The Ephemerata Hardcover by Carol Tyler

Product Details

• Publisher: Fantagraphics (2025-10-21)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 232 pages
• ISBN-13: 9798875001437
• Item Weight: 1389.15 grams
• Dimensions: 30.99 x 23.5 x 2.54 cm

Drawing upon her own bereavement, renowned comics artist and writer Carol Tyler emerges from a decade long period of grief to create an allegorical masterpiece.

NPR's Books We Love 2025

LA Times Book Prize for Graphic Novels/Comics 2025 FINALIST

Cartoonist Studio Prize for Long-Form Comics 2026 NOMINEE

During collisions between life and death, estrangement and loss, Carol Tyler turned to her pen to face facts and extract meaning from the oddly sacred experience. Exploring realms metaphorical, half-imagined, and all-too-real, she explored previously uncharted emotional territory for herself and others, in a work that is both painfully intimate and philosophically rich.

An artistic advancement nearly forty years into Tyler’s comics-making career, The Ephemerata features Tyler’s most breathtaking picture making ever — fine, dense brush lines complemented with occasional color washes or highlights — and formally stunning cartooning. Combining art and text in multiple ways — in the traditional comics panel grid, as words-and-illustration, as organically flowing images surrounded by floating text — she depicts the inner monologue of a fallible human being grappling with questions of profound relevance. Tyler’s memoirist skills also rise to the fore, excavating and colliding scenes from her history, delineating with sensitive intuition ways in which the inevitability of grief is built into our lives and our loves. To struggle in the face of loss is a universal experience. To turn it into this compassionate, deep and beautiful book takes a true artist.

About the Author

Born in Chicago in the 1950s, Carol Tyler is a cartoonist who bridged underground and alternative comics with her debut in Weirdo magazine in 1987: collections such as The Job Thing (1993) and Late Bloomer (2005) followed. In 2015, Fantagraphics published Soldier's Heart, her Eisner Award-nominated biography of her father, tracing his return from WWII and how his trauma impacted his family. Fab4 Mania (Fantagraphics, 2018), based on her 1965 diary, is about her teenage obsession with the Beatles. In recent years, she has taught Sequential Art at the University of Cincinnati's College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. She is a CXC Master Cartoonist and a Slate Studio Prize winner. In 2023, Married To Comics, a documentary about Tyler's life with her husband and fellow cartoonist Justin Green (1945–2022), won rave reviews.