The Three Rooms In Valerie’s Head book signing at Travelling Man
Sarah-Clare Conlon, Literature Editor
To mark the release onto the world of their first graphic novel collaboration (a second is in the pipeline), Eisner-nominated cartoonist Dan Berry and Manchester-based micro-fiction writer and novelist David Gaffney will be chatting about The Three Rooms in Valerie’s Head and signing copies of the book, out now with US publishers Topshelf.
A dark comedy about “love, loneliness, accumulating baggage, and letting go”, The Three Rooms in Valerie’s Head has been garnering praise from all quarters since its launch in London earlier this spring. It tells the tales, various, of Valerie’s serially unlucky love life, thanks, mostly, to a conveyor belt of socially malfunctioning, weirdly obsessed boyfriends – who end up filed in the memory box marked “cellar” and who are retrieved back upstairs into the light every now and again so that Valerie can find out what went wrong in order to not mess up her future relationships.
The Comicon reviewers call it: “A wonderfully offbeat, dark comedic delight… The turn of Gaffney’s phrase, and the skillful use of expression and flow in Berry’s art, perfectly capture both the surreal ridiculousness of it all and the sadness that underpins the tale”, while purveyors of fine comic books Forbidden Planet have described it as: “Funny, poignant, surreal and still warmly emotional and human – a delight to read.”
Pop along to this special book signing to find out more about this unusual pairing of words and pictures, which started taking shape as a live performance project for the Lakes International Comic Arts Festival back in 2015.
