The only drawback is that the lack of words can leave you racing through the book far too fast.

Words are completely superfluous to his creation – there isn’t one panel of this book that would be improved with dialogue. His characterisations are simple but effective, easily capturing the horror and torment on the faces of the characters whose lives he’s playing with. Ott’s beautiful drawings look like they’ve been etched out of the black pages. As she works her way through them we see the stories from her perspective, but even this is not quite as straight-forward as it seems… She stumbles across the Cinema Panopticum – five coin operated boxes that show eerie horror stories with surprise endings.

A young girl wanders around a fair, looking for rides and sideshows she can afford with the small amount of change she has in her pocket. Ott’s Cinema Panopticum is a beautiful silent work, that links four short stories into one larger one. But luckily for us, one medium that is superbly equipped to tell complex stories without using words is comics. Fantagraphics has since gained an international reputation for its literate and audacious editorial standards and its exacting production values.You can barely imagine a silent movie being made in Hollywood today – wordless art forms are left to the fringes. Fantagraphics quickly established a reputation as an advocacy publisher that specialized in seeking out and publishing the kind of innovative work that traditional comics corporations who dealt almost exclusively in super-heroes and fantasy either didn?t know existed or wouldn?t touch: serious, dramatic, historical, journalistic, political, and satirical work by a new generation of alternative cartoonists as well as many artists who gained prominence as part of the seminal underground comix movement of the '60s.

By the early 1980s, Fantagraphics found itself at the forefront of the burgeoning movement to establish comics as a medium as eloquent and expressive as the more established popular arts of film, literature, poetry, et al. Fantagraphics Books has been a leading proponent of comics as a legitimate form of art and literature since it began publishing the critical trade magazine The Comics Journal in 1976.

Thomas ott cinema panopticum