About The Ragged Man
What Kind of Book is The Ragged Man?
The Ragged Man is a strongly paced and physically intense thriller. It is a world created and driven through acts of violence, both real and emotional. Dark, ugly and brutal, this is not a bedtime story for children. Examining and challenging the conventions surrounding the genre, The Ragged Man stands as an urban punk myth for a generation that rose up and slaughtered its own heroes.
How does all this fit together?
The internal logic of The Ragged Man forms a self-enclosed whole, a cell from which the central character denies his own escape. It has an ever-accelerating downward spiral structure. The main protagonist populates and dominates this world, all subsidiary characters being fragments of himself. The Ragged Man saturates his environment so completely that the landscape itself lashes out at him, even as it conforms to his will. Slowly, implacably, he is haunting himself to death.
How long is it?
The Ragged Man is a five-chapter graphic novel that strips the superhero myth down to the bloody bone. It’s gruesome, harrowing and psychologically intense. The story is non-linear and entirely self-enclosed, constantly echoing and reflecting back on itself. It is a complex and exhaustive deconstruction of its central character as he continually defines and demolishes the world around him, denying his own redemption in a violent and desperate attempt to build a reality in which he never existed. The chapters are:
- Mad Gods and Englishmen
- The Unfinished Businessman
- The Ghost of Christmas Might-Have-Been
- The Fissure King
- Our English Dead
Like all Insomnia books, it will be coming out as an “instant trade”.
Is it a superhero book?
It's emphatically not a superhero book.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's the reason why I've never actually written a superhero book. Having this vicious, sharp-cornered monster of a story squatting in my brain is the reason I've ended up turning down every superhero-flavoured project I've been asked to get involved in or invited to pitch for.
What inspired you to write this story?
This is a story whose roots are inextricably tangled around my life in London. The Ragged Man is my interpretation of London itself, the best and worst of it at once - and whatever else he may be, he is absolutely, inescapably his own worst enemy. He's probably yours, too.
The Ragged Man is a very important story for me, for reasons I may start to go into as the book moves toward completion. It is a product of the fourteen years I spent in London. It's a last act of peacemaking between me and that beautiful, damaged city and, if you were to ask me now, I'd still tell you it's the only place on Earth I could have written The Ragged Man.
When will it be out?
2011, but a chapter one preview will be out later this year
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