Jetlag

First published as a limited edition in 1999, this anthology presents five short stories by popular Israeli author Keret adapted into comics by the five members of the Actus Tragicus collective. Keret's tales are brief, surreal fables that set up a witty premise and then end fairly abruptly. In the opening "HaTrick" (drawn by Batia Kolton), a children's magician, attempting to pull a rabbit out of his hat, pulls out the rabbit's severed head; when he tries it again, he withdraws a dead baby. Unfortunately for the artists, these stories are built more on suggestion than on action. In a few cases, literal representations of the story kill its mystique—particularly the title piece, drawn by Itzik Rennert, in which a man on an airplane (next to an evil dwarf disguised as a little girl) realizes that the flight attendant has fallen in love with him and plans to save him from a terrible fate. Only Mira Friedmann's visual elaboration on "Passage to Hell," which incorporates a good deal of pantomime that Keret doesn't mention in his text, adds much to its story. But the artwork is consistently terrific in its own right—the Actus group's stately compositions and calculated distortions owe more to modern art than to the comics tradition. (Feb.)