Broken Frontier

Myriad Editions have announced the publication of Aneurin (Nye) Wright’s OGN THINGS TO DO IN A RETIREMENT HOME TRAILER PARK when you’re 29 and unemployed…on the 16th February 2012 priced £24.99 in hardback and £19.99 as a paperback.

Nye Wright’s tour-de-force, seven years in the making, is a graphic novel about a young man taking care of and coming to terms with his dying father in the final months of his life. The protagonist is a minotaur, and his father a  rhinoceros, in the superbly-drawn world of a trailer park where social workers are sea turtles and mobile homes move atop elephants. This is a universal tale of love and loss told in a wholly original way.

When his father, Neil, phones Nye to wish him a happy birthday, and tells him that he has been ‘certified for hospice’, we see Nye sit down on the nearest doorstep in shock, while carrying on the conversation as normal. Wright’s mastery of the graphic form allows the reader to witness the deepest emotions on many levels, where what is said is only half the story. The graphic vocabulary, in a palette of blue, red and black, is carefully planned. Flights of visual fancy express genuine emotion rooted in reality.

Unemployment allows Nye to take on Neil’s care, joining him in the trailer park where he lives, separated from Nye’s mother. Wright draws a moving portrait of this cussed personality, a former architect of Idaho housing estates. Neighbours are curious, but keep to themselves, as the medical and social care workers, whether man or beast, become their friends, and the family comes together once more. As Neil’s emphysema gets worse, his shortness of breath becomes more evident, until his speech balloons, previously charged with pithy comment, are mostly filled with pauses.

The book will be published simultaneously in paperback and as a hardback collector’s edition of 500, numbered and signed by the author. It confirms Wright’s place as a major comics artist.