Britten and Brülightly
by Hannah Berry
Metropolitan Books

Britten and Brülightly is so good it’s hard to believe it’s Hannah Berry’s first book. Suspenseful, engrossing, beautifully painted, and extremely sad, it seems a book that should at least be Berry’s sophomore effort. Then again, she’s only 25.

Although it got some press, Britten and Brülightly, which was published in April by Metropolitan Books, seems to have sort of slipped under the radar in the U.S. Probably because it is the debut work by a little-known, 25-year-old woman who lives across the ocean in Brighton, England. But it did garner much attention and praise in the U.K., and having read it, I can safely say it deserves all of that commendation. This is undoubtedly one of the best graphic novels I’ve read in a while.

The book tells a classic noir story, following private detective Fernández Britten (who prefers the term “researcher”) as he investigates a suicide case. He has been hired by the fiancé of the deceased man, who is convinced her husband-to-be didn’t kill himself. As Britten unravels the details of the case, the situation becomes increasingly dangerous, violent, and confusing. In the end, the true story involves all the juicy bits of a good noir: blackmail, illegitimate children, more deaths, and a sad, sad truth.

To point out that the plot involves these things is mainly to say that Berry’s narrative succeeds as much as that of any well-crafted story of its kind; it’s tight and believable (in a complicated-mystery kind of way), albeit slightly confusing near the end when she reveals the truth in a beautifully rhythmic, wordless, two-page montage. What causes Britten and Brülightly to rise above, though, are the distinctive touches she brings to her chosen genre, the ways in which she makes it hers.

Take Britten’s partner, for example. From the start—a gray-blue and white page that shows Britten getting out of bed, already dressed and weary at 8 a.m.—Berry posits this half of the pair as the focus of the book, his first-person narration helping to carry the story. On the third page, he mentions his partner, Stewart Brülightly, and two pages later we meet the elusive man when Britten produces and starts conversing with a small white square. Is Brülightly a piece of paper? A photograph? It’s only on page seven that Berry spells out the situation for us: “Don’t be lecherous,” Britten says to Brülightly, “you’re a teabag.” “I’m a teabag with needs, Fern,” the latter replies.

This is definitely weird and punny (“brew lightly”) territory, but it’s interesting, too, especially as the book goes on. Britten, it becomes clear, is an extremely depressed man searching desperately for one case that will allow him to bring a little hope and positivity into the world. The fact that his partner is a teabag raises an important question about his mental stability: Are we to suspend our disbelief and assume the feasibility of a talking teabag in this fictive world? Or is Brülightly’s existence a sign of Britten’s mental instability as he finds it harder to live with himself and the nickname and reputation he has earned, “The Heartbreaker”? It is to the author’s credit that she can make what initially seems an absurdity into a valid point of discussion.

The book’s stunning artwork also deserves credit. Berry, who cites French comics, which are often fully painted, as her precedent, saying they have “incredible visual depth,” hand painted the entire book, frame by frame, page by page. The hard work paid off: the resulting palette feels charged and brooding despite its muted tones. The scenes look washed, as though we are constantly seeing them through a veil of rain or the fog of memory (it does rain a lot—this is England), which contributes to an overarching feeling that, like it does to Britten, the truth holds us at bay; we can only inch closer one thought or discovery at a time.

Panels painted from above or below eye level and full-page spreads that linger long enough on a scene to hint at voyeurism reinforce this sense that as readers, we are standing outside looking in, following the movements of the characters from behind a lens. And the lens analogy seems appropriate, as the book feels quite cinematic at times. It may come with the territory—most of the best noirs are films. But Berry proves quite ably that they don’t have to be.

–Jillian Steinhauer

The Fart Party Volume 2
By Julia Wertz
Atomic Books

When I first discovered The Fart Party almost two years ago, I was exhilarated: This comic has the best title ever! And it’s about a short funny girl who likes cheese (like me)! And she isn’t afraid to talk about farting (like me)! I picked up the first volume of collected Fart Party comics—many of which originally appeared online, and have since late 2005—read it voraciously, and fell in love.

