Unreal City is D.J. Bryant's first solo book (that we are aware of).  Some Copacetic customers will be familiar with the second story in this collection, as it originally appeared in MOME #19.  This 21 page story, "Evelyn Dalton-Hoyt", is his brutally brilliant re-envisionment of "Driven to Destruction" by Steve Ditko (which, for all you comics collectors and scholars out there, is in the February 1972 [V.2#4] issue of Haunted, from Charlton), in which an explicit (very) sexual subtext for the characters is supplied by Bryant's vivid imagination and conveyed through his high octane pencilling and inking, the combination of which may generate a vertiginous reeling in the reader (especially if they are a Ditko fan) by the time they reach the last page.  The same could be said, to varying degrees, about every other story in this crisply printed, oversize (and budget priced), 100 page hardcover collection.  Four of the five stories collected here are in the sharply inked, black & white style which readers of "Evelyn Dalton-Hoyt" will immediately recognize – somewhere between Dan Clowes and Tim Lane (to keep things in a Fantagraphics frame of reference) –  with the sole standout being "The Yellowknife Retrospective," which is rendered in a more minimal, color cartoon style that tilts a bit (but only a bit) in the direction of Tim Hensley's Wally Gropius comics in its reduced line weight and reliance on color for representing spatial relations.  The stories all share an inside-out / outside-in / through-the-looking-glass narrative style that has something in common with Paul Auster's novels (at least the earlier ones), albeit more highly sexualized.  And, yes, there are some quite explicit depictions of human sexual behavior that appear in these pages, and, yes, these depictions represent "the male gaze", but they appear to do so consciously, and in the context of critique (at least to some extent; there is clearly a compulsive component to these depictions, as well). These ways of seeing are linked narratively to mental instability and breakdown, suggesting an inherent danger to looking in this direction; to seeing in this way.  A danger that Bryant has himself perhaps experienced, and so knows all too well... 

Now close to, or actually, out of print.  We have just a few left in stock...