Simply Samuel

This colorful, psychedelic graphic novel twists the bizarre and the macabre into a metaphorical, illusory quest for the secret of life. Samuel, a teardrop brought to sentient life, wanders through weird landscapes of apocalypse, biology, and comics themselves. Musturi (The Book of Hope) presents this elegiac silent story through vivid and polychromatic clear-line imagery with zero dialogue or narration. The bright, fluid design of Musturi’s characters and panoramas makes Samuel’s wordless odyssey paradoxically both alien and universal, accommodating both fantasy and the human condition, spun with a tangle of tension and mystery. The puzzle box of a narrative ends with a list of six (sometimes contradictory) maxims, including “Trust blindly” and “Question all information.” As a guide to the meaning of life, it’s more of a Choose Your Own Adventure story. (Apr.)