by Josh Simmons

Hot on the heels of his first graphic novel, House, Josh Simmons' Jessica Farm fuses serialized adventure, fantasy and psychological horror and stamps it with his signature macabre sensibility in his atmospheric new graphic novel. Like a Lynchian take on Alice in Wonderland, Jessica Farm opens with an exterior of what could be any Midwestern farmhouse: once inside, we track our titular heroine as she bounds out of bed on Christmas and goes about her morning routine, eventually breakfasting with her grandparents. The banality of the situation is subverted by a ratcheting sense of dread, however, as we discover that Jessica's increasingly nightmarish house is filled with creatures around every corner: some whimsical, some sexual, some despairing and some malevolent. Jessica Farm is an ambitious experiment in world-building: as conceived by Simmons, this book is the first volume of a life-spanning comics project in which he drew one page every month for the past seven years, starting in January 2000 — and will continue this project for 50 years in total, making up the story as he goes and releasing 96-page increments every 8 years until he amasses a 600-page body of work.