The Wrestler

    (Fantagraphics, 2025)

Freestyle wrestler The Sledgehammer has never met defeat, not at the hands of Painkiller, Handsome Jens, Fezzik the Giant or the Angel of Death. But over the course of 80 pages, Danish illustrator John Kenn Mortensen’s surreal black and white graphic novel will take Sledgehammer to the limits of reality, to show that he’s motivated by far more than hubris—it’s also love.Mortensen’s first English-language graphic novel delivers on the promise that his delightfully macabre books of illustration had previously made to readers around the world. With his spidery black-ink style, reminiscent of Edward Gorey’s gothic line, we’re taken to a world in which heavy metal mixes with the WWE by way of The Seventh Seal and Faust.
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