.

  New World: Comics from Mauretania by Chris Reynolds (New York Review Books)All of that makes it extraordinarily easy for particular stories, comics or even whole bodies of work to slip out of sight beneath the oily swell of time.

  Something along those lines seemed to have claimed the work of Chris Reynolds. During the late 1980s and early 1990s his utterly distinctive Mauretania Comics was a vital presence in the UK small press boom of the time. He was also part of the graphic novel vanguard, with Penguin publishing his book-length Mauretania (collected in this new volume) in 1990.

  However, as that era’s collection of talent went their separate ways, Chris Reynolds and Mauretania Comics largely dropped out of sight. And as you luxuriate in the contents of The New World, it’s slightly chilling to think that without the intervention of a high-profile champion (Seth wrote a lengthy appreciation of Reynolds for The Comics Journal back in 2005) we might not be talking about the artist and his work today.

  I first became aware of that blossoming small press scene via Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury’s Escape – a magazine that took some of the richest comics talent, both domestic and international, and put it on newsagents’ shelves in a stylish package that could sit comfortably alongside i-D, The Face and Blitz.

  The New World: Tales from Mauretania by Chris Reynolds (New York Review Comics)And it was in Escape that I first came across the work of Chris Reynolds, in an instantly arresting two-pager called ‘The Lighted Cities’ (also collected here). It epitomises much of what we’d expect from a Mauretania comic: the bold, high-contrast graphic style, a sense of timelessness, an air of mystery, a heavy emphasis on place and a seemingly artless narration that teases as much as it reveals.

  As a film-maker as well as a comics auteur, Reynolds shows a gift for imagery and composition, as well as editing and juxtaposition. There’s a lovely flow to his visual sequences. Particularly in shorter pieces like ‘Our Town’, his images are often like a series of beautifully compact little still lives, capturing within their thick black borders a sense of frozen time.

  ‘The Dial’, The 38-pager that opens this collection,uses its broader canvas to expand on some of these elements, while also unfolding with the asphyxiating logic of an anxiety dream. Returning from war, the protagonist, Reg, finds his home unexpectedly deserted.

  The New World: Tales from Mauretania by Chris Reynolds (New York Review Comics)As he delves into his family photo albums he notices details and presences that had eluded him before. Cryptic sci-fi elements gradually reveal themselves, and before long outside forces start to close in on him in an increasingly nightmarish way. The story’s conclusion takes it in another unexpected direction, which sheds new light on what we’ve seen and asks another big question about Reg’s return.

  Themes recur across the collected stories like musical melodies. While one story explicitly references time travel, revisiting the past is a frequent concern, through either journeys to familiar haunts or the altogether less reliable medium of memory. In a lot of the stories time seems to have stood still; the cafe in ‘Monitor’s Human Reward’ appears to exist in a bubble of stasis, like a relic from the austere post-war world which seems to form the core of Reynolds’ aesthetic. The dreamlike developments of ‘The Dial’ continue here; memories are suddenly activated, but reality fails to match Monitor’s, um, precollections.

  The New World: Tales from Mauretania by Chris Reynolds (New York Review Comics)As Seth identifies in his afterword, there can be a danger in going back to something you loved years or even decades ago – especially in pop culture. I didn’t get where I am today by shying away from an overcooked and pretentious reference, so here’s Heraclitus: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

  However, in that gap, the potential for insight emerges – particularly in Reynolds’ work, with its frequent concern with revisiting the past. In fact, coming back to the work after an absence leaves the reader like the revenant Reg with his photos in ‘The Dial’, picking out details and significance that weren’t apparent at first sight.

  A few commentators raised their eyebrows at the prominent credit given to Seth for his design work on this volume, but he has produced a lovely object. We should be grateful to him and the sharp curatorial minds at New York Review Comics for reaching into the past and giving a new generation the opportunity to discover one of comics’ most intriguing bodies of work.

  Above all, we should seize with both hands the opportunity to slip back across the border into the compelling world of Chris Reynolds.

