The Green Hand

By Nicole Claveloux. Published by New York Review Comics.

Softcover, 108 pages, Colour and B&W, 2017 (originally published in the late 1970s)

Nicole Claveloux’s short stories—originally published in the late 1970s and never before collected in English—are among the most beautiful comics ever drawn: whimsical, intoxicating, with the freshness and splendor of dreams. In hallucinatory color or elegant black-and-white, she brings us into lands that are strange but oddly recognizable, filled with murderous grandmothers and lonely city dwellers, bad-tempered vegetables and walls that are surprisingly easy to fall through. In the title story, written with Edith Zha, a new houseplant becomes the first step in an epic journey of self-discovery and a witty fable of modern romance—complete with talking shrubbery, a wised-up genie, and one very depressed bird.

This selection, designed and introduced by Daniel Clowes, presents the full achievement of an unforgettable, unjustly neglected master of French comics.

Darkly humorous, existential, erotic, trance inducing — these comics wield a rare and innovative power....The brilliance of [Claveloux’s] comics lies in what they require of the viewer, to be intimate with what is not known, both within the work and themselves.
—Leopoldine Core, The New York Times

Like a time capsule, these 1970s stories by French cartoonist Claveloux—largely untranslated and unseen in the States until this collection—are a reminder of just how outrageous and imaginative comics could be back in that freewheeling decade.... Claveloux’s exquisitely detailed illustrations reflect such contemporary forces as underground comix artists from Robert Crumb to Victor Moscoso, designer Heinz Edelman, and the Day-Glo colors of psychedelic posters.... Her amalgam, though, is a singularly remarkable trip.
—Booklist

Nicole Claveloux’s comics come across as odd, mind-bending “What If’s.“….The work, certainly, has that air of being created at an inspired moment, with “The Green Hand” in particular presenting as a little-recognized masterpiece.
—The Comics Journal

The artwork...is some of the most beautiful ever created for our lowly form—vivid, dreamlike, with intensely vivid hand-separated colors unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
—Daniel Clowes

Claveloux[’s]...explicitly adult pop-art fantasia delivers emotional insight and imaginative visuals that take the driver’s seat away from the strong logic of the narrative and enjoyably amble readers toward the byways of the subconscious with hauntingly powerful designs and sagacious observation.
—Library Journal, starred review