Killing And Dying

"The six short stories of Killing and Dying fit squarely in the genre of Comics About People Being Horrible To Each Other dominated by such virtuosos of alienation as Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes. With surgical precision, Adrian Tomine dissects the everyday conflicts and unhealthy patterns that engulf couples and families: A would-be artist lashes out at his patient wife; a father grapples with his daughter’s embarrassing attempts at stand-up comedy; an alcoholic woman falls in with a man she knows she should not. Yet there’s nothing clinical about the empathy Tomine feels for his characters or the specificity of detail in his art; together, they create a world the reader cannot merely observe from a safe remove — a world so unsettlingly familiar it can’t help but implicate us, and pull us in."