  Chris Reynolds (W/A) • New York Review Comics, $34.95

  Review by Tom Murphy

  Tags: chris reynoldsmauretanianew worldnew york review comics

• Comics Beat
  http://www.comicsbeat.com/review-making-sense-of-mauretania-in-the-new-world/
  Word count: 1212

  Review: Making sense of Mauretania in ‘The New World’

  04/17/2018 4:59 pm by John Seven

  Subtitled “Comics from Mauretania,” the stories in Chris Reynolds’ The New World don’t take place in the African country of the same name, but in some cryptic landscape never referenced by name in the comics to which the title applies, but which creates a tone that unifies the stories, as well as offers some vague sense of place. Like using Brazil as the title for the movie Brazil.

  Given such an intangible quality to the unifier of the works, it seems a bit obvious for me to proclaim that the opening story, “The Dial,” is dream-like. Of course, it is. In it, we meet Reg, a fellow of little distinction other than walking through his world baffled at where he is headed, literally like the ball in a pinball machine being pivoted in various directions depending upon how it connects with the obstructions built into the device.

  Reg starts out at his parents’ empty home with the purpose of cleaning it out for some reason but is quickly diverted to a long road trip involving a guy named Steve and a mysterious church called the Dial. Reg keeps going over the Dial in his mind even as he is faced with the destruction of his own home, presented as the inevitable result of industriousness and officiousness.

  The story completes itself with Reg going over the same conundrums presented in the story in much the same way as any of us, and with its mysteries fading out presenting the finality of a document that outlines the dissipating mysteries in matter-of-fact form. Want to know what the Dial is? Why the house is empty? It explains that and more, though it doesn’t make anything clear.

  Kind of like the real world, actually — the more information you get, the less stable everything seems.

  The second section in this collection features shorter works, most of them about Monitor, who wears a big motorcycle helmet and visor, a jumpsuit, and a box-like backpack that looks like something an astronaut would wear. Monitor’s motivations are a mystery and his movements even more so.

  The various episodes appear unconnected beyond Monitor’s constant searching and consistent disorientation. He never seems totally comfortable in whatever situation he is in, and they often involve his efforts to decipher a situation or a physical space, frequently giving cryptic clues to events and people in the past.

  Monitor seems to move a lot and jump from job to job. He is a perpetual visitor, an eternal alien.

  But not all the stories are about Monitor. For instance, “Cinema Detectives” offers an incomplete reunion between occasional partners in detection, Inspector Rockwell and Detective Rosa (both of whom appear in further stories) as they collaborate on a case involving missing buildings. The case baffles Rockwell and by the end of the short piece, seems to be destined always to do so. As with any episode in the collection, the story involves a series of details that only hint at the truth behind the world these characters inhabit, though refuse to give you much to work with.

  One of my favorites of this section is “We See Each Other,” which is about Rosa and unfolds like a stress dream. Rosa is waiting for Monitor but he never shows up, and her focus on finding him turns into a cryptic odyssey around the city for Rosa, checking into different places and confronting the people in them, and haranguing people in her life to lend a hand in finding Monitor. It’s obvious that Reynolds has realized a world here, and he is giving us a tour of this world, but he’s letting confusion and tension define the world for us.

  The next story, “Endless Summer Wells,” offers a calmer, but still similarly dream-like tour of a city. Together they remind me of reoccurring dreams that I have, and I’m sure others must, where I drive to the closest mid-western city I can get to, and it’s always the same place, and in the dream I have been to it before, but each dream it appears new to me despite the fact. That’s the feeling that Reynolds captures, that dream-brain logic and vivid reality where several things are true at once, several opposing feelings are felt at the same time, and it’s this sense of place that begins to weave through the stories, uniting them into one fever dream shared.

  The final section of the book offers the 1990 Penguin graphic novel called Mauretania, which spirals around Jimmy, who was introduced in the short story “Whisper in the Shadows,” in which he donned his own Monitor-like helmet as a kid and expressed his desire to be “Monitor II.” By the time this graphic novel rolls around, he may well have achieved his goal. Now all grown and still in the Monitor helmet, Jimmy runs a mysterious company whose business it is to “close down factories that are ‘harmful’ and that sort of thing,” as he explains.

  We find out more about Jimmy and his company — well, sort of — through Susan, who operates kind of like an industrial spy, prodded into finding out more about Jimmy’s business by her new employer, Reynal, who is also pumping her for information about her previous employer. It’s the typical dream journey that we’ve become accustomed to in this volume, with Susan stumbling through a barely comprehensible quest for Jimmy and accumulating information and coming up with conclusions that have no context nor clarity.

