DRAWN & QUARTERLY Vol. 3
edited by Chris Oliveros
(Drawn & Quarterly) $24.95

Two new collections display the wealth of the comic-book medium: Blab #11 and Drawn & Quarterly Vol. 3. Interestingly, most of the work in Blab emphasizes design and visual impact over narrative, while Drawn & Quarterly's selection predominately explores various approaches to storytelling.

Blab is the more immediately gorgeous compilation, starting with Mark Rydan's lush cover: A doll-like child is escorting a midget Abraham Lincoln into a butcher shop run by an elongated rabbit... well, that may not sound beautiful, but Rydan's delicate brushwork and conflicting cues--slabs of raw, bloody meat contrasting with the bright pink and green color scheme and cute "look" of the figures--manage to be both pretty and unsettling (not unlike the work of Jim Woodring in effect, though very different in style). Within, Blab features such visual splendors as Blanquet's strange fairy tale told in silhouettes, Michael Hernandez de Luna's collage of nude figures and insects, Laura Levine's naive paintings of UFO sightings, and a collection of postcards featuring the "Krampus," a devilish figure who visited bad German children on Christmas morning. The few stories that are included tend toward the dreamlike, though a notable exception is Peter Kuper's "Spine," a vivid autobiographical tale about a childhood spinal tap.

Though the pictures are not as splashy, the delights of Drawn and Quarterly soon reveal themselves as one delves into this complex mix of stories. The centerpiece is "Monsieur Jean," a long, layered story by Phillipe Dupuy and Charles Berberian, about a French thirtysomething man grappling with commitment--which, put that way, sounds ghastly, but Dupuy and Berberian have an ear for character- revealing dialogue and an eye for simple but telling images and compositions. Other stories include Franco Matticchio's almost wordless tale of a pillow escaping from its owner, R. Sikoryak's version of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment filtered through Bob Kane's Batman, and Michel Rabagliati's slice-of-life story of an adolescent boy discovering the mysteries of his father's print shop. Father-son relationships are also a theme in a sweet collection of previously unpublished Sunday strips from Frank King's Gasoline Alley followed by Chris Ware's spot-on homage.