Unfortunately, this created two problems for me when reading the second volume, published this summer by Atomic Books. The first is that my expectations were too high. The Fart Party: Volume 2 is still incredibly amusing and a lot of fun, but sometimes it just feels like more of the same. Wertz tackles the everyday in a way that is often hilarious, occasionally profound, and always honest and weird. She can turn working a shitty waitressing job or sharing a high-five with a hobo into an engaging comic strip, a talent much more difficult and rare than some people might realize. And yet at times, the punch lines here feel slightly stale, or perhaps repetitious. I couldn’t help but wonder if I had read them before in the first Fart Party. I wanted the book to have an infusion of something new and different.

In fact, the plot is different—markedly so, as Wertz and her boyfriend Oliver go long distance at the end of the first volume and break up in this one. So she becomes single, and then she travels around the country and decides to move to Portland. At the very last minute Portland becomes Brooklyn, and that is where we’re left at the end of the book: saying goodbye to San Francisco and nervously anticipating Brooklyn.

One feels that this should be difference enough, but it isn’t quite. What does provide some welcome variety is a handful of strips where Wertz lets her more contemplative side show. Though this sort of thing wouldn’t work on a constant basis, the occasional action-less comic about, for instance, how fog sometimes makes her picture herself meeting a dinosaur and handing him half a sandwich is refreshing. A few contributions by and collaborations with cartoonist Laura Park also spice things up nicely, in part due to the contrast between Wertz’s and Park’s drawing styles. And, as with the first volume, this book’s Fart Party Fun Pages are very aptly named. They also provide a chance to read other types of comics Wertz has created, which in turn gives one a greater appreciation of her talents.

This seems especially important as a way of balancing out the stick figure travel diaries, which are what they sound like: stick-figure comics that Wertz sketched during her journeys around the U.S. While I understand they were drawn in transit, and while some of them are pretty funny, after a while, they grated on my nerves. Wertz may be giving us a glimpse into her artistic process, but that doesn’t necessarily work in the context of a larger, polished book. Could she have redrawn some of them? Included fewer? I don’t know.

Then again, maybe I’m just being overly critical because I feel so attached to The Fart Party—which leads me to that second problem I mentioned. Once you fall in love with a book, a comic, an artwork, etc., you begin to feel a certain possessiveness for it. This gets even trickier when the object of your affection is done in the first person; then you begin to feel close to—and ownership of—not just the story but the characters. Wertz has created a comic so awesome, so relatable, so damn first-person, that if you fall for it, as I and countless others have, you’ll start to feel like it’s yours. You’ll hold it to your own set of standards. But that isn’t actually Wertz’s problem, it’s ours. Because she will always be herself, her own character, and she can do what she wants. We’re just along for the ride.

–Jillian Steinhauer

A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge
By Josh Neufeld
Pantheon

Every so often books come along that people in the literary establishment deem important. With a few notable exceptions, those books are usually not comic books (or graphic novels—whatever you want to call them). Those of us who love comics have been arguing for years that perhaps more of them should be. Most recently, our point has been reiterated by Josh Neufeld, whose latest work, A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, was just released by Pantheon. (The book was originally published as a web comic at the website of Smith magazine, albeit in shorter, slightly different form.)

Briefly stated, A.D. is about Hurricane Katrina, but more accurately, it’s about seven New Orleans residents and survivors of Katrina. They represent a range of races, socio-economic classes, and experiences, as Neufeld specifically wanted, in order to present as complete a picture of the storm as possible while still telling it from up close and inside. Some of the characters—who are all based on real people with whom Neufeld conducted extensive interviews—stay and ride (or fight) out the storm and its aftermath; others flee. Six of the characters lose their homes and nearly everything in them; only one has a fortress of a house, which escapes unscathed. One character has the distinct pleasure of being stranded at the now-infamous Convention Center, which initially seemed like a decent escape route and in a bitter twist ended up a nightmare.

