Cornelius: The Merry Life of a Wretched Dog

Horrifying and hilarious, Cornelius the dog is a spectacular train wreck--you just can’t look away

Cornelius is a fumbling loser, the butt of everyone’s jokes. When his friend Alspacka iskidnapped, the subsequent criminal investigation turns into a dramatic and emotionalordeal, upending Cornelius’s life. Torn between his desire to be a writer and his immenseguilt over his cowardly role in Alspacka’s abduction, Cornelius is a classic Faustian figure: an aspiring artist so hungry for success that he will pay any price.

Rarely does a book so delightfully defy categorization. Cornelius is an experience: afarcical collage that reads like a drug-fueled fever dream, an intense emotional pendulumoscillating between psychological horror and slapstick comedy--a real roller coaster. Andtruthfully, Cornelius is all this and more: a brand, a phenomenon, a way of life. From thesingular mind of Marc Torices comes a surreal, carefully curated universe, complete with itsown icons, mythology, and metanarratives.

Exquisitely drawn, Cornelius’s kaleidoscope of styles pays homage to the comicsmedium, an unabashed love letter to the form itself. Translated from the Spanish by EisnerAward-winner Andrea Rosenberg, Marc Torices’s critically acclaimed and award-winningCornelius is mesmerizing in its originality.

Marc Torices (1989) is a comics artist and animator.

While studying illustration at the Llotja-Avinyó school in Barcelona, he co founded the imprint Zángano Comix with classmate Pau Anglada, and self-published La cultura del duodeno, Viaje a Maiame, among other zines. In addition to writing comics, he’s also worked as an editorial illustrator, an animator, and as an art director for some animation studios and other creative enterprises.

Before the publication of Cornelius, Torices self-published several fanzines featuring the dog, and he also created the art for the biography Cortázar, written by Jesús Marchamalo and published in Spain, France, and Italy. He worked on some other comics before this as well, but never with the same enthusiasm as he had for Cornelius: The Merry Life of a Wretched Dog.