Cartoonist Walker Tate’s debut graphic novel, Laser Eye Surgery, is due out this August from Fantagraphics Books, and today we here at The Beat have a 12-page excerpt from the forthcoming book.
Laser Eye Surgery uses vision — literally, vision — as a starting point to explore themes around sight, paranoia, and the comics form (itself a visual medium, obviously). As you’ll see within the preview pages below, Tate’s new book is a spare and intriguing comic, one that uses visuals to tell a story about sight and perception. It starts a mystery — the lead character finds a mysterious advertisement for the titular eye surgery — and off we go from there.
Here’s the cover for the book…
You can find those 12 pages below, after the preview text from the publisher’s listing … enjoy!
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.
And here’s the preview…enjoy!
