STICKLEBACK

George Stickleback lives in his apartment with a cat named Patty and creates tiny figures out of toilet paper. When his friend Yanni interrupts his artistic process with a crisis, George takes the crosstown bus to a diner for a sit-down with his buddy. Obnoxious drunks, a bathroom with negligible privacy, urination as self-defense, unintentional harm to his friend, a trip to the hospital, an abnormally long fingernail and unexpected creative inspiration make up the rest of this thin graphic novel that is significantly lacking in serious action. Annable (Grickle ) expends page after page on the barely varying, tensely drawn images of George sitting on his haunches in contemplation of his little toilet paper men, or boarding the bus and looking for a seat. This overattention to visual minutiae may be intended to approximate a cinematic approach, but such repetition comes off as padding and offers readers what amounts to a 10-page story stretched out to an unnecessary 48. Annable captures a little piece of the creative process (as wasted as it may be on toilet paper men), and he certainly evokes the mundaneness of everyday life in spades, but without enough humor to make it entertaining. (Nov.)