The Plot Against the Giant:
Caroline Bren

The ritual sacrifice of three men at the hands of three inverse-graces.

The Plot Against the Giant, adapted from the Wallace Stevens poem of the same name, depicts the ritual sacrifice of three men at the hands of three inverse-graces. It conjures a torturous primordial revenge of women against men in harsh, etching-like rendering. This edition includes 16 pages of narrative between a facsimile of the original cover, a drawing, and an alternative cover. It is staple bound with a textured cardstock cover, all white to match the original.

*Note*
tPAtG was, according to Morgan’s defunct website seminal.us, self-published in December of 2011. The archive of her website links to the current interior cover, which it seems most who are familiar with this piece recognize. Earlier this year, I was alerted that Brian Nicholson had stumbled upon a copy bearing a different cover, which is this edition’s front and back covers. This edition was interesting because the back cover art features a collage from old fantasy illustration. I’d recently had a discussion with Noel Friebert about Morgan’s interest in and frequent swiping of art from the Fighting Fantasy books. Morgan had often raved to me about Fighting Fantasy, also beloved by her deceased partner Feral. The art is representative of the strange, often rough art that frequently appears in the UK fantasy illustration scene. This copy features what I believe is a collage from those on the back, and its interior bears a clear influence from that style. Her longest piece, Necrophilic Landscape, produced at a similar point in her aesthetic development, features whole drawings swiped from Fighting Fantasy artist John Blanche. I’m most familiar with Blanche’s watercolor work for Warhammer, but these particular illustrations have a kind of lurking, primitive evil that clearly infected Morgan’s drawings. Anyone who has encountered Morgan’s home-dubbed tapes may have also encountered decapitated goblin heads from those very books. I think this is really interesting because Morgan’s last pieces have a completely sterile, brutal sort of deconstruction of Manga style art that feels like a stark contrast to this previous period of her work and points to the process of total refinement that she followed at the time of her death.
-Pris