The Spectators

This meditative examination of cities and humans’ relationship with them isn’t easily described. French cartoonist Hussenot casts urban inhabitants as human shadows who create cities through their gray trails, overtaking a vibrant and colorful natural world with a single dark hue. The human relationship to these gray urban outcrops includes being creators, residents, and more. As Hussenot’s rumination progresses, he explores various ideas: physical reality as a mirror image of our insides, buildings as a way of explaining ourselves, and the notion that cities, like us, are doomed to crumble and return to the earth. Various familiar urban micro-encounters are depicted—subway journeys, walking at night, staring out windows—examining separate people traversing through an urban landscape in order to create an alive, psychological space. Hussenot’s work combines the colorful geometric look of Brecht Evens and the powerfully metaphorical comic abstractions of Olivier Schwauwen in a book that’s a dark, visual delight filled with big ideas. (June)