The Ghost Artist's Syndicate
A Novel of Newspaper Comics

About this book:

In the smoky, ink-stained world of 1950s newspaper syndication, Arthur Vance is the best forger in the business. For four years, he has drawn *Barnaby's Ridge*—the beloved badger-and-boy strip credited to the famous, golf-obsessed Marcus Sterling—perfectly mimicking every brushstroke, every lightning-bolt signature, while his own sharp, modern art rots unseen in a leather sketchbook. At eighty dollars a week in a cold-water flat, Arthur has made his peace with invisibility. Then Sterling walks through his door, smelling of Cuban cigars and entitlement, demanding twelve full-color presentation pieces by tomorrow to save the strip from a Hearst takeover. Suddenly, the ghost is being asked to haunt the master's party in Detroit, and the line between survival and selling his soul has never been thinner.

*The Ghost Artist's Syndicate* is a love letter to the lost craft of daily cartooning—India ink and crowquill pens, blue-pencil proofs and Process White, the brutal geometry of the Sunday page—and a noirish thriller about the price of artistic compromise. As Arthur races a deadline that could destroy the only life he knows, he discovers that Sterling's charm masks a ruthless corporation, and that the syndicate's "mandate" extends far beyond the funny pages. With each panel he inks, the question sharpens: how long can you draw another man's signature before your own hand forgets how to write your name?

Atmospheric, morally intricate, and paced like a daily strip racing the press run, this novel pulls back the curtain on the golden age of comics to reveal the invisible hands that kept the laughs coming. For anyone who has ever done brilliant work in someone else's shadow—or wondered what happens when the ghost decides to haunt the master—*The Ghost Artist's Syndicate* draws the final panel in bold, unerasable ink.