The stories in A.D., like all of those that emerged and continue to emerge from New Orleans and Biloxi after the 2005 storm, run the gamut from upsetting to inspiring, horrifying to gratifying. In a way, Neufeld isn’t covering much new ground here. We all saw these stories on TV, read them in the news, heard them from friends of friends who lived through the incident themselves. And yet, he is. There have been plenty of books written about Katrina, but many have an academic bent, focusing on unraveling what exactly went wrong and how the storm became a disaster of such magnitude. Other books are nonfiction accounts that do take a personal approach, like Neufeld, but his visuals are so effective, the experience is undoubtedly different.

Which all brings up another point: A.D. is not only important but good. I suppose it might be hard to find the former without the latter, but noble attempts often end with varying degrees of success. A.D.’s is high. Neufeld structures the book in an orderly, understandable way—including grouping narrative sections together by color in order to clarify different stages of the action, i.e. the decision to stay, the decision to leave, the storm, and so on—and moves fluidly among his characters’ stories. He draws in a clear, detailed style and seems an artist clearly aware of his potential to rouse emotion—and is quite smart about doing so only intermittently. The book avidly avoids being a tear jerker; rather, it treats its subjects with respect and heightens their drama only when appropriate, when the situations the characters face are so heart-breaking or outrageous that it becomes Neufeld’s responsibility to remind us they’re real.

Perhaps that’s most important aspect of A.D., and of Neufeld’s job: reminding. Other national tragedies—Pearl Harbor, JFK’s assassination, September 11—have a set place in the public conscience, but Hurricane Katrina was something different, an event so muddled, confused, and mishandled, half the nation seemed to have missed its importance and its message, at least in the immediate aftermath. Neufeld vindicates the survivors when he tells their stories, but in the end, they live with those stories every day—they don’t need reminding. We do.

– Jillian Steinhauer

Far Arden
By Kevin Cannon
Top Shelf

It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. It’s a phrase that kept running through my head while I was reading Kevin Cannon’s new graphic novel, Far Arden. Perhaps because the book, which takes as its subject the “crusty old sea dog” and Arctic pirate Army Shanks and a host of other characters—including two semi-obnoxious college students, a jilted lover, an angry orphan, and mad scientist—on their quest for the paradise island of Far Arden, vaguely follows that setup. Starting off madcap, slapdash, and more than a little ridiculous, somehow, over the course of roughly 375 pages, it transforms into a sad, thoughtful, even stirring book. And while the transition may leave readers the slightest bit confused (not to spoil too much, but you might very well have a “Wait, she actually died?!” moment, as I did), it also avoids feeling forced and inconsistent. For some readers, like myself, it may even feel welcome.

The change in pace and tone may partly be accounted for by the way in which the book came about. The story is essentially the product of a 288-hour comic challenge, which is a multiplied version of the 24-hour comic challenge, which calls for a creator to create 24 pages of comics in 24 hours. For Cannon, who was prompted by a friend, the challenge was to create a graphic novel out of twelve 24-hour comics. But after the first four months he slowed his pace a little, he has said, a change that likely allowed the story to ease up in its frenzy and expand in its breadth.

Which isn’t to say that the first part of the novel disappoints. It is absurd but self-aware, and it plays up the absurdity successfully. It does, however, posit Far Arden as a certain kind of book—one that you breeze through, reading mainly for the plot and adventure—so when things start to get a little heavy, about mid-way through, you can’t  tell if Cannon will actually turn his adventure comedy into a tragedy. He does.

As such I found myself wondering, once finished, what the moral of the story is. The strongest contender: that paradise simply doesn’t exist. If you haven’t read the book, that may seem like an obvious notion, something we all realize when we pass from childhood to adulthood, but when you finish reading, you’ll feel the weight of that revelation all over again, just like growing up.

More than leaving readers sad, though, it leaves them thoughtful. The last five pages—probably the most powerful few in the book—really hit this idea home. After everything he’s been through, all he’s suffered, Shanks performs a series of simple, solitary actions, including returning home. In the last panel, which takes up the entire last page, he sits outside, smoking his pipe, with his dog, and while he doesn’t look happy, he doesn’t look entirely distraught either.

