Maps by Chris Auman

Maps by Chris Auman is an illustrated atlas depicting an imaginary continent in a fictitious world. Each page is a section of a small continent existing on some unknown planet.

Specs.

4.9″ x 6.9″ 24 pages, glossy 110 lb color cover, color throughout, stapled, 100 lb paper, satin finish

Maps, An Illustrated Atlas

I have always loved maps, even though I have occasionally gotten lost even with their help. I love looking at the mass transit map of your city, even if I’ll never ride a train there. A book with a map in it is a book I want to read. Not long ago, I relocated to a city of which I was only slightly familiar. I used a map to plan out a theoretical existence before I moved.

You don’t see poverty on a simple map of landmasses and oceans. You don’t see litter, pollution, crumbling industries, or societal unrest. You see instead a very orderly representation of things. Whatever is going on down there, whatever it is you’re observing from the eye of a bird, is going exactly according to plan.

The best thing about drawing your own map is that it’s impossible to make a mistake. How could you get something wrong—a road, a river, an international boundary—when what you’ve drawn did not exist before you drew it? When you have no preconceived idea about what you’re mapping, you just put pencil to paper and go. You’re not just a cartographer. You’re a world creator. A god? I didn’t say that, but now that you mention it…

Review of Maps

Generally speaking, there are two types of people who read books with maps heavily featured in them. There’s the type who obsess over the details and gladly call out the author if the movements they describe wouldn’t make any sense in their own maps (hello Game of Thrones!) and the readers who ignore the maps. Chris, as he makes very clear in his introduction, is the former type, even going so far as to say that he’ll read books specifically because they have maps in them. This comic is a natural outgrowth of that obsession (and a companion to his Cities comic). Maps let you wonder what life would be like on different sections, where (if it’s not accompanied by a global map) they could be placed on a planet, what the environment might be like, etc. The sample image gives the game away a bit, but the rest of the comic is close-up images of different sections of the map, and it wouldn’t make much sense to use one of those images with no context. This is one of those cases where whether or not you should check out this comic is a simple question. Are you obsessed by, or at least interested in, maps and speculating about what might be going on in there? Or do you ignore the maps? Folks who are the former type, come on down! Probably should go ahead and get the set of this along with Cities so you have full context too. — Kevin Bramer, Optical Sloth