EXCLUSIVE First Look At Humanoids ‘Betrayal Of The Mind: The Surreal Life Of Unica Zurn’
by Anton Kromoff
Welcome to the table,
Comics are amazing when they are weird, unhinged, and totally off the beaten path. They can also be really great platforms to tell stories about historical events and figures in a way that can evoke emotion and be impactful for all involved. If anyone has proven to me that they can make fantastic comics that tell deeply personal stories, Humanoids has for sure surpassed that bar time and time again.
Today Humanoids announced a brand new original graphic novel titled Betrayal of The Mind: The Surreal Life of Unica Zurn.
This rare English-language work traces the life and fate of the famous Surrealist figure Unica Zürn from noted contemporary artist Céline Wagner.
A childhood devastated by rape, the absence of an idealized father, a strict moral mother, and a passion for art shaped Unica Zürn. One of the only prominent female figures of the Surrealist movement, Zürn was tormented by inner demons that she shared through her automatic drawings and anagram poems. She longed for and rejected intimacy at once, seeking her so-called Man of Jasmine, an idealized male figure, throughout her life, while living as the partner of Hans Bellmer, a well-renowned artist and photographer in his own right.
As her schizophrenia began to overtake her, she longed to make the woman she once was disappear into the nameless pronoun She. In the eyes of Unica Zürn, madness was the only way to be in the world.
Born in 1975 in the Val d’Oise, Céline Wagner is a graduate of the Polycréa Design School in Toulouse and has lived and worked in the Lot region since 2000. In 2003, she co-wrote a book with E. Baudoin, Les yeux dans le mur (Dupuis). In 2009, she discovered butô during an interview given by singer Antony Hegarty on the occasion of the release of his work The Crying Light and in 2016 released Frapper le sol, Tatsumi Hijikata sur la voie du butô, which won the Grand Prix Artémisia that same year. Betrayal Of The Mind is her seventh graphic novel.
Betrayal of The Mind: The Surreal Life of Unica Zurn will be available in bookstores everywhere and in comic shops (comicshoplocator.com) in March 2024. Digital copies can be purchased from comiXology and other digital platforms soon after.
Until next time, it is always very refreshing to see these kinds of stories getting a space in the sequential visual storyteller medium. When you love comics you want to see things that elevate them in a way that sometimes sad boys in spider-themed suites crying about their supermodel wives or girlfriends or whatever they are currently can’t always do.