  In the end, Jimmy, like Monitor before him, seems to have the context and clarity, a circumstance that hints at a status apart from the other characters inhabiting Mauretania, a privileged place that allows him an overview of the complete picture and the opportunity to transgress the limitations that others must adhere to.

  In this way, it reads much like a fable of our own existence. Few of us have that massive map of the way things all fit together, let alone have an inkling of the subtle meanings behind mundane actions. We are wandering in the dark, and the mechanisms that are in place take care of themselves while we react to the more obvious movements they make. That’s the rhythm of Mauretania too, and Jimmy isn’t going to launch into exposition because none of us would understand it anyhow. It’s enough that someone else sees the mechanisms from an advantageous vantage point. We can’t all put together the pieces that constitute everything.
  John Seven

  Journalist and children’s book writer living in North Adams, Massachusetts. Author of ‘A Rule Is To Break: A Child’s Guide To Anarchy,’ ‘Happy Punks 1-2-3,’ ‘Frankie Liked To Sing,’ and others. My latest children’s books are ‘Gorilla Gardener: How To Help Nature Take Over The World’ and ‘We Say NO: A Child’s Guide To Resistance.’
  Related
  Kibbles 'n' Bits 5/7/18: Return to Mauretania

• Comic Buzz
  http://comicbuzz.com/the-new-world-comics-from-mauretania/
  Word count: 493

  The New World: Comics from Mauretania

  ­­

  Chris Reynolds’s enigmatic and evocative comics are unlike any others. Reynolds has been drawing his self-published comics series Mauretania since the 1980s, building a world full of rolling hills and sleepy villages, strange forces and troubling mysteries. The earth has fallen under the control of alien forces, and his characters can’t escape the turmoil: new religions appear, family photos inexplicably change, businesses suddenly shut down, and vague conspiracies fill everyday life.

  Beautiful, unnerving, and strangely moving, Reynolds’s stories depicted richly in art that Ed Park in his foreword describes as “black and white and black.” This collection, designed and selected by the acclaimed cartoonist Seth, includes a selection of short stories, the novella “The Dial,” and the full-length 1991 Mauretania graphic novel. Presented in an elaborate hardcover with foil stamping, debossing, full-colour endpapers, and extra-thick paper, featuring new scans of the original artwork, this collection finally gives this cult classic its due.

  thenewworldcomicsfrommauretania10

  “Original, well-executed and creative in a way that few comics come close to.”

  —Marc Sobel, author of Brighter Than You Think

  “Imagine Edward Hopper’s paintings and Andrei Tarkovsky’s films transposed to a rural Wales occupied by benign aliens. Yet Reynolds’ visions remain uniquely his own, gently sinister and insinuating.”

  —Comics International

  About the Author:

  Chris Reynolds was born in Wales in 1960 and studied fine art at the North Staffordshire Polytechnic. He has worked as a filmmaker, publicist, and art teacher but now devotes his time to drawing comics. He lives in Poole.

  Seth is the cartoonist behind the comic book series Palookaville, and his comics have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Best American Comics, and McSweeney’s. His illustrations have appeared in numerous publications, including on the covers of The New Yorker, The Walrus, and Canadian Notes & Queries. He is also Lemony Snicket’s partner for the new young-adult series All the Wrong Questions. Seth lives in Guelph, Ontario, with his wife, Tania, and their two cats in an old house he has named Inkwell’s End.

  Ed Park is a founding editor of The Believer and a former editor of the Voice Literary Supplement and for the Poetry Foundation. His debut novel, Personal Days, published in 2008, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications. He lives in New York City.

  thenewworldcomicsfrommauretania08

  The New World: Comics from Mauretania

  By Chris Reynolds

  Designed and edited by Seth, with a foreword by Ed Park

  New York Review Comics

  240 Pages

  Publication Date: 26th April

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-68137-238-9

  £19.99
  Comments

  0 comments

• Bookidote
  https://bookidote.com/2018/05/17/the-new-world-comics-from-mauretania-by-chris-reynolds/
  Word count: 808

  The New World: Comics from Mauretania by Chris Reynolds
  Published May 17, 2018 by Lashaan (Bookidote) in comic book review, Lashaan's Corner
  29 Comments

  thenewworldcoverTitle: The New World: Comics From Mauretania
  Stand-Alone: Yes
  Writer(s): Chris Reynolds
  Illustrator(s): Chris Reynolds
  Editor: Seth
  Publisher: New York Review Comics
  Format: Hardcover
  Paperback Release Date: May 1st 2018
  Pages: 276
  Genre(s): Comics, Science Fiction
  ISBN13: 9781681372389

