On sale date: August 26, 2025
"Correct your sight — See what you've been missing."
Most Anticipated Graphics Novels For Summer 2025 - Comics Beat
An unnamed man stumbles upon a flyer directing him to a suspicious medical facility that promises to "fix" his eyesight. After he gets the operation, optical defects begin to emerge, along with a whole new set of concerns. Impressionable and easily alarmed, the man comes to suspect he has received much more than he paid for.
Laser Eye Surgery is the first graphic novel by New York cartoonist Walker Tate. Far from an objective (or even accurate) depiction of the popular eyesight-corrective procedure, this is an idiosyncratic and lopsided take on sight, paranoia, and the comics form. As the man's vision continues to change in unforeseen ways, he plunges down a path of confusion and intrigue, no longer sure what to trust. Scams and cons appear to be everywhere, a cosmic swindle looms just out of view. Are the perceived dangers really present, or merely thought to be, and which is worse? Shifty and withholding, steeped in dread, Laser Eye Surgery is a comically unsettling rumination on perception and its trappings.
Orders of Laser Eye Surgery include signed riso bookplates while supplies last! Order now to get yours.
Praise
"A spare and intriguing comic, one that uses visuals to tell a story about sight and perception." — Comics Beat
"It's the tale of an unnamed protagonist whose corrective ocular surgery gives him a whole new outlook on reality. This sounds like it's going to use the form to play with ideas of perception and reality. Just the kind of work we love to check out at BF." — Broken Frontier
"An underlying union of, and tension between, the premeditated and the intuitive is one of Laser Eye Surgery's most unique characteristics, as well as being something you'll ponder over long after you've closed up its covers and put it on the shelf." — Four-Color Apocalypse
"Tate, you see, is an artist of omission: with the exception of the occasional shade-line, his forms are unrendered; his surfaces, by and large, are blank and unarticulated... With Laser Eye Surgery, the New York cartoonist's long-form debut from Fantagraphics Underground, Tate leans into this sleight of physicality by focusing on vision itself." — The Comics Journal
Specs
- Pages
- 96
- Format
- Paperback / Softback
- Color
- Black-and-white.
- Dimensions
- 8.6" × 11.1"
- ISBN-13
- 9798875001543