Please note: Customers who order this set will receive both books in one shipment when the newest book arrives in our warehouse. For more information about each book (or to order them individually), click the titles below.

R.I.P.: Best of 1985-2004

This omnibus collection of Thomas Ott’s short shock-ending horror stories — imagine E.C. Comics done with no words, and executed in an impossibly lush black-and-white scratchboard style — collects a dozen stories originally published in three (now out of print) thin European style “graphic albums” (Tales of Error, Greetings from Hellville and Dead End) during the 1980s and 1990s, plus 8 previously uncollected tales, including "The Breakdown" from Fantagraphics' Mome anthology and Ott's collaboration with French great David B., "La Fiancée du Lapin." The book also features an afterword by rocker Martin Eric Ain, a.k.a. Martin Erich Stricker (Hellhammer, Celtic Frost).

Presented in the same deluxe format as the recent hits Cinema Panopticum and The Number 73304-23-4153-6-96-8, R.I.P. offers up twenty twisted tales of murder, suicide, oppression, terror, mutilation, crime, marital strife, and nuclear annihilation.

Download an EXCLUSIVE 19-page PDF excerpt (3.7 MB).

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The Number 73304-23-4153-6-96-8

Swiss horror master Thomas Ott returns with the first full-length graphic novel of his career. When clearing up the cell of a prisoner who has been sentenced to death and subsequently executed, a prison guard finds a small piece of paper with a combination of numbers on it.

On the spur of the moment, he puts it into his pocket.

As the guard lives a solitary, monotonous life, the numbers on the paper awake his curiosity. To find out their hidden meaning could add a new meaning to his life as well, so the guard stumbles into situations in which the number or part of it seem to achieve a certain importance and offer him hints and possible solutions. And the numbers signal a radical change in his luck. He gets to know a woman, falls in love with her, and one night, in a casino, he wins a huge amount of money when gambling on these numbers.

But the next morning, the woman and money have disappeared.

The man goes in search of the woman and the money. But from that day on, his luck changes and the numbers bring him only bad luck, sending him inexorably into an abyss that he might not recover from. Thomas Ott's O. Henry-esque plot twists will delight fans of classic horror like The Twilight Zone and Tales from the Crypt, or modern masters like filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan; his hallucinatory, hyper-detailed scratchboard illustrations will haunt you long after you've put the book down.

Download an EXCLUSIVE 20-page PDF excerpt (3.01 MB) containing all of Chapter I.

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Praise for T. Ott:

"The wordless noir morality plays are both meticulous and unnerving." – The Times (London)

"Comics don’t come much cooler than the heavily stylish, moody stories-with-a-twist created by Thomas Ott." – The Comics Reporter

"Swiss cartoonist Ott employs neither dialogue nor captions in his stories; words appear rarely, usually as chapter titles or signs in the background. Appropriately, Ott uses the early silent cinema as a motif... In keeping with the silent movie motif, Ott uses black, white and grays, enveloping his realistically drawn characters and settings in an expressionistic mood. The characters initially display understated emotions, and their situations seem familiar. Ott’s storytelling moves at a slow but steady pace, making his protagonists’ extreme reactions more believable when they, and the readers, are caught in Ott’s imaginatively conceived, masterfully executed traps." – Publishers Weekly

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