Chrysanthemum Under the Waves

Summary

Chrysanthemum Under the Waves is a book of mourning from Sound of Snow Falling author, Maggie Umber.
In the nine comics collected here, Umber grieves for the loss of her former self – a wife, a co-founder of a successful publishing company, and a person with good health living in a pre-pandemic world. Over the course of nearly 300 pages, she says goodbye to all she held most dear. In Chrysanthemum Under the Waves, Umber uses the demon lover theme, first as a way to hold on to her past, and finally, as a way to let it go.

Sparse and experimental... made me taste cheap dark rum
— AIPT Comics
A tour-de-force silent interpretation
— Floating World Comics
Elusive but memorable, creepy but restrained
— The Comics Journal
A haunting snapshot of a relationship that juxtaposes moody reality with a merging, melting otherness as the former begins to merge into the latter
— Broken Frontier
Show-stopper
— High-Low
Challenging our idea of what is story in comics [...] maybe it's a more a process of visual association, visual themes, visual latent motifs
— Comics Alternative

i think the style rine is in makes the elements of the house feel organic like its a shipwreck w urn corals & chandelier anemones growing & i love that
— lympho nodge

✍ Debuts at CXC (Cartoon Crossroads Columbus), 2024
✍ 4/2/2024 artist Zoom talk for Lale Westvind's Print Class at Parsons School of Design, New York, NY
✍ 10/1/16 reading/slide show presentation of The Shirley Jackson Project, Boneshaker Books, Minneapolis, MN
✍ 3/12/20 Now #8 Fantagraphics reading/signing with Amy Lockeart, Quimby's, Chicago, IL

Credits: The Tooth by Maggie Umber.
Music: Fantastic Dim Bar by Kevin MacLeod,
Quinn's Song: A New Man by Kevin MacLeod.

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