There's a rift in taste that happens sometimes between me and my fellow comic-book aficionados. When a book is sometimes considered too smart for its own good, many will turn up their noses, call it pretentious, and leave it there. For me, when this type of stuff really works, its cream of the crop. Anders Nilsen's deceptively ordinary drawings are used here at first to depict the common theme of isolation, loneliness, dejection and alienation - all in a seemingly unremarkable set of light pencil drawings and straightforward narrative device. But as those feelings deepen in the protagonist, the book stops talking with words, and shows in pure graphic simplicity the degradation of a human soul. The people turn into odd uncomfortable shapes, turned, twisted, burned and ultimately reduced to nothing but dots. All the torments of the grimmest Dostoyevsky character here are expressed in a progression of grotesque images which convey the impossible maze of our own minds. Pick this one up if you're ready for a challenge.
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