Martin Vaughn-James's The Cage is usually called a book without people: empty rooms, a bed covered in sand, a cage in the middle of a desert, and captions like "a modest little room." But Thierry Groensteen, who bought all the originals and working notebooks for the French national comics centre, found a character there. In his reading, on page 83 the artist himself is killed, or his shadow.
Vaughn-James drew the book from 1972 to 1974, mostly in Paris. It came out in Toronto in 1975 in a print run of 1,500 copies and then stayed out of print for decades, until Coach House reissued it in 2013.
What led Vaughn-James to this book was reading Robbe-Grillet's For a New Novel. He had illustrated the "new novelists" himself, mostly for Éditions de Minuit, and in the preface to the reissue he lists Last Year at Marienbad among his sources. That explains how the book is built: the captions often don't match the picture on the same page. They describe something drawn elsewhere, or sounds that can't be drawn.
In a working notebook he wrote that the bed shown at the start can't be the same one when it appears next, because dozens of other pictures have passed between them. The book had its own life in France: a translation came out from Les Impressions Nouvelles in 1986, in 2002 Groensteen published a monograph on how The Cage is made, and in 2024 the publisher printed the book again with his essay and pages from the author's notebooks. Vaughn-James himself mostly painted from the mid-1980s on, and he died in Provence in 2009.
