The Theatre of Cruelty

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"When one realizes that life is the expression of death and death is the expression of life, that continuity cannot exist without discontinuity, then there is no longer any need to cling to one and fear the other." This quote by spiritual leader Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche begins the bizarre black-and-white comic book The Theatre of Cruelty. Using extensive imagery and iconography from Indian spirituality combined with images of atrocity (such as a forest of skinned human beings copulating) Marc Tessier and Alexandre Lafleur have mapped out a terrain of the subconscious that becomes almost prayerlike or, at the very least, transcendental on close inspection. Though The Theatre of Cruelty contains a selection of separate stories, the beginning tales feel like visual primers for the final one, "To Chandra from Surya," a powerful love story in which the reoccurring imagery provides a much stronger foundation than the nonlinear narrative.


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"The Sleeping Heart", "The Theatre of Cruelty", "The Lovers", and "To Chandra from Surya" filter autobiographical fragments through the dream world, probing the depth of the human psyche. Written and drawn over a five year period, each tale is a rollercoaster ride through Heaven and Hell, fueled by a quest to capture the truth through the power of imagination.


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