  This was nothing like anything I’ve ever read before. Released in bits and pieces since the mid-1980s, Chris Reynolds has been teasing readers with fragments of a world that seemed to continuously attempt to come full circle yet also remain fragmented and indecipherable. The cartoonist delivers a truly surreal story that often puts a strange individual with a helmet at the heart of it and successfully draws up a world that seems real at first glance but quickly shows its dream-like facet in the most calm and controlled way possible. Expect the black and white artwork to suck you into a parallel world that is stripped down to dichotomies and ideals, and the dialogue and direction to conjure a billion questions within you that will unfortunately never find answers in the long run.

  Seth, a cartoonist himself, edited this volume and scoured the archives to put together all the artwork that Chris Reynolds ever shared with the world. A lot of the stories are actually short stories that sometimes don’t even exceed a page with nine panels, and often don’t ever show any signs of continuity between each other. Each story also strives for uniform panel size that are sometimes free of dialogue, making it easy to blow through the volume (clueless, most of the time). The main attraction in this collection is however the graphic novel Mauretania that occupies half of the volume and is strategically placed at the end (last half) of the volume. Readers who pick up this edition will thus find themselves in front of a bunch of stories that are extremely difficult to understand, but never meant to be. Just when you think Mauretania will clear up the air and give you exactly what you seek, you’ll find yourself mesmerized by its surreal and puzzling story, and succumb to its spellbinding vision.

  thenewworldquote1

  I would normally try and tell you what the whole graphic novel is about, but I believe The New World actually doesn’t want anyone to be able to achieve such a feat. In fact, Mauretania alludes to a whole rivalry between the unconscious and the rational. You can try as much as you’d like to try and connect the dots. You can try and enjoy the hunt for answers throughout this adventure. You can try and convince yourself that things seem to start to make sense. But I can assure you that by the end of it all, the only feeling you’ll have is a sense of loss. A feeling that gravity isn’t there to ground you anymore and that the artwork is starting to pull you into a dream where life is a mystery that you just can’t solve.

  There’s no lying that this was far different from any typical collection of artwork. It will not please anyone who seek instant gratification. It doesn’t lay out the plans to the whole project and tell you everything that you want to know. Opposite to linear, this is a fragmented tale with recurrent characters and a mysterious world that strives to put forward mankind’s short-sightedness, search for purpose, blindness to detail, tendency to isolation and loneliness, and especially individual and corporate paranoia. As you can see, there’s a huge array of themes hidden within the black and white art, but what you’ll go home with after going through this collection of comics will be personal and probably very different from what anyone else with go understand from it all.

  The New World: Comics from Mauretania is, I believe, a mysterious story that is simply meant to remain a mystery forever.

  THANK YOU TO PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE CANADA FOR SENDING ME A COPY FOR REVIEW!
  MY OVERALL RATING: ★★★☆☆
  Have you read it yet?
  Do you plan to?
  What do you think about The New World?
  Share your thoughts with me!
  Till next time,

  lashaansignature

  Instagram – Facebook – Goodreads – Twitter

  Tags: bookidote, bookworm, cartoon, chris reynolds, comic book, comics from mauretania, review, science fiction, seth, the new world
  Post navigation
  Previous Post Previous post: Green Lantern: Earth One (Vol. 1) by Gabriel Hardman
  Next Post Next post: What To Do When You Feel Lost
  29 comments

• The Herald
  http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts_ents/16197261.graphic-content-chris-reynolds-on-mauretania-comics/
  Word count: 1976

  Graphic Content: Chris Reynolds on Mauretania Comics
  Teddy Jamieson
  (3) View gallery

  There was, believe it or not, more to the 1980s than Thatcher, the New Romantics and shoulder pads. It was also a fine time for Chinese cinema, New York novelists and, let's not forget, British small press comics.

  Growing up alongside the punk and post-punk fanzine culture, British cartoonists began to break away from comic book conventions and explore new areas. Eddie Campbell pioneered the British autobiographical comic in his Alec strips, while the likes of Ed Pinsent reinvented British whimsy with a surrealist twist.