Part of the effectiveness of these pages is their general simplicity. Cannon’s drawing style is fairly simple and spare throughout, which complements the sometime insanity of the plot nicely, but it reaches a mature, composed peak at the very end. In these final pages, too, the lack of dialogue renders his chronic overuse of descriptors (action words like “sniff,” “bored sigh,” and “drag” abound in this book, to at least one reader’s incredible frustration) more acceptable. When we leave Army Shanks, he is thinking about everything he’s been through, perhaps searching for some meaning. I believe we are meant to do the same.

–Jillian Steinhauer

A Mess of Everything
By Miss Lasko-Gross
Fantagraphics

As the comics medium has flourished over the past decades, autobiographical (and semi-autobiographical) comics seem overdone—or are at least well on their way to being so. How many first-person stories about growing up do we really need? How different can they all really be? It’s hard to ignore such questions when picking up Miss Lasko-Gross’s second graphic novel, A Mess of Everything. The book, which is also number two in her semi-autobiographical trilogy, tells the tale of  Melissa, as she goes through high school. Admittedly, I wasn’t hugely excited by this prospect. I’ve read plenty of these types of books.

But A Mess of Everything surprised me. It turned out to be quite worthy: funny, insightful, and at times, moving. It’s not a revolutionary book—it doesn’t stretch or redefine the bounds of its genre—but Lasko-Gross reminded me that the beauty of her chosen genre is that everyone’s story is, in fact, different and unique. If the author is a skilled storyteller, it’s as good as a reason as any to read yet another graphic novel about growing up, even if you’ve already read many.

Let’s start with the title: It is perfect. When you’re a teenager, you pretty much always feel like you’ve made a mess of everything—or, even if it’s not your doing, like everything is a complete mess. Lasko-Gross hits the nail on the head with her title, which captures perfectly the angst that fills Melissa’s journey.

Said journey takes place in an comfortable, safe town where, as Melissa acknowledges, there’s virtually no violent crime or poverty. But, like teenagers the world over, she is unendingly bored and restless. Her experience in high school encompasses all the usual struggles for a girl her age: boys and sex, bitchy girl friends, girl friends with eating disorders, drugs, acne, and figuring out how to trust and be yourself. To top it all off, Melissa is extremely smart and precocious, finding high school to be “all ‘euro-supremacist’ and misogynistic lies.”

Lasko-Gross tells the story in short, individually titled episodes rather than as one continuous narrative—a series of snapshots, really. Though the vignettes stay in chronological order—no flashbacks or jumping around—this format affords her a certain freedom that regular storytelling would not. The opening episode acts as a kind of introduction, but beyond that, there is really no exposition. Lasko-Gross jumps right in to the meat of it, highlighting the relevant and important people or events and skipping the rest.

At times, this can be a little bit frustrating for the reader, as some characters appear once or twice only to vanish for good. We are left to assume that they have essentially vanished from Melissa’s life as well, or that they remain there but lurk in the unimportant background, but that doesn’t always seem to do them justice. One episode, “Not to Love” (which also contains the title line for the book), shows Melissa with a boyfriend, Elijah, who tells her he loves her. Although she enjoys his company, her thoughts let us know she doesn’t feel the same way. The story ends with the two kissing and then parting ways—but that’s it. Elijah never re-enters the book, and while we can assume they broke up, it’s a bit of miffing experience for the reader.

It does point, however, to the way in which Lasko-Gross posits Melissa as the absolute center of the book. Supporting characters are important for how they relate to her, for what they teach us about her, but ultimately they are just there to support. A Mess of Everything is the exploration of the psyche of one character, a premise emphasized by a recurring visual motif that represents Melissa’s thoughts. An abstract pattern that looks like a maze or a web of roots and suggests a brain or some kind of organic form, the pattern appears whenever she is deep in thought and serves almost as an aura.

It is a subtle, bluish-grey aura, though, pretty much in the same color tones as the rest of the book. The reason for this muted palette isn’t entirely clear—maybe because it hints at flashback, positing the story in the past, or because angst combined with bright colors might be a bit over-the-top. Either way, the art is nicely detailed and heavily shaded, giving the images a life of their own. And the title pages and panels for the episodes definitely have lives of their own: These expressionistic and sometimes semi-trippy drawings play up Lasko-Gross’s ability to tell a not-entirely new story in a novel way.

