Cage

Martin Vaughn-James (1943-2009) was a painter and groundbreaking comics artist who published three of his early works with Coach House Press: The Projector (1971), The Park (1972) and The Cage (1975). He was born in England and spent much of his youth in Australia, before moving to Canada to do his groundbreaking comics work in the 1970s. Vaughn-James is widely recognized as a pioneer in the development of the graphic novel. Later in life, Vaughn-James moved to Belgium, where he focused on painting. His works were the subject of several personal exhibitions in Brussels and Paris. Vaughn-James also published two works of prose fiction: Night Train (1989) and The Tomb of Zwaab (1991).

"In the histories of comics in Canada and comics as book-length narratives he played an important and often neglected role. His importance stems not just from the fact that he was a Canadian cartoonist when so few others were out there, or that he created long-form cartoon books when no graphic novel designation yet existed in book stores or libraries. Vaughn-James was also, and remains, a significant figure in comics history because his work was singular, literate, experimental, and often unsurpassably good." -- The Walrus "He is best known for a publishing sequence from the early 1970s ... that stand as either seminal graphic novels from the generation in which that notion finally began to take hold, books that function in many ways like graphic novels but aren't quite the same thing, or works that have informed the development of or suggested possibilities for those kinds of books." -- The Comics Reporter