  And then there was Chris Reynolds. In collaboration with Paul Harvey, Reynolds launched the small press magazine Mauretania Comics in the mid-1980s, a black-and-white comic featuring short stories full of aliens and detectives and a character in a helmet called Monitor (or sometimes Jimmy).

  Full of mysteries that were never really resolved, Reynolds's strips for Mauretania had a curious late-afternoon-sun-in-a-bottle atmosphere. What really snagged you was the sense of place and time in the strips, a bittersweet, troubled awareness that life was passing by in front of us.

  Penguin Books published an original Mauretania graphic novel in 1990, but in its wake Reynolds rather disappeared for a while before resurfacing online.

  His work remained largely overlooked, however, until the Canadian cartoonist Seth wrote a love letter to Mauretania Comics in The Comics Journal in 2005. And now, 13 years later, Seth has been instrumental in getting a selection of the Mauretania strips republished, going so far as to design the handsome new hardback edition from New York Review (look out for a review in The Herald Magazine in the coming weeks).

  No better excuse, then, to chat to Reynolds about his past, present and future. So, come with us, now, to Mauretania.

  HeraldScotland:

  Chris, can we start with an introduction? Where are you now? Where have you been? Are you content?

  Well, Teddy, I'm still being mysterious and still doing comics, mostly for sale online these days, although occasionally some get made into properly printed books as we see. I am in Bournemouth. Not content, though. I have been given the gift of non-contentness to help me with my work.

  What is your own history as a reader of comics?

  Almost entirely Batman until about 1985, plus the UK comics of the 1960s and 1970s, plus Harvey Pekar's American Splendor.

  When did you start making them yourself?

  I began doing comics in what you might call a serious and intentional way in 1984, but I was writing text stories about the same characters and situations before that. The material that went into Mauretania Comics began in 1974 when I took my parents' typewriter upstairs and began my never-finished big novel Time Off.

  It was a huge story that contained Monitor and Robert, and looking back on it now, it had the theme of exploring places that is a big part of Mauretania Comics. Then, in the early 1980s I began doing very short stories of about five lines each, about the same kind of subject. So, in 1984, with Paul Harvey, who I had done some experimental comics with, we started "Mauretania" which was an anthology comic in that incarnation.

  What were the influences visually and narratively that fed into Mauretania back in the day?

  Visually, I made it up as I went along. I didn't consciously get the style that I draw from anywhere. A lot of it came from experiments with Super-8 films and trying to get a 3d effect on those by using thick black outlines for the screen and having a second screen with a big hole in the middle a few inches in front of the main screen.

  Did you know what you were trying to do from the beginning or was it a case of finding your feet as you went along?

  I didn't know what I was doing and I still don't. It took Seth's appreciation of Mauretania Comics in The Comics Journal to point out to me what was going on. It caused me to panic a bit, as I hadn't realised how I was coming across, and then I didn't know whether then to carry on in the same way or to try to react against what he'd seen in the stories. It was a big thing for me to be given that insight.

  Time and place seem central to the strips. Discuss?

  I did these strips originally because I wanted to preserve, to trap, to maintain, to transmit, certain very happy but elusive feelings I had about my favourite places, places that I dreamed about, and places in books. I made the attempt to capture those times and places in comics. I was not 100% successful of course, but then no art is. But I did end up in some interesting places along the way.

  I remember reading Mauretania back in the eighties and seeing it as quite political in some way I couldn't quite articulate. A kind of retreat, maybe, from the Thatcherite present. Is that something you'd even recognise?

  Could be a retreat, but more an invitation to a different way of thinking ... Yes, actually, it is a retreat. I get so fed-up with that stuff. I still get very wound up about it and I don't like it. (My friend Michael from South Africa who has come to live in the UK calmed me down though. "This place is like heaven," he says.)

  Which leads to the question, what is the most unlikely reading other people have projected onto Mauretania?

  This is it - that's what I had in mind - the readers bring their own drinks to join in the party - the reader supplies half the story from what they bring to it. But there are not many different interpretations. A couple of reviews of the story The Dial contained various ideas about there being a split in the story where "the dream" began, but otherwise people seem pretty consistent about what the stories mean to them.

  Mauretania arrived at a very fertile time for the British small press. Did you feel part of a community?

  I didn't at the time, but, looking back on it, we had a lot of support and probably didn't appreciate it enough. Paul Harvey and I would still have done Mauretania Comics without the help of Escape and Fast Fiction, but with their help it was wonderful.

