Haunted

A surprising, wry, and deeply moving reflection on despair and the way back out

Ten years after finishing the original French edition of Maybe Later-the book in which the French superstar cartooning duo Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian worked separately for the first time-Dupuy set out on his own again with Haunted. Gone are the tightly constructed narratives and urbane, elegant graphics of his projects with Berberian. In their place, roughed-in drawings give an urgent, spontaneous feeling to a series of hallucinatory stories and dreamlike sequences that register the raw distress of solitude and self-doubt-the dark core of the material held in balance by Dupuy''s acid humor and lyrical sensibility.

A jogging Dupuy runs around and sometimes through the stories of the misfit characters that haunt him: a self-amputating dog, a Left Bank artist in search of emptiness, an art-collecting duck, Lucha Libre wrestlers, and a group of single guys at the