Overview

Drawing upon her own bereavement, renowned comics artist and writer Carol Tyler emerges from a decade long period of grief to create an allegorical masterpiece. During collisions between life and death, estrangement and loss, Carol Tyler turned to her pen to face facts and extract meaning from the oddly sacred experience. Exploring realms metaphorical, half-imagined, and all-too-real, she explored previously uncharted emotional territory for herself and others, in a work that is both painfully intimate and philosophically rich. An artistic advancement nearly forty years into Tyler's comics-making career, The Ephemerata features Tyler's most breathtaking picture making ever — fine, dense brush lines complemented with occasional color washes or highlights — and formally stunning cartooning. Combining art and text in multiple ways — in the traditional comics panel grid, as words-and-illustration, as organically flowing images surrounded by floating text — she depicts the inner monologue of a fallible human being grappling with questions of profound relevance. Tyler's memoirist skills also rise to the fore, excavating and colliding scenes from her history, delineating with sensitive intuition ways in which the inevitability of grief is built into our lives and our loves. To struggle in the face of loss is a universal experience. To turn it into this compassionate, deep and beautiful book takes a true artist. Full-color illustrations throughout

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Table of Contents

Reviews

Detailed and often dreamlike, Tyler's pen and ink illustrations are punctuated with occasional, muted washes of color. In Tyler's capable hands, grief is not exactly beautiful, but it is specific and transformative.-- ""Publishers Weekly, Starred Review"" This is everything you'd expect from Tyler and more; I'd certainly rank it as the best single piece from her that I've ever read.-- ""Kleefeld On Comics"" Carol Tyler is a crucial voice for the medium. Poetic, her work is ornamented with detail, yet not flowery. Carol is neither sensationalistic or sentimental, yet she documents all the clumsiness of human existence with incredible grace.--Craig Thompson (author of Blankets and Habibi) Carol Tyler's work stands out for its thoughtfulness, energy and bite. She is a great storyteller with an ethereally expressive drawing style that enables her to convey emotion and personality with aching resonance, and she understands people with an acuity that is tender, wise and devastating.--Jim Woodring (author of Weathercraft and One Beautiful Spring Day) The verdant richness and humanity of her whole body of work has raised her in my mind to one of the handful of true greats of the original 'underground' generation.--Chris Ware (author of Building Stories)

Tyler has written and illustrated one of the more relatable creative works about grief and loss and what lies in the aftermath for the living left behind. She explores her real-life losses through artistic metaphor, that while fantastical, are also deeply relatable.-- ""Cinema Sentries"" Carol Tyler is an artist of sadness, artistically calculated remorse, and a distinct curiosity about the whole train of human experience too often neglected in comic arts.-- ""Comics Grinder"" Carol Tyler has long been a jewel in the cartooning firmament as one of the premiere practitioners of the auto-bio comix story.-- ""Dying Is Easy, Comics Are Hard"" The Ephemerata is a profound, honest, and essential reading for anyone seeking a new and compassionate language to understand the universal, and at the same time deeply intimate, experience of sorrow.-- ""RetroFuturista"" It's one of the most intriguing things I've read this year. Part journal, part poetry, part memoir. It kind of straddles all over the place. I would definitely call it hauntingly beautiful-- ""Graphic Policy"" Of course Tyler finds refuge in a giant version of her great-grandmother Theola's mourning bonnet. Of course all over the landscape there are surrealist not-quite-trees poking up at the sky. Of course these things are explained by the locals of ""Griefville"" in ways that enthusiastically refuse to make sense. As is often the case at a funeral, the going is rough but the company is good.-- ""New York Times"" Tyler invites readers to accept the inevitability of grief as a cost of a life well lived and well loved. In weaving more than a decade's worth of grief-causing and grief-informed events together, she offers readers a glimpse of the myriad ways grief can come to encompass every waking or dreaming moment and persuades that we must all find ways to live within it.-- ""Booklist"" Detailed and often dreamlike...In Tyler's capable hands, grief is not exactly beautiful, but it is specific and transformative.-- ""Publishers Weekly, Starred Review"" This is everything you'd expect from Tyler and more; I'd certainly rank it as the best single piece from her that I've ever read.-- ""Kleefeld On Comics"" Carol Tyler is a crucial voice for the medium. Poetic, her work is ornamented with detail, yet not flowery. Carol is neither sensationalistic or sentimental, yet she documents all the clumsiness of human existence with incredible grace.--Craig Thompson (author of Blankets and Habibi) Carol Tyler's work stands out for its thoughtfulness, energy and bite. She is a great storyteller with an ethereally expressive drawing style that enables her to convey emotion and personality with aching resonance, and she understands people with an acuity that is tender, wise and devastating.--Jim Woodring (author of Weathercraft and One Beautiful Spring Day) The verdant richness and humanity of her whole body of work has raised her in my mind to one of the handful of true greats of the original 'underground' generation.--Chris Ware (author of Building Stories) Misery memoirs have 21st century ubiquity, but The Ephemerata is a large cut above such button-pushing. Tyler's observational intelligence, artistic innovation, emotional honesty and sheer talent make this a heavyweight graphic novel that needs to be taken seriously come awards season.-- ""Slings & Arrows Graphic Novel Guide"" The stories in The Ephemerata bleed into one another as do the visuals. As the traditional comics grid shifts into illustration and back again, Tyler bridges the gap between the pain of everyday living and the grief of dying.-- ""Book and Film Globe"" Carol Tyler's graphic memoir, The Ephemerata: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of Grief, is a stunning exploration of grief and loss, using a plethora of artistic techniques that stretches the boundaries of the medium.-- ""Conskipper""

