A stray dog has part of the number tattooed on his ear, the winner of a marathon race on a picture in the newspaper is wearing another part of the number, and the phone number on a poster from somebody looking for the stray dog provides the next part, etc. The next day, a series of remarkable coincidences occur, all of them having to do with the number on that scrap of paper. When he's been executed, the executioner finds the strip of paper lying next to the electric chair and for some reason puts it in his pocket before he goes home. He sometimes takes out the strip of paper and looks at it. At the start of the book, it is used as a bookmark by a condemned man in his Bible. Instead, The Number 753-6-96-8 is a graphic novel about a number on a strip of paper. In fact, it's probably more wrong than right. On that strip of paper is a number: 753-6-96-8.
The multi-talented Thomas Ott makes animations, was the lead singer of a band called The Playboys, and on top of this, he makes political satires, comics and caricatures for various newspapers and magazines. Among his other books are 'Cinema Panopticum', 'Greetings from Hellville' and 'The Number 753-6-96-8'. Since 1995, he is a regular contributor to Lapin, the publication of the French publisher L'Association (he has lived in Paris since 1990). The titles of his books, like 'Tales of Error' and 'Hellville, Tales from the Edge', already suggest that he is fond of the darker sides of life, which he depicts in his books with painstaking clarity. His work was published in various European magazines, including Ahai, Hochparterre, Okay Erotik Magazin, Strapazin, Tagesanzeiger-Magazin and Weltwoche in Switzerland, Boxer, Geo-Spezial, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Tempo in Germany, as well as El Vibora in Spain and Bulles Dingues, Culte, L'Écho des Savanes, Libération, Stronx and Vogue in France. Born in Berne, Ott studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich and began working in the independent comics scene in the second half of the 1980s. Luckily, the Swiss artist Thomas Ott makes wordless scratchboard comix, which helps in making his work known in the rest of the world. There aren't many comix artists from German-speaking countries whose work has been translated into other languages.
0 kommentar(er)