–Jillian Steinhauer

I Saw You…Missed Connection Comics
Edited by Julia Wertz
Three Rivers Press

Missed connections ads are a mixed bag of emotions: they’re at once funny, sad, creepy, and inspiring. So perhaps it’s only natural that we should turn to them for inspiration and for the creation of great and strange stories. Still, it’s an idea I would never have thought of. Luckily, Julia Wertz did.

Wertz, the creator of the hilarious autobiographical comic The Fart Party, started to find herself obsessed with reading missed connections ads a few years ago, and was struck by the idea of creating comics based on them. She put a call out to fellow cartoonists and received an overwhelming number of submissions, which led to the creation of a mini-comic, which led to a book, appropriately (if unexcitingly) titled I Saw You…, published by Three Rivers Press. As with pages of missed connections ads in newspapers or on Craigslist, I Saw You… is eclectic in terms of the length of the pieces, their tone, and their approach to the assignment. It is also great. The diversity of the content, as well as the overall talent of the contributors, make it an extremely enjoyable read.

The book is divided into six thematic parts that mostly just seem put there to impose some semblance of structure on contents that might otherwise ramble. Reading it is like reading a book of missed connections ads (inevitably entertaining), except better, because there’s more to each piece—each has two personalities (the author of the ad and the artist/interpreter, except for a handful of first-person contributions). Some of the best pieces are the ones that play on this fact, with the cartoonists creating clever stories that add a new layer to the ads from which they are born.

A prime example is one of Laura Park’s contributions, “The Three Women of Sunday,” in which a man whose ad talks about spending Sunday “watching and eating movies with three kind women” (his words) is actually a creepy guy parked outside the window of a ground-floor apartment, voyeuristically peering in and grinning while he sips a drink. David Malki’s piece, “Same Ol’ Saturday Night…” has a similarly witty twist, as the two people who shake with “damp hands” outside a bar bathroom and then go their separate ways to different birthday parties turn out to be clowns, with a particularly great (and slightly disturbing?) end panel of the two clowns having sex against a bathroom sink, of course in costume.

Beyond the twist factor, stories in the book stand out for countless other reasons. Some contributors get points for being charmingly creative—Nate Doyle, Kazimir Strzepek, and Kenny Keil among them—some are just plain funny, including the Daily Cross Hatch’s own Sarah Morean, Wertz (both of hers are quite amusing), Aron Nels Steinke, and a personal favorite, Jeffrey Brown; and still others really show off their artistic talent: Maria Sequeira’s fluid, almost swirling style; Rama Hughes’s bold panels that read almost like sequence of photographs; Aaron Renier’s pages, buzzing and full and nearly bursting.

And then of course there are the cartoonists who found such amazing ads that you wonder whether they spent whole days looking or just got lucky. These range from someone seeking out the doctor who performed her colonscopy (“I thought we hit it off!”) to a man who laments that the cute girl he eyed in the coffee shop pulled out a Mac (“you’ve been deceived by their cheesy ads and mediocre hardware”), to an ad looking for the “gore queen at the S&M party.” It begins, like a kind of craigslist fairy tale, “You were the Asian girl with the hacksaw torturing the helpless child…”

–Jillian Steinhauer

Quietly Sure-Like the Keeper of a Great Secret
By Jo Dery
Little Otsu

Artist Jo Dery’s first book is a simple and charming endeavor—even if it’s a bit touchy-feely. The slim, 88-page volume is a collection of brief, intertwined stories about the relationship between humans and nature. It follows four characters, “seekers and guides,” as the book’s publisher, Little Otsu, calls them, on their journeys in a natural landscape.

