Comic book series : Hwy 115

A road movie featuring two detectives, René and Agatha, on the tracks of Robert Illot, a.k.a. "The Heimlich Killer," a serial killer whose modus operandi is to suffocate his victim with various objects (including chickens and lightbulbs) along the highways and byways of France. As they get closer and closer to catching up with him, seeking out and interrogating men and women from his past life at the insane asylum, he always stays one step ahead and the row of corpses grows longer and longer... In this lengthy original graphic novel by Matthias Lehmann (his first, released to great acclaim in his native France earlier this year), dreams and flashbacks converge with the ongoing narrative, done in Lehmann's hypnotically intense and insanely labor-intensive woodcut style to form a dark and disquieting vision of humanity.

2007 Eisner Award nominee: Best U.S. Edition of International Material

"An impeccably constructed graphic novel... Lehmann's first full-length comic is also a technical and esthetic tour de force. Conceived down to the smallest detail, every panel was created on scratchboard. Thus Lehmann allows the blackness of the events to leap out from the depths of his drawing." – Livres Hebdo

"All the basic elements of David Lynch's film work can be seen in Hwy. 115, without ever sliding into plagiarism... It's not difficult to interpret thte gesture of scratching through a thick layer of black to allow the light to shine out as an allegory for psychoanalysis and, by extension, for the detective story... Lehmann displays in this book an honesty that has long been missing from Lynch's predigested cinema." – Chronic'art