Sabrina

"Nick Drnaso made my top five in 2016; I’ve been a fan of his for a long time and I was really happy to see that other people have become big fans of his too through the attention surrounding the Booker Prize. Sabrina has a really startling story and a really startling style. It’s an amazing economical example of comics fiction today and was appropriately embraced by the world of fiction. For instance, not only was it recognized by prize committees, it also attracted blurbs from the literary likes of Zadie Smith. It’s a very dark story about the kidnapping and murder of a young woman, and the aftermath of that murder and how her boyfriend tries to cope with her death. “The simpler the rendering, the more a reader can see themselves in the characters portrayed” Part of what this book does really powerfully is pay attention to the process of mourning and grief. It’s also a searing media critique: it comes out in the story that the person who had murdered Sabrina had had filmed the murder, and the tape is leaked. The book takes on the painful subject of conspiracy theorists who deny that the murder happened. So it becomes a book about mourning and modern media, rendered in a minimalist style that’s very stripped down and effective given the maximalist parameters of the plot. A couple of things. First, there is a lot of attention to expressiveness in this book. The characters’ rigid, blocky bodies draw readerly attention to the characters’ faces. For instance, the cover is just a stripped-down, three-quarters-angle portrait of Sabrina. So, like all the panels, attention is drawn to the face. It invites readers in a participatory way to look for reactions in gestures, body language, and facial expressions. This is a quality of comics that Scott McCloud talked about: the simpler the rendering, the more a reader can see themselves in the characters portrayed. Sabrina is a really good example of that. We find ourselves searching the faces on the page."