Detailed and often dreamlike...In Tyler's capable hands, grief is not exactly beautiful, but it is specific and transformative.-- ""Publishers Weekly, Starred Review"" This is everything you'd expect from Tyler and more; I'd certainly rank it as the best single piece from her that I've ever read.-- ""Kleefeld On Comics"" Carol Tyler is a crucial voice for the medium. Poetic, her work is ornamented with detail, yet not flowery. Carol is neither sensationalistic or sentimental, yet she documents all the clumsiness of human existence with incredible grace.--Craig Thompson (author of Blankets and Habibi) Carol Tyler's work stands out for its thoughtfulness, energy and bite. She is a great storyteller with an ethereally expressive drawing style that enables her to convey emotion and personality with aching resonance, and she understands people with an acuity that is tender, wise and devastating.--Jim Woodring (author of Weathercraft and One Beautiful Spring Day) The verdant richness and humanity of her whole body of work has raised her in my mind to one of the handful of true greats of the original 'underground' generation.--Chris Ware (author of Building Stories)

Detailed and often dreamlike...In Tyler's capable hands, grief is not exactly beautiful, but it is specific and transformative.-- ""Publishers Weekly, Starred Review"" This is everything you'd expect from Tyler and more; I'd certainly rank it as the best single piece from her that I've ever read.-- ""Kleefeld On Comics"" Carol Tyler is a crucial voice for the medium. Poetic, her work is ornamented with detail, yet not flowery. Carol is neither sensationalistic or sentimental, yet she documents all the clumsiness of human existence with incredible grace.--Craig Thompson (author of Blankets and Habibi) Carol Tyler's work stands out for its thoughtfulness, energy and bite. She is a great storyteller with an ethereally expressive drawing style that enables her to convey emotion and personality with aching resonance, and she understands people with an acuity that is tender, wise and devastating.--Jim Woodring (author of Weathercraft and One Beautiful Spring Day) The verdant richness and humanity of her whole body of work has raised her in my mind to one of the handful of true greats of the original 'underground' generation.--Chris Ware (author of Building Stories) Carol Tyler's graphic memoir, The Ephemerata: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of Grief, is a stunning exploration of grief and loss, using a plethora of artistic techniques that stretches the boundaries of the medium.-- ""Conskipper""

Carol Tyler is a crucial voice for the medium. Poetic, her work is ornamented with detail, yet not flowery. Carol is neither sensationalistic or sentimental, yet she documents all the clumsiness of human existence with incredible grace.--Craig Thompson (author of Blankets and Habibi) Carol Tyler's work stands out for its thoughtfulness, energy and bite. She is a great storyteller with an ethereally expressive drawing style that enables her to convey emotion and personality with aching resonance, and she understands people with an acuity that is tender, wise and devastating.--Jim Woodring (author of Weathercraft and One Beautiful Spring Day) The verdant richness and humanity of her whole body of work has raised her in my mind to one of the handful of true greats of the original 'underground' generation.--Chris Ware (author of Building Stories)

Carol Tyler is a crucial voice for the medium. Poetic, her work is ornamented with detail, yet not flowery. Carol is neither sensationalistic or sentimental, yet she documents all the clumsiness of human existence with incredible grace.--Craig Thompson (author of Blankets and Habibi) Carol Tyler's work stands out for its thoughtfulness, energy and bite. She is a great storyteller with an ethereally expressive drawing style that enables her to convey emotion and personality with aching resonance, and she understands people with an acuity that is tender, wise and devastating.--Jim Woodring (author of Weathercraft and One Beautiful Spring Day) The verdant richness and humanity of her whole body of work has raised her in my mind to one of the handful of true greats of the original 'underground' generation.--Chris Ware (author of Building Stories) Eisner nominee Carol Tyler returns with The Ephemerata: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of Grief, which documents her journey into a whimsical, disorienting space she calls ""Griefville.""-- ""Publishers Weekly""

Author Information

Born in Chicago in the 1950s, Carol Tyler is a cartoonist who bridged underground and alternative comics with her debut in Weirdo magazine in 1987: collections such as The Job Thing (1993) and Late Bloomer (2005) followed. In 2015, Fantagraphics published Soldier's Heart, her Eisner Award-nominated biography of her father, tracing his return from WWII and how his trauma impacted his family. Fab4 Mania (Fantagraphics, 2018), based on her 1965 diary, is about her teenage obsession with the Beatles. In recent years, she has taught Sequential Art at the University of Cincinnati's College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. She is a CXC Master Cartoonist and a Slate Studio Prize winner. In 2023, Married To Comics, a documentary about Tyler's life with her husband and fellow cartoonist Justin Green (1945–2022), won rave reviews.

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