Wholesale Chrysanthemum Under the Waves

Read my wholesale terms here if you have any questions. Thank you for carrying my books in your shop.

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

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

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

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

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 advanced copies at CXC (Cartoon Crossroads Columbus), 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

🖤