The Danish visual artist John Kenn Mortensen has a new book due out this summer called The Wrestler, which joins an already-impressive resume alongside books of illustrations such as The Nightmare Factory, The Bestiary, and Night Terrors.
What sets The Wrestler apart, however, is that it’s Mortensen’s first sequential English language graphic novel. As the name implies, it is about a wrestler, and as Mortensen’s other work implies, it is also eerie and brought to life by his rich black-ink style. We here at The Beat are lucky to have an exclusive excerpt of the book today, courtesy of publisher Fantagraphics.
You can find your first look at The Wrestler below, beneath the catalog copy for it. The Wrestler is due out June 24….enjoy!
John Kenn Mortensen’s mordant, black-and-white inked images have taken you to The Nightmare Factory, The Bestiary, and given you Night Terrors. Now, in the internationally bestselling visual artist’s first available graphic novel, you’re going to fight like hell!
Freestyle wrestler The Sledgehammer has never met defeat, not at the hands of Painkiller, Handsome Jens, Fezzik the Giant or the Angel of Death. But over the course of 80 pages, Danish illustrator John Kenn Mortensen’s surreal black and white graphic novel will take Sledgehammer to the limits of reality, to show that he’s motivated by far more than hubris—it’s also love.
Mortensen’s first English language graphic novel delivers on the promise that his bizarre, crowd pleasing books of illustration have previously made for readers around the world. With his spidery black-ink style, reminiscent of Edward Gorey’s gothic line, we’re taken to a world in which heavy metal meets The Seventh Seal meets Faust, all by the way of AEW.
And now the pages…
