It is only retrospectively that we can call this work a work of comics or a graphic novel. But not using them leads me to infer that Vaughn-James was coming from a place outside the tradition of comics.

There is no way of knowing how Vaughn-James would have used these tools from the comics toolbox, if he had chosen to do so, nor am I suggesting that The Cage suffers for not using them. In short, if Vaughn-James was familiar with comics, he was deliberately throwing out some of comics' most powerful tools-the idea of the breakdown (the way panels are arranged on a page and the way they interact with each other) and the use of balloons/captions that are part of the images. This book resembles 19th century comics that used typeset captions that lay outside the panels (think Max and Moritz) and generally has one image per page, like children's story-books. I have read that Vaughn-James was influenced by comics. This book is often called a graphic novel (sometimes a ' proto-graphic novel'). (This is by no means an obvious assumption, based on the subject matter and the way the work unfolds.) If so, it only takes a few pages for his work to lose that early 70s look and become something unique. Let's assume Vaughn-James drew this sequentially. At first, the art has the look of late-60s/early-70s graphics (for example, think Yellow Submarine/Peter Max). The insides were printed on dark brown paper (in the images below, I have adjusted the contrast to help make the images more legible). The lettering style on the cover dates the original edition. (You can see some of his paintings here-they seem quite good.) Aside from that,Vaughn-James seems to have been primarily a visual artist (he also wrote two prose novels). By that standard, much of what small presses produce are 'limited editions.') The Cage is the fourth of a series of graphic-novel-like books that Vaughn-James created (the ones that preceded it were Elephant (1970), The Projector (1971), and The Park (1972)), and apparently he did a book called L'Enquêteur for Futuropolis in 1984. (This 'limited edition' print run will likely cause some amusement among those who, like me, have ever worked for small press publishers. It was published in a limited edition of 1500 copies by The Coach House Press in Toronto in 1975.

(I believe that a French language edition remains in print.) Author Martin Vaughn-James (1943-2009) began work on The Cage in January, 1972, and finished it in February, 1974. Fairly few people have seen it in English, as far as I know. The Cage is a cult book in the classic sense.

The cage martin vaughn james