The Ghost in the Panel
A Novel of the Funny Pages

About this book:

For nine years, Arthur Miller has been the perfect ghost—inking, penciling, and writing *Barnaby's Burden* while the strip's legendary creator, Chick Kelly, cashes the checks and signs the originals from his Pennsylvania estate. But when the syndicate threatens to replace their dying legacy property with a sudoku column, Arthur does the unthinkable: he draws the truth. In a single Friday panel, Barnaby Stout stops mugging for the funny pages and looks out at the reader with the hollow eyes of a man who knows he's being erased.

What follows is a quiet rebellion waged in non-repro blue and India ink, played out on Strathmore Bristol between the radiator's knock and the 7 train's scream. As deadlines close in and Chick's panicked directives grow more desperate, Arthur begins smuggling his own work into the delivery envelopes—raw, un-syndicated drawings of the woman upstairs, the upholsterer downstairs, the life that happens in the gutters between the panels. Each stolen sheet is a declaration: *I am here. I draw. I exist.*

*The Ghost in the Panel* is a love letter to the vanished craft of the daily strip and a thriller about artistic identity in an age of content. With the precision of a crowquill line and the weight of a press run, it asks what happens when the invisible man decides to show up on the film—just as the lights are going out.