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The cover to The Ephemerata, featuring an illustration of a woman holding a cup. She looks tired and sad. In front of her is a gray structure with crooked branches reaching out from it, which cover the woman's face and point toward her eye.
The cover to The Ephemerata, featuring an illustration of a woman holding a cup. She looks tired and sad. In front of her is a gray structure with crooked branches reaching out from it, which cover the woman's face and point toward her eye.
  • Load image into Gallery viewer, The cover to The Ephemerata, featuring an illustration of a woman holding a cup. She looks tired and sad. In front of her is a gray structure with crooked branches reaching out from it, which cover the woman's face and point toward her eye.
  • Load image into Gallery viewer, The cover to The Ephemerata, featuring an illustration of a woman holding a cup. She looks tired and sad. In front of her is a gray structure with crooked branches reaching out from it, which cover the woman's face and point toward her eye.
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Carol Tyler

The Ephemerata: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of Grief

On sale date: October 21, 2025

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.

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.

Praise

"Detailed and often dreamlike...In Tyler's capable hands, grief is not exactly beautiful, but it is specific and transformative." — Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"Carol Tyler is a crucial voice for the medium. Poetic, her work is ornamented with detail, yet not flowery. Carol is neither sensationalistic or sentimental, yet she documents all the clumsiness of human existence with incredible grace." — Craig Thompson (author of Blankets and Habibi)

"The verdant richness and humanity of her whole body of work has raised her in my mind to one of the handful of true greats of the original 'underground' generation." — Chris Ware (author of Building Stories)

"Carol Tyler's work stands out for its thoughtfulness, energy and bite. She is a great storyteller with an ethereally expressive drawing style that enables her to convey emotion and personality with aching resonance, and she understands people with an acuity that is tender, wise and devastating." — Jim Woodring (author of Weathercraft and One Beautiful Spring Day)

"Of course Tyler finds refuge in a giant version of her great-grandmother Theola's mourning bonnet. Of course all over the landscape there are surrealist not-quite-trees poking up at the sky. Of course these things are explained by the locals of "Griefville" in ways that enthusiastically refuse to make sense. As is often the case at a funeral, the going is rough but the company is good." — New York Times

Specs

Pages
232
Format
Hardback
Color
Full color.
Dimensions
9.3" × 12.3"
ISBN-13
9798875001437
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