The Number 73304-23-4153-6-96-8 [Hardcover]

T. Ott (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 18, 2008

A horrific graphic novel, without words.

Swiss horror master Thomas Ott returns with the first full-length graphic novel of his career. When clearing up the cell of a prisoner who has been sentenced to death and subsequently executed, a prison guard finds a small piece of paper with a combination of numbers on it.

On the spur of the moment, he puts it into his pocket.

As the guard lives a solitary, monotonous life, the numbers on the paper awake his curiosity. To find out their hidden meaning could add a new meaning to his life as well, so the guard stumbles into situations in which the number or part of it seem to achieve a certain importance and offer him hints and possible solutions. And the numbers signal a radical change in his luck. He gets to know a woman, falls in love with her, and one night, in a casino, he wins a huge amount of money when gambling on these numbers.

But the next morning, the woman and money have disappeared.

The man goes in search of the woman and the money. But from that day on, his luck changes and the numbers bring him only bad luck, sending him inexorably into an abyss that he might not recover from. Thomas Ott's O. Henry-esque plot twists will delight fans of classic horror like The Twilight Zone and Tales from the Crypt, or modern masters like filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan; his hallucinatory, hyper-detailed scratchboard illustrations will haunt you long after you've put the book down.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

The Swiss master of fatalistic noir here engrossingly envisions a story too corny for words, which contemporary crime-fiction writers wouldn’t touch. Except as pictorial elements (e.g., on signs and shirts, as logos and mastheads), Ott doesn’t, however, use words, just his humanistic mastery of the demanding scratchboard technique. In his art, figures are weighty and firm, buildings massive, furnishings and implements blunt and homely. The cinematic analogue of his work is 1920s German expressionism, whose primary master, F. W. Murnau, might have made a masterpiece out of the very gimmick that Ott exploits here. A man picks up a strip of paper with a hyphenated number printed on it and puts it in his Bible. Subsequently, he is executed. While coiling up the electric-chair cables, the executioner finds the strip. Subsequently, he sees the numerals on the strip in the sequence on the strip as he goes about his everyday life. Following the number leads to some very good fortune, and to his doom. Perhaps only Ott could make this slight conception so powerful. --Ray Olson

Review

“The bizarre plot twists and moody, David Lynch-esque horror from Swiss suspense master Thomas Ott don’t disappoint.” (Wizard )

“The Swiss master of fatalistic noir here engrossingly envisions a story too corny for words, which contemporary crime-fiction writers wouldn’t touch.” (Ray Olson - Booklist )

“From artistic, design, and narrative standpoints, Ott creates a masterpiece of contemporary graphic storytelling that knows no geographical or linguistic boundaries.” (Rick Klaw - Sfsite.com )

“Ott’s hyper-meticulous attention to how detail relates to used space and negative space is at once both unsettling and captivating, utilizing a form of technical, pen-like cross-hatching for essentially every line that can only be described as Robert Crumb on Adderall.” (C. R. Stemple - Pads & Panels )

“A wonderfully crafted horror story that moves along briskly to the end but which lingers in the reader’s mind for much longer.” (Sam Gafford - PopMatters.com )

“Ott has once again produced a twisted, scary masterpiece.” (Neel Mukherjee - The Times Online )

“The end of the tale isn’t surprising, but the way that the logic is worked out to its predestined conclusion is nice, and the drawings are wonderful.” (Journey into Perplexity )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books (June 18, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560978759
• ISBN-13: 978-1560978756
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,112,553 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars take a number...., June 16, 2008

By 

curt dilger (phila usa) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Number 73304-23-4153-6-96-8 (Hardcover)

I've been waiting for this book, since I am a big fan of Thomas Ott's work, some of the finest being done in graphic novels, and I was convinced this one would be special. The underlying story is deepening in his work, and now this book has resolved one of the critical conceptual problems in the graphic novel in a beautiful way. The best graphic novelists understand that the balloon is the death of creativity, unless used ironically, knowingly, and instead find other, more deeply felt ways to insinuate the textual element into the graphic narration. Shaun Tan's recent publication, The Arrival, is another fantastic realization of this issue and has its own brilliant solution. Ott here uses a long hyphenated number, a deliberately cross lingual cypher, printed on a small strip of paper, to show a hopscotch-like narrative, involving a talismanic relation between this paper "master" number carried by two different men, and their "sinthomic" relationship with fragments of this number, as they wander through the labyrinth of their mathematically foreclosed fate.