The story lines are a bit vague and far from literal: a spider follows a boy’s shadow (soul?) into his body, rendering him temporarily blind; a different boy, whose hair looks like a mini mountain range, talks to the moon, which then melts into a pond for him; and more of that sort of thing. Generally it reads like Dery either spends way too much time outdoors or perhaps too much time smoking peyote. But in a way, she has endeavored to create her own myths and folk tales, and in that sense, her efforts are not ill-conceived. There’s always the possibility that I’m just too much of a jaded urbanite to appreciate them—although I do think that good story-telling is much more complex than we judge it to be, and getting a 21st-century audience to think about its relationship to nature can be done far more effectively than it is in Quietly Sure.

But while the story lines flounder, Dery’s art succeeds. A flat, trippy, folk-art style, where patterns, objects, or scenes often float around, it is perfectly matched to the fragmented, weird stories. At certain moments, the art called to mind outsider art legend Martin Ramirez, with the use of incessant repetition of lines to create patterns. These patterns proliferate and intermittently hint at decorative abstraction, though they never fully go there.

The closest Dery comes is in the best spread of the book, near the end, when the hunter character is searching for the sea with a lizard on his shoulder. Night falls, and in those two particular pages, Dery seems to invert the book’s color palette from blue on white to white on blue—although it’s not entirely clear which color represents foreground and which background. And that’s what’s so great. The outlines of trees and other forms are equally difficult to discern, and the whole spread, nearly abstract, is delightful.

Dery has a Website where you can check out more of her work, all of which is consistent with what’s in Quietly Sure. But the site also has animations, and those I found much more engaging and suited to her artistic style. Then again, the readers of the art blog New England Journal for Aesthetic Research voted Dery and Quietly Sure their People’s Choice winner for books in the 2008 Boston Art Awards—so maybe I really have just been living in New York for too long.

–Jillian Steinhauer

Last weekend, while the rest of New York’s geek community were off getting their Star Wars and video game fixes at Comic Con, I ventured into the hippest of all indie territories—Williamsburg, Brooklyn—to check out a show that was closing at Cinders Gallery called “Adolescent Rage.”

The exhibition was the effort of Closed Caption Comics, a Baltimore-based collective of all-around creative folks who produce zines, comics, and art, as well as play in bands, run a music label—Lost Ghost Records—and organize an all-female performance festival, Puss Fust. Not bad.

The space at Cinders was given over entirely to Closed Caption, with all 10 of their artists represented in a combined total of more than 80 pieces. The work varied from quiet but intense nature drawings by Conor Stechschulte to Noel Freibert’s swirly, trippy screenprints of creatures and monsters, to the busy, sometimes crude, collages of Chris Day.

Considering the wide range of styles and large number of works, the exhibition was surprisingly cohesive—like carefully ordered chaos. Walking into Cinders, it was immediately clear that this was the work of a collective, a group of like minds. There was an overall aesthetic and attitude—a kind of off-the-cuff, DIY, “why the hell not?” mentality—that permeated all of the art. Also a general lack of concern for reality, except insofar as it could inspire the creation of weirder, alternative ones.

To that end, personal favorites included Ryan Cecil Smith’s amusing take on the classic camp bunk photograph, Muscle Camp, and an excerpt from Closed Caption Comics #7 by Lane Milburn in which a group of people descends into a dark room in what looks like a castle to behold and marvel at a book.

The show is over, and I lament not having written about it sooner to give New Yorkers the chance to check it out. But Closed Caption is a busy collective: Their zine comes out twice a year (the release of Closed Caption Comics #8 coincided with the Cinders show), and as previously mentioned, they have lots more going on. Track their movements and pin them down by checking out their blog, closedcaptioncomics.blogspot.com.

–Jillian Steinhauer

Forecast: Nozone X
Ed. by Nicholas Blechman
Princeton Architectural Press

As humans, we have a collective obsession with predicting the future. From utopian and dystopian novels to doomsday movies to TV programs where families drive space ships instead of cars, our concerns about the government, technology, and the unknown territory of outer space have forever driven us to guess, predict, and resolve our way into the next century. But these days, as we expedite global warming with our bad habits and the planet increasingly goes to shit, it seems like an especially pertinent time to look into the future and try to predict what’s coming—for the sake of showing people that we must try to stop (or at the very least, delay) it.

