Two D+Q books highlighted in Austin Chronicle

The Contradictions

by Sophie Yanow

Drawn & Quarterly 204 pp. $24.95

This is the Eisner-winning story of a student traveling around Europe and "figuring out radical politics in a messy world full of contradictions." This is Sophie Yanow's time abroad as a young college student, rendered in her black-and-white simple-line style (think Hergé and you won't be disappointed) and redolent of what life is actually like when you're that age and doing those things: funny, dull, revelatory, problematic, and interwoven with the lives of comfortingly similar or unnervingly different fellow travelers. "In the time after the psychedelics and the critical theory and the breakup, I had dropped most of my classes." Remember how Karl Stevens' Penny, noted above, can give you the feeling of actually owning a cat? The Contradictions, a delight of roadtrippery remembered, may leave you feeling like you've just hitchhiked through Europe with a new friend.

Heaven No Hell

by Michael DeForge

Drawn & Quarterly 228 pp. $21.95

Here's a new hardcover collection of short works from the acclaimed, cutting-edge comix stylist and deft explorer of human emotions Michael DeForge. Somebody somewhere has – OK, several people in many places have – called this guy a genius, right? It's not difficult to concur. DeForge is committing narratives that flow with madcap logic, his rendition of human relationships (with themselves, with objects, with the sheer fact of existence) as deep and familiar as his gambits of illustration are wildly inventive, his wildly inventive gambits of reality and illustration as outrageous as they are (in the context of each piece) perfectly sensible: How the hell else would someone draw such a story? But who the hell else but this DeForge would come up with it in the first place? Like, it turns out that heaven is where "Everyone in the silver tier gets to fuck Nora's husband." WHUT? But, yes, we should all be so worthy; and experiencing this book is, I'll suggest, a step toward that juicy goal.