Comics Alternative

It's Wednesday, which means that the Doctoral Duo return to share their recommendations of recent releases! And this week, Gwen and Derek focus on three exciting, yet quite diverse, new titles. They begin with Nick Dranso's Beverly (Drawn & Quarterly), a series of six stories set in a Midwest suburban landscape, where individuals grapple with friendships, alienation, and the uncertainties of growing up. Gwen notes the dark poignancy of these narratives, character studies that often make the reader uncomfortable and made all the more effective through Dranso's clean lines and simple illustrative style. What struck Derek was the book's construction. This isn't a "traditional" collection of separate stories -- something like you would find, for example, in Eleanor Davis's How to Be Happy or Adrian Tomine's Killing and Dying -- but a text more akin to a short-story cycle, a collection of discrete stories, each of which could stand on its own, but all interconnected in such a way that a fuller meaning is generated