Enter Forecast: Nozone X, the 10th and latest installment of Nozone, a graphic design and comics zine launched in 1998 by Nicholas Blechman. Blechman is an illustrator-designer and the art director of the New York Times Book Review, so Forecast is inevitably more design- than comics-focused. It also looks much more like a book than a magazine, or whatever you might expect from something called a “zine,” a word which conjures up images of DIY, stapled booklets in this writer’s mind.

Forecast is, predictably, about predicting the future, in light of the crappy way we treat our planet. It is filled with ideas that we’ve all heard before: In the future, we will be able to specify the eye color and foot size of our babies before we have them; most of New York, and the world for that matter, will be sunk below the rising sea level; and perhaps—just perhaps—the apocalypse, or the rapture (!), is upon us. None of this repetition is necessarily bad. Recycled ideas can be presented in new and refreshing ways, such as in John Fulbrook’s contribution, a spare and timely retelling of the story of Chicken Licken, who thinks the sky is falling.

Some of the book’s content, however, feels a bit stale or trite. Other contributions read as too preachy in the company of more subtle and wittier takes on the issues at hand. Still others just aren’t as funny as they hope to be. As can happen with design, Forecast struggles with the question of form versus function. The anthology looks fabulous and is fun to flip through, but when you sit down to actually read it, the content has trouble keeping pace with the presentation.

It does hit its full stride at certain moments, with a number of stand-out contributions that hammer home just how trapped we may really be. A two-page spread by Julia Hasting of black comics panels filled only with drops of falling rain is haunting; endpapers by Christoph Niemann that consist of funny flowcharts for the cycle of life will make you smile; a diagrammatic guide to pod living by Nick Kulish and Shi Yeon Kim will make you laugh; and meeting your maker, through the work of Christian Northeast, will kind of creep you out. Forecast will no doubt get you thinking about the future, but probably in a less constructive way than you might have hoped.

- Jillian Steinhauer

In The Country Nurse, the final installment of Jeff Lemire’s Essex County trilogy, the artist is obsessed with images—the image of the open farmland of Essex County, the image of a crow flying in front of the moon, the image of a boy growing up and learning the truth about who he is. He uses these composite images to complete a larger picture, started in the first two books in the series, of Essex County, a fictionalized version of his hometown.

In a real sense, then, Essex County is the protagonist of the three books. Whereas so often in series based on locations—consider any TV show set in a particular locale, for starters—the plots of the characters’ lives become the focus of the story, here the reverse is true: The tales of these characters are woven into the larger fabric of the story of Essex County, and the stories are important not so much for what happens in them as for how they represent life in the county. The lives of the people in Essex County become emblematic of the place, rather than subsuming it with their own drama.

Thus Lemire tells about his characters and their pasts, but in a very unassuming, unhurried way. As we read, we do not feel like we are racing toward any plot conclusions; we are merely observing and taking in what is set before us. The book is a feat of controlled tone and atmosphere. Lemire sets a slow pace that in turn mimics the pace of life in Essex County, where little really “happens” from day to day.

Because the plot is not at the forefront of the novel, the art is extremely important; luckily, it doesn’t disappoint. Lemire’s black-and-white drawings are poignant and at times deeply personal. He often prefers that we get to know the characters by reading the expressions on their faces, and sometimes their thoughts, rather than relying on dialogue. In one especially well-done scene, for instance, when Lester, who we met as a younger boy in book one, finally finds out who his father is, Lemire skips the conversation between uncle Ken (who is raising Lester) and his nephew altogether. Instead, Ken tells Lester that “we need to talk,” and what follows is a silent two-page spread that beautifully renders the slight movements indicative of the conversation. Lemire even removes us from the room in which they are talking, placing us outside the window as spectators, along with a crow.

The wonderful thing about a passage like this is the balance that he strikes between story and form. We are engaged in what is happening—we have been waiting since book one for Ken to tell Lester about his father—but also how it is happening—the sparse, simple drawings that distill an emotionally charged conversation down to a handful of understated moments in time.

–Jillian Steinhauer