Pachyderme
Written by Frederik Peeters
Illustrated by Frederik Peeters
Translated by Edward Gauvin
Self Made Hero
Release Date: October 1, 2013
Cover Price: $19.95

Pachyderme opens with Carice, a 1950s bourgeois housewife stuck in traffic while on her way to visit her hospitalized husband. When she realizes there was an accident ahead caused by an injured elephant in the middle of the road, she decides to cut across the woods to reach the hospital on foot. and with that, Carice begins a lucid dream, a waking journey filled with alien babies, hogs, Swiss spies, and buried passions.

Pachyderme is a piece of comic literature. Frederik Peeters, who both wrote and illustrated the book, has created a multi-layered narrative. Our protagonist Carice begins this very surreal journey unaware of who she really is. She thinks she knows who she is. She thinks she knows what she wants. But she has buried her true passions, her true callings, amidst the passions of others. She has become what others want her to be.

Hellraisers
Written by Robert Sellers
Illustrated by JAKe
Lettered by Lizzie Kaye
Self Made Hero
Release Date: January 29, 2013
Cover Price: $22.95

Hellraisers takes the basic framework story of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and twists it on its ear, presenting the story in an non-seasonal manner. This absolutely absorbing and unapologetic graphic novel tells the classic tale in a more gritter milieu by way of intertwining the biographies of four of the most rabble rousing drunken playboy European actors of all time – Richard Burton, Oliver Reed, Richard Harris, and Peter O’Toole – and depicts them as sort of ghosts of decadent past (and in O’Toole’s case, right up to the present day) to help mentor and tutor a young everyman who is headed on the same paths that pretty much destroyed the aforementioned men.

The book, written by Robert Sellers and illustrated vividly and wildly in stark black and white by JAKe, is a tense, turgid, infectious, and hard to put down ride through the four men’s lives, a ride that has the top down, without seatbelts, and going an out-of-control 120 miles per hour.