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.

Preview

chrysanthemums on the left, woman and a man embracing on the right

a man staring, man holding a woman as she falls apart, a woman gazing at a dress, a clock nearing 10am

Blurbs

Feel the loudness of splatter and smudge. It howls and simmers. It is a pleasure to feel these images, you don’t read them, you feel them. Gaze into the dark pool, the surface of a well of subconscious, like a crystal ball, shadows of dream and memory cast onto the page with brooding inkiness and deep texture. Multiple styles of drawing here but all of them simmering with emotion. Magical feats of comics communication within these stories, beautiful tricks of mark making expressing what cannot be said.
I really love this book, very much.
— Lale Westvind

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

Reviews

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

Events

✍ Debuts at CXC (Cartoon Crossroads Columbus), 2024

✍ 6/14-7/3/2024 Drawing Worlds: The Art of Comics and Beyond

✍ 4/2/2024 artist Zoom talk for Lale Westvind's Print Class at Parsons School of Design, New York, NY

✍ 3/12/20 Now #8 Fantagraphics reading/signing with Amy Lockeart, Quimby's, Chicago, IL

✍ 10/1/16 reading/slide show presentation of The Shirley Jackson Project, Boneshaker Books, Minneapolis, MN

Trailer

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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