Joe Daly brings a refreshingly original — and utterly hilarious — voice to the comics medium, a dry, deadpan wit anchored in everyday reality combined with unnervingly deranged plots, rendered with a hyper-detailed, half-realistic and half-cartoony Tintin-style crispness.

Fantagraphics Books is proud to announce the debut collection of John Daly, the first book the company has published by a South African cartoonist. Daly's cartoons, offbeat, hallucinatory, and often hilarious, seems descendant from the substance-induced work of Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Victor Moscoso, and S. Clay Wilson, filtered through the artist's own unique vision and sense of the absurd. Stories alternate between full-color and black-and-white, and range from representational Jim Jarmusch-like scenarios to wild visual excursions, albeit linear ones.

In Joe Daly's most ambitious stand-alone graphic novel, Palmer ― wallflower, mystic seeker and paper mill worker ― moves into a new apartment with his outwardly self-assured and womanizing friend. Events take a peculiar turn as Palmer befriends an iconoclastic co-worker, Billy Boy, and plunges head-long into the mysterious and sinister world of sorcery, psychological operations, subterranean organizations and wild-goose chases.