Arsene Schrauwen

In 1947, the author's grandfather, , traveled across the ocean to a mysterious, dangerous jungle colony at the behest of his cousin. Together they would build something deemed impossible: a modern utopia in the wilderness -- but not before Arsene falls in love with his cousin's wife, Marieke. Whether delirious from love or a fever-inducing jungle virus, Arsene's loosening grip on reality is mirrored by the graphic novel reader's uncertainty of what is imagined or real by Arsene. This first full-length graphic novel from the critically-acclaimed Olivier Schrauwen is an engrossing, sometimes funny, slightly surreal and often beautiful narrative.

"This book is great and weird and frustrating and beautiful..." Tom Spurgeon

"I've found estimations like 'Roy Andersson remaking as an X-rated children's comic' to be personally useful in conveying the unique tone of this Olivier Schrauwen original ... I readily urge you deeper into this fascinating and disquieting experience." The Comics Reporter

"Ollie Schrauwen's new graphic novel , from Fantagraphics, is rich and fantastical, yet at the same time resolutely physical and sensual. It is a comic that provides much more than a story; reading it is an experience." Joe McCulloch The Comics Journal

"Occasionally, a creator kicks the comics-medium football not only over the goalposts but into another stadium entirely. Schrauwen's off-the-wall ode to his grandfather's life, love, and virus-induced mental walkabout -- rendered in burnt orange and cornflower blue -- is artistically simple but deeply symbolic. The whole book has the hallucinatory feel of a curious found item that inspires an uncanny anxiousness." The Comics Journal

"... reads like Conrad by way of Kafka, as drawn in pen and ink by the douanier Rousseau. Cockeyed, adventurous, and truly bizarre... Schrauwen's portrait of the impulse towards empire may not be rooted in actual history, but it does loopy justice to the garish and arrogant irrationality of the whole colonial enterprise." John DiBello Publishers Weekly

"... is one of the most complex, and simply best, comics released this year. ...[It] uses simplified drawings, collage-like text and two colors (red and blue) to convey a narrative that moves between the real and the fantastic with grace and facility. The result is an experience both utterly original and strangely familiar, like a dream." Sean Rogers The Globe and Mail

"In this crackpot graphic novel from the historically minded and utterly original Schrauwen, the Belgian cartoonist imagines a fanciful history that slips the bonds of reality almost immediately. ... The author's obsessions with infestation, death, mutation, and genitalia, scroll in a continuous waking dream set amid a Magritte-Dali landscape. []" Hillary Brown Paste

"One of the very best graphic novels of the decade." Dan Nadel

"The book is flat-out one of the most complex and interesting--visually, thematically, conceptually--comics of the last few years.... The Belgian cartoonist is the embodiment of the idea that cartooning is writing with pictures, and with

Utopia comes with a price in this European cartoonist's graphic novel debut inspired by his mid-century colonialist grandfather.

Finalist, 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize - Graphic Novel/Comics

Olivier Schrauwen was born in Belgium in 1977 and studied animation at the Academy of Art in Gent, and comics at the Saint Luc in Brussels. He currently lives in Berlin.