World Within The World – Collected Short Comix, 2010 – 2022
Cartoonist: Julia Gfrörer
Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
Publication Date: February 2025
As the name implies, cartoonist Julia Gfrörer has compiled the short comix she made between 2010 and 2022 into a new hardcover, titled World Within the World. There are 39 pieces in this book, ranging in length from one page to dozens. The stories in this book are varied in subject matter and tone, but running throughout are recurring ideas about violence and eroticism, set atop a deep respect for — or perhaps curiosity with — the ineffable nature of existence and life.
Collectively, this is also a set of comics that is — to borrow a phrase — unstuck in time. As well as place. The settings and periods for these stories oscillate from medieval to modern to retellings of Edgar Allan Poe stories to what if Fraiser suffered an Akira-looking apocalypse (see the preview pages below). We’ve written quite a bit about Gfrörer’s work on this site, including this bit that appears on this book as a pull quote on its dust jacket: “Gfrörer’s stories feature a mix of elusive reality and foreboding moods, all suggesting something we can’t totally conceive and yet understand emotionally.”
The above was written by former Beat reviewer John Seven, about Gfrörer’s 2020 book, Visions, and I bring it up here because I think that sentiment is also applicable to these stories, as well as a poetic and well-stated way to describe the feeling from the start. I think it’s perhaps most true of the second piece in the book, Dark Ages, the mysterious ending of which felt so poignant and so familiar, it actually gave me goosebumps. The story follows a (seemingly) pre-historic couple, who frolic and copulate and traipse into a cave, where the man shimmies into a crevice and becomes stuck for an indistinguishable but long amount of time. He’s eventually pulled from being trapped, but left afraid to come into the sunlight, where his vision degenerates into a blurred figure that feels like a stand-in for the fragility of normal life.
This story is not perfectly indicative of everything that appears in the book, but I do think it plays with ideas and questions that are never far within these pages. There’s a sort of anachronistic haze to it, powered by Gfrörer rich and handsome cartooning. It’s also a story that lives at a familiar intersection for World Within The World, that of sex and danger and love and mortality. Again, these are not the only ideas in this book, but they are recurring.
And I think it’s important that they appear so early, almost like a thesis statement or declaration of intent, because it speaks to another strong quality of this book — the sequence in which the stories are arranged. The order of the pieces here creates a natural flow that leads readers well, making this a compulsively readable book. I found myself wanting to spend a lot of time with each of the stories here, but also compelled to move right to the next work. And the ordering feels thoughtful and complex, not boxed in by the dates in which the pieces were created or even the content of the stories. It’s like a good mix tape in that way, where the flow from story to story dictates order.
Overall, World Within the World is a wonderful collection. The artwork is intricate and striking, the ideas offer poignant questions throughout (while never becoming so self-serious they lose the ability to be funny or surprising), and the sequencing of the pieces makes for a rewarding, intact reading experience. I highly recommend this book.
World Within The World is available now from Fantagraphics Books
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