Posted in: Comics | Tagged: grant morrison, rian hughes, XX

Grant Morrison Calls XX "The Best Genre Book Of The Last 25 Years"

Bleeding Cool featured an early version of XX: A Novel, Graphic by Rian Hughes a few years ago. A monster of a tome, that reinvents prose by one of the true Renaissance Men of comic books, XX: A Novel, Graphic will finally be published by Picador in August.

Rian Hughes is a graphic designer, illustrator, comic artist, author, graphic novelist and typographer. His designs include the Forbidden Planet logo, the Eagle Award logo, much of the Marvel, DC, Image, Valiant, Oni and IDW logos and masthead, He drew the comic book Dare, and The Key for the BBC, he wrote and drew the silent graphic story I Am A Number, Batman comics, Burlesque works, and his typography work collected in Logo-A-GoGo. He's drawn six books for Ginger Spice, and can often be found on Charing Cross road buying old copies of Amazing Fantasy. And for his first novel, Rian Hughes is bringing a hell of a scrapbook of quotes from the great and the good.

'The best genre book of the last 25 years. Brilliant, exciting, absorbing and mind-blowing . . . Whatever Goethe's Faustus was, whatever
Melville's Moby Dick was, whatever Joyce's Ulysses, or Kubrick's 2001 was, XX is its latest expression – a perfect work of art about what it means to be human in a world of gigantic ideas' —Grant Morrison

'Rian Hughes is a culture-maven/documentarian par excellence' — Steven Heller

'With graphic flair and acuity, Hughes proves himself to be a worthy digital-age successor to Stéphane Mallarmé and Robert Massin'
— Print magazine

'Rian is the rare visualist whose sharp, eye-pleasing design playfully evokes the past while boldly defining the future' – Jim Lee

'Rian understands the mercurial magic that fuels the mind-twisting propaganda machines that drive our cultures' – Frazer Irving

'A luminescent pop-culture demon' – David Quantick

'A book which only Rian Hughes could have created, which should make us all eternally grateful that he did' — Kieron Gillen

'He's a f-cking genius' —Kelly Sue DeConnick

Welcome to XX: A Novel, Graphic. There has never been a book published like this before.

XX might be the most extraordinary book you ever see, and one of the most extraordinary books ever to be published.

A visual feast, XX is a unique and exciting novel that twists the design, typography and layout of the page to tell its story, making it as interesting an object as it is a narrative.

Propulsive and boldly designed, XX is the genre-bending brainchild of RIAN HUGHES, the award-winning British graphic designer, illustrator, comic book artist, and writer. 'As a designer, I've always imagined how the novel, as a form, could utilise the full expressive possibilities of type and layout to tell a story. For XX I've designed new fonts, curated old ones, drawn illustrations and diagrams, taken photographs and written stories within stories. This is something new for me, something I'm truly excited about sharing.'

Supplemented by redacted NASA reports, artwork, magazine articles, secret transcripts, and a novel within the novel,

XX tracks the journey of an extra-terrestrial signal as it is intercepted by one of Earth's most powerful radio telescopes. Has humanity made first contact? Is the signal itself an alien lifeform? A threat? If so, how will the people of Earth respond?

XX is Science Fiction's House of Leaves, with the novel's world building and layered story appealing to fans of The Three-Body Problem, Seveneves, and Ted Chiang's short stories. It deconstructs layout and language in order to explore the way ideas propagate and presents a compelling vision of humanity's unique place in the universe alongside a realistic depiction of what might happen in the wake of the biggest scientific discovery in human history.

XX: A Novel, Graphic by Rian Hughes is published on August 20th by Picador.

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