Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2022 January 14 • Friday

What is Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina about?

The cover might give a clue. There’s Sabrina, her name is the title, but the point of the book might be at least somewhat that Sabrina is not its real subject, just as Sabrina isn’t the real subject for the other characters. (This is similar to Lolita: there is a tragic irony in the title.)

Sabrina is, as the cover illustration makes explicit, a background for other people’s stories. She’s in the first few pages but then we never see her again and learn that she’s been apparently randomly murdered by a stranger.

A lot is left unexplained. Is the murderer the “weird guy” whose apartment she told her sister she went to in response to a job advertisement? Drnaso isn’t creating an exploitative story here, choosing to remain on the periphery of horror and looking at how it affects people rather than at the horrific acts themselves.

We’ve all seen enough of those anyway, another point implicitly made in this graphic novel. In Sabrina’s one scene she chillingly demonstrates easy familiarity with the true crime sensation In Cold Blood and news reports throughout the day buzz with random violence and mass shootings.

The focus of the story is Calvin Wrobel, an Air Force officer providing a sanctuary for Sabrina’s boyfriend Teddy. Calvin has his own problems, an ex-wife who lives in Florida with their daughter while Calvin, in Colorado, is confused about whether his future involves being with his family or accepting a promotion that would increase the distance between them.

It’s one of the quietest comics I’ve ever seen. In its crushing silence, with its series of relentless square panels, often using many small ones in sequence almost as a slow-motion effect, and its solid and muted color palette, not to mention its mid-Western reticence, it seems clearly to be a post-Chris Ware book, although Drnaso has a different tone and different concerns.

What is it about? Storytelling, lack of connections, being attacked for good intentions and honest mistakes, fear, lack of trust, the hardships of humans in a fragmented and post-trauma world.

It’s very good but not a short, easy or comforting read, excepting the comfort derived from artistic excellence.