Frederick & Eloise.
Published by Fantagraphics Books, 1993.
At the time I wrote and drew this story, in 1991, I was living in a large living room of an unusual sixth-floor apartment near Place Pigalle, in Paris France. I was madly in love with comics by Jacques Tardi, Moebius, and Edward Gorey, films by Jim Jarmusch (especially Stranger than Paradise), Terry Gilliam, and the Coen Brothers, and the photographs of Jacques-Henri Lartigue and Eugene Atget.
Frederick & Eloise began as a paragraph scrawled on a restaurant tablecloth before evolving into the series of illustrations it became. The original idea for the comic book was to have one panel per page, much like many of Gorey’s books. When Fantagraphics published the book, they decided to print it four to a page. One day I’d like to see it re-published in its correct format.
You can buy a signed copy of Frederick & Eloise for $10 directly from me at my shop, right here.
In 2002 I was asked by the Prince Theatre in Philadelphia to "show" this comic at a little comics event they had, so I added music to the book and created a movie, of sorts. The music is from Tin Hat Trio, with permission (I met them at a concert and Rob Burger said, for real, "go for it"). There is one chapter with music by Frederic Lips, an accordionist. Doing this piece