Cartoonist Studio Prize Shortlist 2014

For an impoverished cartoonist, I do an awful lot of international traveling.

Raw, bare-boned, scathingly funny dispatches from the renowned comic diarist Gabrielle Bell, with biting cultural commentary mixed with her signature introspective, self-deprecating humor, and surreal digressions (from car-driving bears, through Zombie Apocalypses, to cute babies, and . . . more bears!) as she visits France, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, Colombia, back to Brooklyn, and finally landing in upstate New York. In Truth is Fragmentary Gabrielle Bell proves she can be . . . funny!

Gabrielle Bell was born in England and raised in California. Her work has been selected for the 2007, 2009, and 2010 Best American Comics and the Yale Anthology of Graphic Fiction, and she has contributed to McSweeneys, Bookforum, the Believer, and Vice. The title story of Bell's book, Cecil and Jordan in New York, has been adapted for the film anthology Tokyo! by Michel Gondry. Her latest book, The Voyeurs, was selected as one of the top five graphic novels of 2012 by Publishers Weekly. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.