Blue Pills: A Positive Love Story

Originally published in Switzerland, Peeters's comics memoir of his romance with an HIV-positive woman named Cati (whose young son is also seropositive) is a new and sweeter kind of AIDS narrative-set in the era when HIV has become a chronic condition rather than a death sentence. There's not much of a plot here (the unnamed boy gets sick, then better; Peeters and Cati panic after a condom breaks, and are reassured by their doctor), but the book is much more about Peeters's fluid, slashing, unfailingly evocative ink brushwork documenting the psychological changes he's gone through. Sure-handedly caricatured facial expressions and body language tell a lot of the story, and almost every page is punctuated with a silent panel or two that suggests the way Peeters's newly expanded awareness of his mortality has made him more aware of the world he lives in, too. The final chapters feature an ingenious visual metaphor: after a doctor tells Peeters that he has ""as much chance of catching AIDS as you have of running into a white rhinoceros on your way out,"" he imagines himself stalked everywhere by the rhino. It's a small gem of a book, whose only real flaw is an ungainly English translation, larded with unfiltered Gallicisms.