Synopses & Reviews
Abandoned Cars is Tim Lane's first collection of graphic short stories, noirish narratives that are united by their exploration of the great American mythological drama by way of the desperate and haunted characters that populate its pages. Lane's characters exist on the margins of society--alienated, floating in the void between hope and despair, confused but introspective.
The writing is straightforward, the stories mainstream but told in a pulpy idiom with an existential edge, often in the first person, reminiscent of David Goodis's or Jim Thompson's prose, or of films like Pick-Up on South Street or Out of the Past. Visually, Lane's drawing is in a realistic mode, reminiscent of Charles Burns, that heightens the tension in stories that veer between naturalism on the one hand and the comical, nightmarish, and hallucinatory on the other. Here, American culture is a thrift store and the characters are thrift store junkies living among the clutter. It's an America depicted as a subdued and haunted Coney Island, made up of lost characters--boozing, brawling, haplessly shooting themselves in the face, and hopping freight trains in search of Elvis. Abandoned Cars is an impressive debut of a major young American cartoonist.
Review
"It's the modern equivalent of the Raymond Chandler yarns that fill up the more exciting portion of your bookshelf -- a string of police chases and back-alley fist fights with a surprisingly introspective thread running in the background." Mania
Review
"When you put all the pieces together, you don't simply get a story or a group of stories, you get a book that pulls back the curtain on the collective unconscious of a nation. ... Like the myths that it is inspired by, lingers long after reading and grows in stature as you re-live and re-tell it." Chad Derdowski
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"The real comic book event of the summer... breathtaking... The book signals the arrival of a major new voice on the American literary landscape, with or without the illustrations." Print
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"Lane's beautifully crafted pen-and-ink drawing combines a master artist's eye for detail with a predilection for the grotesque to produce a superb blending of unforgettable images and poignant meditation on life's tragic undercurrents." Booklist
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"The spirit of the Beats imbues the debut collection by Tim Lane... The stories are united by their sense of longing and melancholy. ... His pen and ink style, reminiscent of Charles Burns, is extremely detailed and noirishly evocative." Kempt
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"[An] apt literary comparison might be to Raymond Carver... establishes Lane in the first rank of today's emerging comics artists." Step Inside Design
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"The stories take place along a vaguely defined stretch of scenery haunted by the ghosts of Kerouac, Marlon Brando, and Elvis, where visitors can probably hear the distant strains of a Tom Waits song or The Magnetic Fields' playing in the background... Here's one to watch." The Onion A.V. Club
Review
"[I]t reads like the book Jack Kerouac may have written with oh, say, Donald Ray Pollock, populated by characters outrageous and familiar, out of their minds and so far down to earth that they're actually beneath it. And that's not saying anything about the visuals. Tim's gorgeous illustrations are why I bought the damn thing." The Onion A.V. Club
Review
"St. Louisan Tim Lane's , one of 2008's essential comics, has recently been reissued in paperback with two variant covers that vividly recall the lurid pulps of the 1930s." Jedidiah Ayres Hardboiled Wonderland
Review
"[Lane's] excellent, down and out, Beat-inspired tales of post-war/modern day America are unique to the form, and his grappling with what he calls the 'Great American Mythological Drama' yields some of the most literate, stark, and surreal comics I've ever read. [...] Great book." Cliff Froehlich St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Synopsis
Graphic shorts in a Jim Thompson vein. Abandoned Carsis Tim Lane's first collection of graphic short stories, noir-ish narratives that are united by their exploration of the great American mythological drama by way of the desperate and haunted characters that populate its pages. Lane's characters exist on the margins of society--alienated, floating in the void between hope and despair, confused but introspective. Some of them are experiencing the aftermath of an existential car crash--those surreal moments after a car accident, when time slows down and you're trying to determine what just happened and how badly you're hurt. Others have gone off the deep end, or were never anywhere but the deep end. Some are ridiculous, others dignified in their efforts to struggle to make sense of, and cope with, the absurdities, outrages, ghosts, and poisons in their lives.
Synopsis
The acclaimed 2008 debut now in softcover--noirish, existential short comics.
Synopsis
America depicted as a subdued and haunted Coney Island, made up of lost characters'"boozing, brawling, haplessly shooting themselves in the face, and hopping freight trains in search of Elvis. An impressive debut of a major new talent
About the Author
Tim Lane lives in St. Louis, MO.