What is Burial King?
It was supposed to be a fiction about a family owned mortuary in a country town. It became a multilayered autobiography with an ensemble cast, told through the lens of a kitten… I’m sorry.
I drew panels first and wrote second, blind to direction more than 3 pages ahead. Bad technique morphed into an obsessive investigation into my founding memories. The project spanned 2 years outside of a lonely reality working night shifts as a security guard with a booze problem. Sticking with the fictional kitten costume, I've honed in on some type of dissociative amnesia, foggy recalls of a warped childhood, and lurking familial denial.
Burial King was not created in irony. No wink at the audience is made. None of it is real, but, every panel is exceptionally familiar to me, and makes for the clearest auto-bio explanation of my life I can muster.
Published September 2025 by The Mansion Press FRANCE | 104 colour pages | Jumbo Size 19cm x 27cm | Thick 150gsm cream paper | Soft cover
The official blurb:
A midday film screening entwines the lives of eccentric theatre attendees in this subversively funny graphic novel from Raphael Iacocca. Meet a cast of cinema patrons, employees, and even the film’s characters, all caught in the centre of a troubled cartoonist’s nightmare. There’s Max, the jitterboned kitten who befriends an evil skeleton in the cinema foyer; Kennedy, the cornsilk country girl–turned–highbrow theatre manager, hiding her molasses-tongue from colleagues; and Warrick, the tragic leading man of our midday movie, chasing down his deceased brother’s stolen corpse.
A romping metaphorical horror that crescendos when a beer-drunk film projectionist reveals himself as the puppet master behind it all.
