And unlike Sean Tan's amazingly illustrated silent picture book 'The Arrival', Ott's work never gets bogged down in schmaltz, instead relying on a tough, hard-boiled pulp fiction world where men are either victims or thugs, and every woman is a cold-hearted dame!. While his stuff is mature, it's not pretentious. The art is brilliantly unique and perfectly suits the stories he tells. While Otomo's masterpiece is like a big budget blockbuster in print form, Thomas Ott's graphic novels are like a collection of David Lynch/film noir short films. I haven't been as impressed with a comic artist since Otomo's work on Akira. These are adult picture books that aren't gimmicky or trying to be self-consciously cool: these are almost like mini movies (without the sound and moving pictures element of course!) And he can tell a story without using any words, speech bubbles or written sound effects. This somehow lead me to the artist Thomas Ott and his work's Dead End, The Number, Welcome to Hellville and Cinema Panopticum. Then I discovered another Japanese artist, Tsutsui Tetsuya and his comic called ' Manhole', a horror/detective story that was cinematic in tone. I liked some of the images I saw and read a bit more. There was just something about them that I couldn't relate to in any way. The style of American comics never appealed to me. Only recently I tried to get back 'into' comics/graphics novels. It just seemed like Akira was a fluke of nature, a wonderful piece of work that simply surpassed everything else. Even the creator, Katsuhiro Otomo's other work - Domu, the short story collection Memories - was weak by comparison.

and I wanted more.īut the sad thing was I could never find anything to match it - or even come close to it, for that matter. (Here's a link to read the entire massive manga online for free When I first read it, I was blown away.

Cinema Panopticum by Thomas Ott