Blood Of The Virgin Tour Poster

Although 2023 is only halfway done, it's hard to see another book topping Sammy Harkham's Blood of the Virgin for me. Brilliant, expressive cartooning in service of an ambitious story about the creative process and the people swept up in the often chaotic world of filmmaking.

I've been fortunate to pick up several pages from the book prior to its publication as a collected edition and several more from a recent exhibition of Harkham's work at Philadelphia's Partners and Sons gallery. This piece is not from the book but was produced to announce a short European tour by Harkham arranged by his French publisher, Éditions Cornélius.

Although the piece isn't from the book, it features many of the central characters from BotV interspersed among announcements for appearances and screenings that took place during Harkham's European tour.

From the publisher's synopsis of Blood of the Virgin:

Set primarily in Los Angeles in 1971, Blood of the Virgin is the story of twenty‑seven‑year‑old Seymour, an Iraqi Jewish immigrant film editor who works for an exploitation film production company. Sammy Harkham brings us into the underbelly of Los Angeles during a crucial evolutionary moment in the industry from the last wheeze of the studio system to the rise of independent filmmaking.

Seymour, his wife, and their new baby struggle as he tries to make it in the movie business, writing screenplays on spec and pining for the chance to direct. When his boss buys one of his scripts for a project called Blood of the Virgin and gives Seymour the chance to direct it, what follows is a surreal, tragicomic making-of journey. As Seymour’s blind ambition propels the movie, his home life grows increasingly fraught. The film’s production becomes a means to spiral out into time and space, resulting in an epic graphic novel that explores the intersection of twentieth‑century America, parenthood, sex, the immigrant experience, the dawn of early Hollywood, and, shockingly, the Holocaust.