FANTAGRAPHICS AT 50! At the beginning of our celebration of 50 years of Fantagraphics at Broken Frontier this past month we interviewed Jesse Moynihan about his epic saga Forming. Jesse said then that the main themes of the book “revolve around the search for truth, enlightenment, hate, selfishness, compassion, love and making art through one’s life.” Forming was originally published as a webcomic and, after around a decade and a half of creation, will be published in the Autumn by Fantagraphics in a 448-page collection. We’re delighted to be able to revisit the book again this month with another selection of preview pages, exclusive to Broken Frontier…
FORMING
by Jesse Moynihan
Forming is an eon-spanning, psychedelic, metaphysical, mystical, and epic work of modern mythology and comedy.
In Forming, Jesse Moynihan takes 50,000 years of socio-religious postulation and throws it in the blender to create one epic—and irreverent—battle royale between alien gods, Ancient Greek Titans, interplanetary assassin droids, and humanity itself. Originally begun in 2009 and garnering hundreds of thousands of followers online, Jesse Moynihan’s acclaimed Magnum Opus was never completed — until now!
Spanning Atlantis, 10,000 BC, across eons and galaxies, religions and myths, humanity emerges from the primordial soup, only to be exploited for its labor by an alien super-being, leading to wars and forces between the likes we could hardly comprehend if not given life before our very eyes via Moynihan’s breathtaking and hand-painted
gouache, ink, and airbrushed pages. Forming heralds the birth of civilization and maps out the genesis of life, mass, time, and space, followed by the raging war that ensues in the universe’s years of adolescence and beyond, as the final fate of the universe unfolds. Moynihan’s epic collision course of gods and mutants, philosophy and hilarity, mythology and psychedelia are an instant classic of cosmic comic book world building on par with Kirby and Moebius.
Fantagraphics at 50 Month runs through August at Broken Frontier. You can see articles as they’re published in one tagged list here.
