From Eisner Award-winning writer Darcy Van Poelgeest (Little Bird, Precious Metal) and rising star watercolor artist Erin Connally comes The Cutting Garden. This gorgeously rendered, standalone graphic novel hardcover explores companionship, legacy, and sacrifice and will hit shelves this September from Image Comics.
On a quiet street in New Orleans, a mysterious girl seeks out a florist to deliver an earth-shattering truth in a final act of kindness and redemption. The Cutting Garden is an intimate and elegant gothic tale that shares bloodlines with contemporary literary horror books like that of Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and postmodern indie films like The Tree of Life.
“The Cutting Garden has been a labor of love for many years and I’m thrilled we can finally share it with the world,” said Van Poelgeest. “The process of writing and creating this story has sincerely changed me, as a writer, and a person. My hope now is that readers will take this journey themselves through the stifling shadows of Louisiana, and perhaps they too might feel a change.”
Connally added: “As my debut in comics, I wanted to offer readers a visual feast that represents both Darcy and my fascination with beauty and decay. As a southerner, I needed to capture the landscape that’s inspired me since I was a child. The Cutting Garden is this combination—a weird little Southern Gothic lullaby that I hope readers will be entranced by.”
Van Poelgeest first came to prominence with his breakout hit series Little Bird, co-created with Ian Bertram, which topped sales charts and sold out and was reprinted multiple times. It went on to win the Eisner Award for Best Limited Series in 2020. Its highly anticipated sister series, Precious Metal, launched in 2024 and gained instant critical acclaim.
The Cutting Garden original graphic novel hardcover (ISBN: 9781534330801) will be available at local comic book shops on Wednesday, September 2 and independent bookstores, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, Indigo, and Waterstones on Tuesday, September 29.