HUMMINGBIRD HEART

Graphic novelist Dandro looks back on the waning days of his 1990s adolescence.

In his visual narrative, made both ruminative and cinematic by sequences of silent moments and unpeopled scenes, the author retraces his inner and outer lives as, in the wake of his estranged father’s death by suicide, he helps care for his irascible grandma through her last days on the one hand and, on the other, takes joyrides punctuated by bursts of profane banter with two buddies as their high school careers wind down. Aside from some deadpan hilarity (“What is that?!” “My colostomy bag”) and a trip to a cartoon museum during which he imagines himself in the worlds of classic characters from Krazy Kat to Popeye, his artistic bent inclines toward oblique expressions of glum solitude—glimpses of a hummingbird through a window, pictures of empty rooms or streets, figures seen at a remove from high or low angles. But if his monochromatic art, being sketchy and packed into pages of often undifferentiated panels, takes some getting used to, the events it depicts fall into recognizable categories, and its elegiac mood will elicit strong responses in readers facing or recalling that liminal period in their own lives. Other than Dandro’s Vietnamese American friend, Zung, the cast is White.

Sharply recalled and ultimately engrossing.