the cage by martin vaughn-james review

    In 1917 Marcel Duchamp unveiled The Fountain and the art world was not ready for it. In 1937 Guernica was unveiled at the World's Fair and the Spanish government was not ready for. In 2025 I read Martin Vaughn-James' The Cage and I was not ready for it. This graphic novel challenged the way I read comics, and I, unfortunately, was not up for the challenge.

    To its credit, this was unlike any comic book I've read before. Vaugh-James created an absurdist dystopia that's meant to invoke a sense of mystery, confusion, and intrigue. It combines the complex writing structure of House of Leaves and the surrealist ambiguity of Last Year at Marienbad. It's a very minimalist work, some pages have no writing and none of the pages have panels or punctuation. Sometimes, when presented with just a picture, you're forced to sit there and ponder the grotesque environment, to take in the black and white ruined world, and figure out what the hell is actually going on.

    This book is confusing, and purposely so. The prose is written either as a sentence fragment or a stream of consciousness run-on sentence and, a lot of the time, is unrelated to the picture it is accompanying. On top of this, the writing and the pictures tell a non-linear story, adding to the narrative dissonance. Martin Vaugh-James is giving us a deep, difficult mystery to solve; we have the all the clues, it's just matter of putting everything together. And honestly, I don't know if we can, or if we even should.

    The Cage has been written about fairly extensively, and almost everyone says the same thing - this is a book that is meant to be experienced, not understood. In his monograph, La Construction de La Cage, Thierry Groensteen writes "In truth, all those who have taken the trouble to study these 180 pages, where the gaze is trapped and logic thwarted, have been stunned by the irreducible originality of The Cage, no less than by its disturbing strangeness." Vaugh-James provides us with everything we need to make sense of this story, but we're still left as bewildered as before.

    For me, the best word to describe this work is lynchian. There are so many shots of mundane objects, a bed, a fence, a decaying door, that illicit such a feeling of dread. Even if we can't tell what happened here, we know it wasn't anything good. I think this page perfectly showcases the unease you feel while reading The Cage. The crumbling rock structure and the suspended, piercing spikes contrasted against the painting of what the building used to look like, demonstrate that the passage of time has not been kind to this world, but still, we don't entirely know what happened here.

    The Cage remains one of the wholly unique works of this medium. There was certainly nothing like this before its release in 1975 (three years before A Contract with God, the "first" graphic novel), and while some modern comic books come close, nothing since has quite captured the feeling and atmosphere you get while reading this.