Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen

From 2014 onward, Fantagraphics published Dylan Horrocks’ Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen, a single-issue comic that explores the boundaries of storytelling and imagination. Horrocks, the series’ sole writer and artist, crafts a meta-fictional journey where a struggling cartoonist discovers a magical pen that transports him into the worlds of his own creations. This debut issue matters as a thoughtful, visually inventive meditation on creativity, genre, and the ethics of representation, marking a distinctive entry in Horrocks’ celebrated body of work.