The Forest

A gorgeous, ghostly, and silent graphic novella from the modern scratchboard master.The Forest is a graphic novella told via twenty-five singular illustrations, without words, of which only Swiss artist Thomas Ott is capable. A young boy sneaks away from a family funeral and sinks into the forest depths, where he confronts man's greatest fear and must choose his path. Drawing with a technique called scratchboard, where a white surface is covered with a black layer and scratched away, Ott creates images out of negative space to harrowing effect. In Ott's hands, the medium becomes the perfect vessel for his eerie, horror-imbued morality tales. This gorgeous volume will be printed on heavy art paper with Pantone Black ink to best showcase every exquisite detail of Ott's virtuosic talent. Black-and-white illustrations throughout

New York Journal of Books

"The art is mesmerizing ... a series of haunting images that tell a story both fantastical and touchingly human."

Publishers Weekly

"Lovers of classical illustration techniques and eerie art will be drawn to this simple but elegant fable."

Midwest Book Review

"An inherently fascinating and intriguing story told without words in one page of deftly crafted art at a time."

Andy Oliver, Broken Frontier

"A supernatural tale that is chillingly eerie with a level of detail that combines the everyday and the fantastic to morbid effect."

About the Author

Thomas Ott is a Swiss artist born in 1967. He received training as a graphic artist at the Kunstgewerbeschule School of Design in Zürich and has been a freelance comics artist and illustrator since 1987, as well as an animator, musician, and political cartoonist.  His books include The Number 73304-23-4153-6-96-8, Cinema Panopticum, T. Ott's Tales of Error, Dead End, Greetings from Hellville, and R.I.P.: Best of 1985-2004.

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