The Margins of Uncle Ray's Comics

About this book:

When Maeve inherits her estranged Uncle Ray's dilapidated house, she expects to clear out junk and sell the property. Instead, she finds an attic lined with over two hundred longboxes—sixty thousand forgotten indie comics from the 1980s black-and-white boom. But these aren't a collector's treasures. They're unsold print runs, and hidden in the margins of their cheap newsprint pages, Ray wrote his life in three colors of ink: blue for the daily grind of a crumbling publishing empire, black for the betrayals and missing money, and red for the warnings that suggest he was running from something far more dangerous than bad sales figures.

As Maeve decodes the microscopic cursive squeezing between panel borders, a shadow history emerges—of shell companies and burnt print runs, of a partner named Miller who stole presses and bought Lincolns, of distribution warehouses in Newark and printing plants in Utica where plates conveniently vanished. The comics themselves are worthless; the stories written in their gutters are priceless. And the alphanumeric codes on each box—IND-84-A, IND-85-B—aren't inventory numbers. They're a timeline leading to the one title that might explain everything: *The Boy from Queens*.

Atmospheric and fiercely original, *The Margins of Uncle Ray's Comics* transforms the forgotten ephemera of a collapsed industry into a labyrinth of family secrets and criminal enterprise. For readers who love the literary mystery of *The Shadow of the Wind* and the gritty nostalgia of *Marvels*, this is a novel about the stories we hide in plain sight—and what happens when someone finally turns the page.