For a handful of pages in Nick Drnaso's new graphic novel, the title character of Sabrina is a real person. We see her eat, talk, and laugh with her sister. But after she's brutally killed on camera, strangers on the internet pick apart her death like it's a twisted sign of the times.
Sometimes it can be hard to remember that the word "Disney" comes from a real person's name. The company that the legendary mogul built is frighteningly powerful and ubiquitous - and his last name has come to connote, sometimes pejoratively, a certain artistic sensibility. A new graphic novel called Von Spatz is a trippy reminder that there was an actual man behind the mouse.
Sometime in the future of Woman World, men will be nothing more than faintly remembered creatures at the heart of grandmothers' fairy tales. Myths will be passed on about what they were like and the inheritors of the Earth will wonder… "Why did men have nipples?"
Uncomfortably Happily is the rare graphic novel that remains still for long periods of time. That's not to say the comic is ever boring, only that it makes the most of its quiet and relies on strongly developed and clearly motivated characters, rather than complicated plot, to tell its story.
In 1997, Christophe André was kidnapped while serving with Doctors Without Borders in a town near Chechnya. Guy Delisle's Hostage recounts the three months that André spent in captivity, and proves the idea that all you really need to make a fantastic comic is a captivating story and a sense of style.
Adrian Tomine creates the kinds of comics that you don't want to recognise yourself in. They're the polar opposite of power fantasies, and it's hard to find anything like a hero in his panels. But they make for damn good reading.
