The In-Betweener's Hidden Frames
A Graphic Novel of Golden Age Animation

About this book:

In the ink-stained basement of Vanguard Pictures, 1934, Arthur Pendelton draws the frames that make the magic move—twenty-four drawings per second of smiling bears and singing mice, all choreographed to glorify obedience. But in the microscopic margins beyond the camera's gaze, where the sprockets bite the film, Arthur animates a different story: a longshoreman lifting a cobblestone, a strike leader raising a flag, a single defiant word blooming in the dust of a cartoon gag. *STRIKE.* One frame at a time, he's smuggling truth past the censors, the efficiency experts with their stopwatches, and the studio boss who thinks a duck's walk can be Bolshevik.

By day, he's a ghost in the machine, perfecting the "illusion of life" for a studio that treats artists like interchangeable cogs. By night, he traces resistance into the celluloid's edge, gambling his livelihood on the hope that somewhere, a tired projectionist's worn aperture plate will let the hidden frames breathe on a screen in Omaha or Detroit. When a brutal new production manager arrives to Taylorize the art form into a slaughterhouse, and the Screen Cartoonists Guild begins whispering through the washrooms, Arthur's private rebellion becomes the spark that could ignite the whole rotting structure.

*The In-Betweener's Hidden Frames* is a love letter to the forgotten hands who built the golden age—inkers with cramped fingers, in-betweeners losing their eyesight, women walking miles to save three cents—wrapped in a taut historical thriller where every pencil stroke is an act of sabotage. Lavishly illustrated and steeped in the toxic chemistry and transcendent craft of the camera stand, this is a novel about what happens when the people who draw the dreams decide to stop drawing the lies.