Very poignant and beautiful parable, perfect for the medium. There are no pyrotechnics with the format; it is a laconic distribution of plates, four at the most per page, its sobriety a reiteration of the story's bleak progress. But all of the drawings clearly reveal a labor of love, a superbly crafted scratchboard subtractive drawing technique that has become Ott's trade mark.

Three observations always seem to emerge from books of this quality that argue for them in favor of film. The speed with which the story can be "skimmed" its essence extracted, is amazing, far faster than filmic media, and under the control of the viewer, who can himself decide on the story's rhythm, on which drawings to linger. Also, the graphic novelist has considerably more freedom in format, instead of fairly restricted industry aspect ratios in filmic media (I'm reminded very much here of Sergei Eisenstein's essay "the Dynamic Square"). Finally, the comprehensive mise-en-scene of graphic novels is equally impressive to film (admittedly without the soundtrack), but it can be realized by one person and can represent an undiluted, uncompromised, excellent work of imaginative, innovative, narrative art, striving to capitalize its A. Very Highly Recommended. And thought provoking far beyond the work itself.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Story to Be Savored, November 24, 2009

By 

GraphicNovelReporter.com (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Number 73304-23-4153-6-96-8 (Hardcover)

How long can you spend reading a book without words? Quite a bit, it turns out, and when the book is as good as The Number 73304-23-4153-6-96-8, you can see why. You can lose yourself for long spells in each lush image on every page.

Writer and illustrator Thomas Ott sets the tone early. His detailed, line-filled black-and-white drawings recall film noir, and his "Twilight Zone"-like tale of obsession and greed creeps steadily along to a conclusion you know must come but desperately hope to avoid.

With no words or dialogue, Ott's unnamed protagonist, an electric chair operator for the local prison, arrives at work to do his job. From the executed prisoner's last possession, his Bible, falls a strip of paper with the numbers 73304-23-4153-6-96-8 printed on it. Their meaning is lost, but the executioner keeps the paper anyway, and soon he notices their importance. Everything in his life is running on a pattern, the numbers repeating in strange and unexpected ways: a dog tag, a phone number, an address, a sequence of winning numbers on a roulette wheel.

Unable to resist the temptation of using this numerical foreknowledge for his own gain, he falls prey to his own vices. This is where The Number 73304-23-4153-6-96-8 truly begins to shine, as a smart morality tale with a devious twist. It works as a sharp allegory to the notion that people see what they want to see, form patterns where they wish them to appear, and surrender logic to passion. Those patterns repeat, seemingly on an endless loop, and while it appears to be a wonderful progression at first, the horror of the entire situation slowly dawns on reader and protagonist alike.

Ott has a wonderful way of capturing the mysterious beauty of the unknown through the eyes of his everyman. In the timeless era in which the story is set, nothing feels real, yet everything is as familiar as the back of one's hand. There's an overwhelming sense of danger lurking just somewhere in the edges, hidden in the shadows of these drawings, pervading every scene with that terrible prescient feeling things are far different from what they seem and that everything will be changing soon. Even the passage of time is shrouded in mystery, or at least obscured.

Sustaining this ominous feeling throughout the entire story is a difficult task, but Ott manages it with ease. Credit his natural ability to tell a story in pictures with keeping this ambitious project from ever sinking to the level of trite. With or without words, The Number 73304-23-4153-6-96-8 is a story to be savored--and one that resonates.

-- John Hogan

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfection, January 28, 2009

By 

C Wahlman "cdub" (Merrillville, IN) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Number 73304-23-4153-6-96-8 (Hardcover)

I am afraid my review will not be as eloquent, or as knowledgeable, as the other, but this graphic novel is so perfect, I have to write about it.

I stumbled upon Thomas Ott here on Amazon while searching for something else. The brief description was so intriguing, I decided to buy it.

As a product, it is superb. High quality hard cover book with Ott's beautiful illustrations are a steal at this price.

As for the art, the story is incredibly interesting and innovative. The visual conveys so much, words would have been a distraction blatantly stating the obvious. I was able to glance through the book quickly, understanding the story perfectly. Upon further review later, I took a much deeper look at the images and found a better appreciation.

I am thrilled I stumbled upon this. I am now in search of more Ott. I highly recommend it.