  After the Penguin graphic novel you seemed to disappear. Did you just decide to take a different path?

  What happened was that Titan Distributors were taken over by Diamond, and they didn't want to continue distribution of Mauretania Comics which meant that it wasn't financially viable anymore and so we had to stop. We switched to doing exhibitions of artwork but they're impermanent of course. This went on for a couple of years. Then I got enough money together to make the Mauretania Comics film, Hunters of The Sun (five-minute version available on YouTube! Films are a worse form of expression than comics - far worse).

  And then I was away from comics doing other stuff, not creative things, living. Just occasional experimental ones like Jenny in Stringtown, and a some of commissions. I even did some "Manga" for a Japanese publisher in those days. Not seen here, of course.

  When did online comics begin to interest you?

  It was when Kindle started up. In about 2008, I thought, I'll go for it with comics again.

  What do you make of Seth's design for the new collection? Do you feel like he is a kindred spirit? Did you ever imagine you'd make it into hardback?

  Seth has done a wonderful job both in the stories he's selected to run and in his design. It makes a really strong package and he's put these comics together in a better way than I could have imagined. He's seeing the structure behind it of course, in the way that I don't. He has to be a kindred spirit. There's such an aura of friendliness about what he's done. I thought I would make it into hardback one day, but I'd accepted that it might be after I was dead.

  How does it feel to revisit these 30-year-old strips? What do you make of the younger you?

  Younger me was a very sensitive chap. I couldn't re-do these stories now though. I've become a lot lighter in my personality, more personally confident, fewer rough edges.

  Is Mauretania still a place you enjoy visiting? How has it changed?

  It's still there. I still get the dreams. Except that now, part way through the dream I think, "Oh yeah, this is the one I wrote that story about ..."

  What are you working on now?

  I've split off Ken Prime from the Cinema Detectives and he now lives in Aberystwyth and is Ken Prime - Psychic Detective! You see, there's no plan. I'm just going forward into what I think might be interesting. It's a six-pager.

  Who are your own favourite cartoonists?

  Gary Dumm and the other American Splendor artists. All the Batman artists from the 1960s, all the artists from the British comics of the 1960s. I like anyone though. I like painters. My friend George sometimes lets me watch him paint.

  Complete the following sentence. The great thing about the comic strip is ...

  That they are a unique form of expression which takes no money, equipment, or obligations. The pictures will tie everything together for the reader and so you can be free ...

  The New World: Comics From Mauretania, by Chris Reynolds, is published by New York Review Comics, priced £24.99.

  Most popular
  Most commented

  1 Iain Macwhirter: The SNP’s legendary party unity could be finally about to crack
  2 Alba no more. Skye no more. Loch Lomond no more. Runrig say farewell
  3 A man's last hours, played out on social media
  4 Edinburgh orders removal of Princes St black-out fence
  5 Caravan park up for sale at £1.2m-plus
  6 Muslim women launch equality campaign amid claims of 'crisis' at Scottish mosques
  7 How cheap and flammable insulation may have rapidly spread the Glasgow art school fire
  8 Residents unimpressed with Sturgeon's Govanhill defence
  9 Agent says Dedryck Boyata 'won't risk future' by playing for Celtic
  10 Kevin McKenna: British establishment will use dirty tricks to stop independence
  11 Alan Stubbs: Steven Gerrard will soon learn who to take advice from at Ibrox
  12 Steven Gerrard pleased with Lee Wallace's progress on the road to recovery at Rangers
  13 Obituary - Donald Joseph 'DJ' Peteranna, builder and businessman
  14 Sunday Herald View: The wall of silence over the art gallery school fire must be destroyed
  15 BBC Switch Off campaign goes viral - but is the publicly funded broadcaster really biased?
  16 Family of two brothers found dead after a night out reveal drugs fears
  17 Fresh call for Salmond to quit Kremlin TV channel
  18 Celtic striker Moussa Dembele gives Brendan Rodgers a timely boost ahead of AEK Athens game
  19 Tourism boss: Glasgow's streets could host cross-country skiing
  20 Ex-footballer calls Rangers fans 'm**gs' after spat over son Josh Windass's Ibrox departure

  Read more

  Get involved with the news in your community
  Send your stories and photos now

Word Count