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Thunderhead Underground Falls
By Joel Orff; for Mature Readers
128 pages; 8" x 10"; $14.95
ISBN-10: 1-891867-88-1;
ISBN-13: 978-1-891867-88-0;
Diamond: MAR07 3088; June 2007
Joel Orff’s new graphic novel Thunderhead Underground Falls tells the story of Jack, a young army reservist who has one weekend left before shipping out for combat in the Middle East. He and a friend find themselves behind the wheel of his parent’s car, driving farther and farther west into a snowy landscape. The book is an impressionistic exploration of Jack’s flight from his future, as well as an exploration of this place that he’s pledged his life to fight for. Jack and his friends want to experience the simple freedom of taking a drive, of seeing familiar things before his outlook is changed forever by the violence that he knows he will soon face. As the hours go by, Jack begins to consider desertion, but he knows that if he stays to hold onto the life that he knows, it will still be changed forever.
Thunderhead Underground Falls sample pages |
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"This book picks up where my previous one Waterwise left off, both in the tone of the story and the minimal style of storytelling. I wanted to present the commonplace, everyday world in a way that gives it a heightened, poignant aspect. As the characters move through the story we see things through their eyes, and the simple freedom of being able to take a drive through the country becomes kind of a miraculous occurrence. In some ways this book is about a single moment, in which the main character is experiencing many different emotions and reliving several memories at the same time. The qualities that are unique to comics make it possible to pick up the subtle connections between different events - and create a fluid representation of both the passing of time and the static feeling of the current moment. (Or at least that is what I’m attempting) There’s a kind of random quality to the way that memories appear, and I wanted to have that random feeling, but within a graceful narrative. I never want to tell the reader what to think. I want them to be able to decide for themselves what the significance of various elements of the story are and what the characters are thinking, while at the same time sharing an emotional experience with those characters."
— Joel Orff
Joel Orff's first book Strum and Drang: Great Moments in Rock 'n' Roll was nominated for the 2004 YALSA Paperbacks for Young Adults Booklist.
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| Strum and Drang: Great Moments in Rock 'n' Roll |
Thunderhead Underground Falls |
Waterwise |
Stapling cast-off newsprint from the local small-town newspaper into little books, Joel Orff churned out a thirty-two page comic once a month for most of his childhood. After his first year of college he threw them all out; a decision that he's still not sure if he regrets. More recently he's been published in several books and magazines around the world, including the Artisti Allibratori Associati publication Tattoo Comix (Italy), Fahrenheit Magazine (Denmark), The Comix Compendium from Mangijin Books, The Stranger weekly newspaper in Seattle, and 'Heroes of Invention', which was created for the Minnesota Children's Museum. His illustrations were included in an exhibition at the National Comic Library in Copenhagen in 1994. In 2001 they were featured at both the Somerville Comix Fest and Curious Brain exhibit in Boston.
In 2002 Joel Orff was a finalist for the McKnight Foundation Screenwriters Fellowship, and had his first play produced as part of the Minnesota Fringe Festival. In 2004 he was a finalist for the McKnight Screenwriters Fellowship. In 2005, his comic strip 'Great Moments in Rock 'n' Roll' began running weekly in the California paper Pacific Sun. In 2006 his second graphic novel Waterwise was published in a French translation by editions ça èt là in France. In 2007 editions ça èt là will publish a French translation of Thunderhead Underground Falls.
Images, characters and likenesses © and ™ Joel Orff
