Raw Sewage Science Fiction

By Marc Bell. Published by Drawn & Quarterly. 

Hardcover, 336 pages, Colour, 2024

The great fine art doodler returns

Canadian treasure Marc Bell returns with another gorgeous, confounding comic that redefines how an art book can tell a story and how a graphic novel can be an object first and story second. His internal monologue leaks out like static from a radio and informs the external; he’s tying up loose ends; he’s finishing long-paused sentences.

Raw Sewage Science Fiction is about making art and understanding the results as autobiography. The process is a series of indignities, bubble wrapped frames, unpaid invoices, art lost through neglect or in the mail. Bell uses autofiction, collage, straight comix, tight cross hatching, loose doodling, repurposed in-flight magazines, envelopes, grocery lists, and snatches of late night CBC radio to examine a lost decade as he wanders from coast to coast.

In a century, these will be our illuminated manuscripts, our sacred texts, our guides to life for now they are simply the truth—the irritating, confounding, glorious truth.

“[Bell] charges full speed ahead toward a strange land of hallucinations and absurdity. [Readers] will howl at his relentlessly ingenious words and images.” —The Miami Herald

“There's a fuzzy line between comics and fine art, and Marc Bell is determined to doodle all around it . . . [with] his absurdist tableaux.” —The Globe and Mail