Comics Alternative

For this week's review show, Gene and Derek are back with an extra long episode jam-packed with nougaty comics goodness. They begin with Adrian Tomine's Killing and Dying (Drawn and Quarterly), his new book collecting issues twelve through fourteen of Optic Nerve. (Be sure to check out the guys' previous reviews of Optic Nerve #13 and Optic Nerve #14.) The text contains six separate short stories, and the guys start by trying to find any connective tissue binding the pieces together. Derek observes that every other story in the collection -- "Amber Sweet," "Translated, from the Japanese," and "Intruders" -- are first-person narratives functioning as confessionals of some sort. Also, the three longer stories that precede each of these "confessions" become progressively darker in tone. The overt humor embedded in "A Brief History of the Art Form Known as 'Hortisculpture'" gives way to the ambivalence of "Go Owls," which leads to the more ambiguously somber "Killing and Dying." Yet this is not a story cycle, by