"The long-awaited follow-up to The Resurrectionist, this gorgeously illustrated volume continues the story of Dr. Spencer Black. Genius. Healer. Madman. Destroyer.
Once, a gifted surgeon believed he could cure all illness with quick strokes of his knife, that he could create perfection in the human body. Spencer Black’s fascination with mythical creatures led him to believe they had once lived and walked upon the earth; he became determined to re-create them.
Triumphant for a time, Dr. Black traveled the world, opening people’s eyes to wonder and horror, until tragedy struck. He lost nearly everything, including his son, Alphonse. But Dr. Black’s desire to usher in a new world remained unquenched. He married machinery and medicine in a quest to form new beings who would lead humanity into a golden age of immortality and perfection.
Word spread of Dr. Spencer Black’s philosophy, growing into the Noumenon, a community where all were welcome, regardless of faith, ethnicity, creed, or state of health. Acolytes flocked there from across the United States, caught up in Dr. Black’s vision of the future.
Presented here in deeply interwoven words and illustrations, The Cult of Dr. Black is told through meticulously rendered anatomical drawings, melancholic images from Alphonse’s notebooks, newspaper clippings, and even the guiding texts of the Noumenon.
Herein lies an entire world, created by E. B. Hudspeth for the reader’s enjoyment …"
"This macabre tale—part dark fantasy, part Gray’s Anatomy—tells the chilling story of a man driven mad by his search for the truth, with hypnotic and horrifying images.
Philadelphia, the late 1870s. A city of gas lamps, cobblestone streets, and horse-drawn carriages—and home to the controversial surgeon Dr. Spencer Black. The son of a grave robber, young Dr. Black studies at Philadelphia’s esteemed Academy of Medicine, where he develops an unconventional hypothesis: that the mythological beasts of legend and lore—including mermaids, minotaurs, and satyrs—were in fact humanity’s evolutionary ancestors. And beyond that, he wonders: what if there was a way for humanity to reach the fuller potential these ancestors implied?
The Resurrectionist offers two extraordinary books in one. The first part is a fictional biography of Dr. Spencer Black, from his childhood spent exhuming corpses through his medical training, his travels with carnivals, his cruel and crazed experiments, and, finally, his mysterious disappearance. The second part is Black’s magnum opus: The Codex Extinct Animalia, a Gray’s Anatomy for mythological beasts, all rendered in meticulously detailed anatomical illustrations."
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