Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight: The Life and Death of the Mining Town of Solomon's Gulch, Idaho

In 1998, James Sturm launched this single-issue graphic novella for Drawn & Quarterly, a starkly intimate portrait of a real Idaho mining town’s rise and fall. Through meticulous, somber linework and a historian’s eye, Sturm chronicles Solomon’s Gulch from boom to bust, capturing the human cost of industry and the fragile dreams of its inhabitants. A quiet, essential work of historical comics, it demonstrates how a single, well-crafted story can illuminate an entire forgotten world.