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

female and male figures in a dark room, in front of a fireplace, with chrysanthemums on the mantel

a woman turned away, putting chrysanthemums into a vase on a fireplace in front of a painting of chrysanthemums

a woman and a man talking at a party in the bathroom

female and male figure arguing in a dark room

boat and text reads: BUT THE SAILS WERE O THE TAFFETI, AND THE MASTS WERE O BEATEN GOLD

a man's face with black circular eyes, woman embracing a man, a woman holding a dress, a clock

a dentist office front desk, a dental chair, a woman getting dental x-rays

back cover, Chrysanthemum Under the Waves

Blurbs

One of our favorite comics of the year so far, Maggie Umber's Chrysanthemum Under the Waves! The book is a stunning collection of nine comics that Maggie created over a six-year period. Dark, haunting imagery and brilliant storytelling!
— Lily & Generoso, Plastic Grapes

Maggie Umber's CHRYSANTHEMUM UNDER THE WAVES (self-published, 2024) is a beguiling comic — deftly flitting between modes and media, sometimes overt, sometimes opaque, always haunted and haunting in equal measure. I don't necessarily understand all of it, but its underlying emotion is smothering.
— Hagai Palevsky, comics critic at The Comics Journal and SOLRAD

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, author of Grip published by Perfectly Acceptable Press

Maggie Umber has one of the most distinctive and unique cartooning styles in comics, and she now presents us with her most ambitious work yet, a (mostly) silent horror themed work.
— Austin English, Domino Books

Maggie Umber's brilliant new graphic novel Chrysanthemum Under The Waves. A raw, moving, at times austere visual journey. Easily one of the Books of the Year.
— Thomas Campbell, Comics Blogger

Gorgeous, ethereal cartooning, painterly and meditative.
— Wig Shop Web Shop

There’s no cartoonist quite like Maggie Umber. It’s been fascinating watching this short story collection come together through her Patreon posts; its final result for me is a beautiful, haunting melody that makes me feel deeply uneasy even though I can’t construe the words sung. A compliment.
— Erik Missio

Reviews

Maggie Umber’s latest graphic novel, “Chrysanthemum Under the Waves,” is a mood.
— Newcity Lit

Umber (Sound of Snow Falling) presents nine unsettling graphic shorts that delve into darkness, grief, and the author's fascination with James Harris, a demonic figure from a 17th-century ballad. The collection eschews a standard comics-style narrative in favor of evoking an eerie and contemplative vibe, through ephemeral black and gray story fragments and portraits.
— Publishers Weekly

It’s an impressionistic and dreamlike collection that takes you into the far fringes of storytelling in a way many artists attempt but few truly succeed.
— Leonard Pierce, The Comics Journal

Somewhere around the 1/3-of-the-way-through mark of these near-300 pages I came to the realization that I wasn't just experiencing a "good" comic, or even a "great" one. I got the distinct impression (confirmed beyond the shadow of a doubt by the time I reached the "title" story, "Chrysanthemum"), that this thing is a bona fide goddamn masterpiece. A groundbreaking and sometimes heartbreaking charting of emotional extremity delivered with near-unparalleled confidence and, dare I say it, grace — except, of course, when it's intentionally NOT graceful. Umber is charting new territory for the EXPRESSIVE possibilities of not only her own work, but for the medium of comics as a whole.
— Ryan C.'s Four Color Apocalypse

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

Somehow Umber manages to make the heaviness of the subject-matter bearable, even beautiful. I don’t know whether there’s really light at the end of this tunnel but she provides just enough illumination to see us through. By letting her images speak, she’s able to say what she wants more eloquently than many books I’ve read.
— Vol. 1 Brooklyn

For someone as young as she appears to be (I met her as I had before at CAKE, the 2024 Chicago Alt Comix expo), I would hesitate to suggest it might be her “life’s work” but I’ll propose that it is that so far for two reasons; 1) this is a deeply personal project, dealing very much with her “life’s work,” at least the work of her life, until now, and 2) it is her most ambitious work, by far. I’ll call it art comics, too, to distinguish it from alt comix, as the painterly image is central here. And it’s most often wordless, or privileging the image. The fact that it involved linking so many separate pieces and many of them wordless, it could be challenging to many readers, for sure. It was for me, but it pays off for the work I invested. I can’t wait to see it in paper next month. It’s tremendous.
— Dave Schaafsma, Professor and Director of English Education at University of Illinois Chicago

This is a collection of stories... but it’s amazingly unified in mood. Many of these seem to reference old movies, or at least how people were dressed back then. They’re all narrative pieces, but (mostly) wordless, and it’s a bit vague what the story actually is — which works wonderfully, really. There’s like a despair emanating from these pages. Excellent work.
— Random Thoughts, The Sky Won't Fall?

Trailer

video and art by Maggie Umber

Events

✍ 10/25/2024 Chrysanthemum Under the Waves Book Release Party, Tangible Books, Chicago, IL

✍ 9/26-9/29/2024 special guest with advanced copies at CXC (Cartoon Crossroads Columbus), plus The Sounds of Silence: Spotlight on Maggie Umber conversation with OSU comics scholar Jared Gardner 2024

✍ 8/9/2024 interview on the hu u no podcast. Click here to listen to the episode. Artist and writer Dmitry Samarov and I talk about Chrysanthemum Under the Waves, self-publishing vs working with a publisher, my history as an cartoonist and why I left 2dcloud.

✍ 6/14-7/3/2024 Drawing Worlds: The Art of Comics and Beyond, A2AC Gallery, Ann Arbor, MI

✍ 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

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