Eleanor Vane's Last Comic
A Graphic Novel

About this book:

In the basement of a Manhattan archive, a doctoral candidate finds a comic that shouldn't exist: *The Mirror Line*, a 1987 zine so dangerous its entire print run was burned on a Hoboken gravel lot by a distribution kingpin. Only twenty copies escaped the fire. One sits in Arthur Finch's gloved hands, its staple wire still holding a microscopic fragment of ash.

As Arthur scans the pages under ultraviolet light, a hidden history bleeds through—Eleanor Vane wasn't a myth but a union presswoman who drew the cartel's real faces into her panels, then vanished with nineteen copies and a set of coordinates etched in drypoint: *Look for ash.* Now the archive's senior cataloger warns him off the trail, the dead distributor's successors still control the industry, and someone has noticed the missing file.

A literary noir built from invoice carbons, shipping manifests, and the brittle paper of suppressed voices, *Eleanor Vane's Last Comic* follows one researcher's descent into the gutter space between official history and the truths pulped to keep it clean. Every page turns up another layer of the conspiracy that remade American comics—and the woman who refused to stay erased.