Books like The End of the World

A new graphic novel by Don Hertzfeldt. From the artist at http://www.bitterfilms.com/forum.html"the end of the world" is being published in december, bringing to a close the strangest creative exercise i have been a part of and i'm a little surprised it's finally going to be released at all. the very first scraps of it showed up in 2003, and for maybe one week out of each of the following few years i'd remember it, stare at it from different angles, add a new thing or two, wonder what on earth i was doing, throw it back into the sea, and return to whatever film i was making. until this year, i think the longest time spent on it in one sitting was a couple of months in 2009 when i revised everything significantly and added several new sections... before abandoning it all again. it was growing into a place for all the spare parts that didn't work in any of the films to trickle down into... and in the other direction, often a place to steal things from. at one point someone says, "dad, no, wait, the bike's still chained to the truck," a line appearing in "wisdom teeth" in 2010, but actually written for "the end of the world" the year before. there are even moments written many years ago for the book that are finding their way into projects not even released yet. so while the book does not represent ten years of work by any stretch of the imaginaton, it does represent ten years of buried ideas: homeless scenes, dead ends, stories too strange to tell elsewhere, things drawn in the dark and soon forgotten. it was an enormous non-linear puzzle of stuff to finally try and shape into something legible, in the early years more mood piece than anything, then a sort-of narrative surfacing enough to chip away at, and in 2009, a main character. i threw out enough content from the now-216-page book to fill another book the same size, added significant sections to it only a few months ago, and was still rearranging the order of everything only a few weeks ago. if the films were albums, i guess these would be the b-sides. reading it all back now, i have as many memories of creating it over the years as i have memory gaps... so many lonely late night sparks in santa barbara when i needed a break to do anything but animate. it is sad and jazzy, occasionally much funnier than it maybe deserves to be, and reminds me of something sort of lost and ghostly that i can't quite put my finger on