Comic Art Museum - Brussels

Is there anyone out there who has never tried to guess what stories lurk behind the walls of houses and behind office windows, those urban silhouettes that come and go in a setting of which we ourselves form part? Greg Shaw has translated this idea into a concept. By reinventing the rules of the comic strip, he builds an original story in which the reader’s eyes become the camera, flitting from one point to another in the landscape, in search of the sequel to a story which he is increasingly drawn into as a witness.
Jean Auquier, Belgian Comic Centre [Centre Belge de la BD].


Murders, tensions and a settling of scores… the story of this highly unusual comic book stretches over an incredible journey of 140 pages based around one single image: the gigantic one on the cover page! From this one fixed image – an imaginary city which could be New York, Toronto or Hong-Kong – the author, making constant use of the zoom effect, forces the reader to participate, very much like an immobile voyeur from a window overlooking a courtyard, in several interchanging and mutually shocking stories. The reader becomes dazed, starts wandering, loses track of the personalities, and then finds them again, and observes each life with an element of surprise, disdain, empathy... One could list the graphical inventions, the enchantment created by the illustrations/scenes, the precision and the beauty of the production, the attention paid to the harmonies of colour… Allow yourselves to be simply blown away by the visual style of Greg Shaw!

The Author

Greg Shaw, born in Ghent (Belgium) in 1979, studied comic art at the Académie des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles. He loves to create atypical stories, often forcing himself to keep to a set of official rules. His first – entirely abstract - comic book Parcours pictural was published in 2005, which plays with the boundaries of what is defined as a comic strip. In 2007, he took part in the 0x10 exhibition in Lausanne to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the publishing house Éditions Atrabile. He has also contributed to the launches of the periodicals Stupre (published by Éditions Warum, Paris) and Eisner (published by Podium uitgeverij, Amsterdam).

www.editions-sarbacane.com