IT NEVER HAPPENED AGAIN: Two Stories - Softcover

"Two thematically divergent, but devastatingly human portraits from an emerging cartoonist displaying the sort of storytelling and artistic restraint that often only comes after years of toiling away at the drawing board. Alden is a talent to watch."--Publishers Weekly "Alden's natural sense of framing and pace, his willingness to use silent panels to tell stories, and his beautiful (yes, beautiful) pencil images combined to open my eyes to a new idea of what a great comic can be. It helps that he's also an excellent writer--both stories sketch out lonely, lost characters efficiently, and put them each through very different quests for meaning."--Slate "Alden's pencil drawings play beautifully with light and shadow. Each page uses just the right amount of detail, and no more, to accurately portray emotion. His loose, sketchy style renders the soul of each scene more perfectly than a finely detailed drawing would."--Foreword Reviews "His moody, nuanced visuals and intuitive, empathetic character work [...] reveal an already startlingly mature young talent. It is genuinely exciting to contemplate how he will further develop in the years ahead."--The Comics Journal "When I first saw "Hawaii 1997" on Tumblr, I read the whole thing "without trying" -- a compliment usually reserved for masters of wordless ligne claire cartooning. It's extremely difficult to make a comic rich with atmospheric lights and shadows while remaining 100% easy to read as a comic. "Hawaii 1997" did it. "Anime" is a more complicated and nuanced story that admirably gives the reader space to form their own opinions on its protagonist. I'm excited to read whatever Alden does."--Dash Shaw, creator of New School, Bodyworld and Bottomless Belly Button "One of the top 10 most anticipated Graphic Novels of the year."--Publishers Weekly "Since [Sam Alden's] 2013 Ignatz award [...] was based on part on "Hawaii," it is "Anime" that carried the burden of revealing whether that promise was going to be realized going forward. And "Anime," his best work to date, more than stands up to the considerable pressure a young cartoonist faces when declared "most likely" by his profession. This is a volume, and a cartoonist, that in every way lives up to those expectations and sets us up for beautiful things to come."--Guttergeek "James Joyce wrote that the moment of an epiphany in a story was when "the soul of the commonest object ... seems to us radiant, and may be manifested through any chance, word or gesture." Alden finds this in "Hawaii 1997."--Robert Boyd "The emotional and communicative aspect is at the heart of [Sam Alden's] cartooning. The relationship between artist and audience is incredibly direct and even by merely looking at his panels you'll have the feeling that they've been drawn only for you."--Just Indie Comics

Here are two exquisite stories set at different times in the author's life. In Ignatz Award nominated "Hawaii 1997," few words are spoken, but Sam Alden's imagery evokes the magic of a nighttime encounter at a Hawaiian resort. In "Anime" he explores the complicated dynamics of pop culture obsession. Alden is one of the brightest young talents working today. Sam Alden was born in 1988 in Portland, Oregon. In 2013 he was an official guest at the BilBOLbul festival in Bologna, Italy, his comic Haunter was excerpted in Best American Comics 2013, and he is the recipient of the Ignatz Award for Promising New Talent. He now lives and works as an illustrator and cartoonist in Montreal.