Something to look forward to later in the year from indie and alt comics crew Floating World Comics when noir horror Forbidden Surgeries of the Hideous Dr. Divinus, the debut graphic novel from film director S. Craig Zahler arrives in stores. We have a preview today at Broken Frontier which runs with the project press release below.
During his forty-fifth year of life, “A singular voice in cinema,” (Movies in Focus) and “One of genre’s most exciting filmmakers” (Indiewire) decided to make a comic book.
After the release of three startling, award-winning movies that have played around the world, S. Craig Zahler wanted to return to his first artistic passion— illustration. With tools that he had developed as a director, screenwriter, cinematographer, novelist, and songwriter, he committed himself to writing, drawing, inking, and lettering his graphic novel debut, a full-length work entitled, Forbidden Surgeries of the Hideous Dr. Divinus.
This sprawling tale of noir horror begins in the coastal city of New Bastion. Homeless people are disappearing from the streets, and occasionally, a dismantled corpse turns up in a dumpster. These crimes are left alone, until the day a comatose woman named Lillian Driscoll is kidnapped from the hospital. Her brothers—a grumpy detective named Leo and a slick mobster named Tommy— seek answers that lead them to darkness, arcane medicine, and pain.
Fans of Bone Tomahawk (recently named best film of the decade by Conan O’Brien) will enjoy Zahler’s return to the supernatural, and the idiosyncratic, tough guy dialogue found in his crime pictures Dragged Across Concrete and Brawl in Cell Block 99 (both of which premiered at the Venice Film Festival) is also present in this starkly rendered, black-and-white graphic novel, a stylistic confluence of pre-code horror, vintage comic strip, and modern indie art styles.
October 2020
7″ x 10″, 104 pp
Written & Illustrated by S. Craig Zahler
US $15.95 | CAN $20.99
9781942801054
Published by Floating World Comics
Distributed to the book trade by Consortium Books Sales
Now available for Pre-order
“With DR. DIVINUS, Zahler arrives as a cartoonist fully formed. It’s as if he’s been doing this for twenty years. But it’s only with this graphic novel, his first, that Zahler has turned his considerable creative talents toward comics. As a medium, comics should feel blessed.”
–Benjamin Marra (Terror Assaulter, Night Business)
“IT’S INSANE. I love it.”
-Tim Seeley (Hack/Slash, Grayson)
“Zahler conjures the spirit of EC and weird visionary outlier comics but with way more story structure and momentum than those comics ever have. Comics is lucky to have his contribution to our medium!”
–Dash Shaw (Bodyworld, Bottomless Belly Button)
“S. Craig Zahler brings the same furious energy to his first graphic novel that he does to his music, movies and novels. Forbidden Surgeries of The Hideous Dr. Divinus is a deliberately paced weird horror story with punctuations of cruelty and uncomfortable hilarity.”
–Josh Simmons (The Furry Trap, Black River)
“Zahler has produced something otherworldly … with hints of those classic 80’s underground B&W outlaw comics that we all love so much. This is something different and unexpected and I would highly recommend it!
–Jim Mahfood (Grrl Scouts, Tank Girl, Into The Spider-Verse)
