Little Nothings: The Prisoner Syndrome by Lewis Trondheim

Little Nothings: The Prisoner Syndrome
By Lewis Trondheim
NBM

He’s taken on a lot over the past decade and a half. There have been aliens and vampires and dungeons and dragons. In 2000 he wrote about the adventures of Santa Claus, and in 2001 it was the story of pint-sized king. It was the following year, however, that Lewis Trondheim took on what was, perhaps, the most difficult subject matter of his storied career—his own life. That year’s four volume Travel Notebooks marked a return to autobiography, after years spent tackling nearly every other subject in the known universe. The trend continued with the sublimely titled Nothing Diaries, which have subsequently been collected in the States as the volumes, Little Nothings.

The title, of course, is a happy little piece of self-deprecation, Trondheim’s not-so-subtle declaration of the banality of his day-to-day existence—and perhaps, by proximity, a swipe at the inevitable self-indulgence of such a project. The artist largely lives up to his title, writing about printer cartridges and saliva production and a weird spherical object ejected from his nasal cavity while blowing his nose. In that sense, the artist has captured the zen-like mundanity of the genre.

But Trondheim’s position as one of the continent’s most celebrated cartoonists affords him a certainly level of geographical freedom not often offered to other diary strip cartoonist—it’s an opportunity that that artist takes advantage of fairly often over the course of the book, traveling to festivals, ceremonies, and conferences. Early on in the proceedings, on a trip to Nantes, in his native France, Trondheim discovers the term that gives this volume its subtitle: ‘the prisoner syndrome.’

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Why I Killed Peter by Alfred and Olivier Ka

Why I Killed Peter
By Alfred and Olivier Ka
NBM

NBM doesn’t offer much to go on. There’s the title of course—loaded but cryptic—suitable perhaps for a B movie thriller or a murder mystery. On the cover is a simple silhouette of a shadowy figure—Peter perhaps? The other side of the book offers only a quick pull quote from the text: “Peter is a liberal priest. He’s cool. He’s funny. He’s not a priest, he’s like a regular guy. It’s like I have a new uncle. A great one, who laughs, who sings, who tickles.” The back flap, meanwhile, offers a less than modest note from publisher NBM, that reads, in part, “Novels in the true sense [are] about exploring our lives, our feelings, our experiences…Here are the most intelligent comics the world has to offer.”

It’s a sad sign of the world’s current state, perhaps, that from these dissonant elements, we can glean some sense of the subject matter contained herein—the self-serious copy, a shadowy figure, a tickling priest. Pulling the pieces together, it becomes pretty clear why the company opted to forgo a straight-forward summary for the back of the book. After all, this is not sort of subject matter that moves comics in the direct market world. For that matter, Why I Killed Peter isn’t the kind of book that tends to draw a lot of sales from casual comic shop browsing. Rather, it’s the manner of book whose success traditionally hinges on industry buzz and critical acclaim. Fortunately for NBM, it’s likely to garner both.

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